Judicial protection and gender equality in Ibero-America: A bibliometric assessment of women’s legal rights

Scholarly interest in the field of judicial protection, women’s legal rights, and gender equality in Ibero-America has increased as part of a larger debate on access to justice, institutional accountability, and structural inequality. This article presents the evolution of this thematic field between 1997 and 2026 with particular emphasis on the transformation from predominantly legal-normative approaches to broader socio-legal and interdisciplinary perspectives. The study is designed as quantitative bibliometrics following the phases of document selection guided by PRISMA, validation of temporal trends, and thematic mapping. The final corpus comprises 134 articles published in journals indexed in Scopus and Web of Science belonging to Q1 and Q2 for their respective categories. The results point to a statistically significant increase in scientific production, suggesting that the field has been gradually consolidating within the legal, socio-legal, and gender studies. The thematic map identified nine clusters that were distributed over four quadrants: basic, motor, niche, and emerging or declining themes. In other words, these clusters point to the central position of gender, violence, human rights, and access to justice, along with country-specific research agendas in the literature, as themes that are either developing or receding. Although the field has gained visibility and conceptual maturity, the results also reveal persistent gaps concerning the institutional mechanisms needed to address structural barriers to justice for women. By offering a systematic overview of this body of research, the article contributes to the identification of future comparative, interdisciplinary, and policy-oriented research pathways on gender equality and judicial protection in Ibero-America.