A postcolonial feminist exploration of the scholarship on women and educational leadership with a bibliometric approach

Abstract

This study applied a bibliometric approach to a dataset of publications on women and educational leadership to critically explore the nature of research in the field and the utility of the bibliometric method in its mapping. The analysis was conducted on bibliographic records of 823 papers on women and educational leadership published from 1975 to 2020, which had been retrieved from the Web of Science. The results are presented in the form of lists of most impactful papers; most productive research centres/organizations and countries; similar lists of contributing disciplines and publication venues; as well as maps visualizing collaborative activity. A postcolonial feminist perspective used in interpretation of the results reveals that, on the one hand, the approach makes it possible to uncover the persistent coloniality and linguistic hegemony in the field, whereas, on the other hand, bibliometric metrification may contribute to Western epistemic violence and valorisation of scholarship in masculinist terms.