Background:

The care economy as a broad term encompasses unpaid care work within households, care for people at home or community, necessary for the maintenance of life, reproduction and maintenance of the paid labor force. The growing interest in the recognition of care work, the demand for gender equality for the creation of public policies has led to a lot of research on the subject at the national and international level.

Objective:

This bibliometric study compiles and analyzes the current state of global scientific production in the field of care economy.

Method:

A search was carried out in 10 databases to map original scientific articles, review articles and textbooks published in Spanish and English, with no publication date limit. Normative documents and bibliometric studies were excluded. The results of the databases were downloaded, deduplication, selection and quantitative and qualitative analysis of the data were performed. The analysis includes geographic areas studied, year of publication, authorship and co-authorship, and co-occurrence. The free access bibliometric analytic tool VOSviewer version 1.16.18 was released for the creation of maps based on bibliographic data. RESULTS: 2,495 documents were identified, 1,949 screened and 516 included in the analysis as they fully met the selection criteria.

Conclusions:

The number of documents published annually on the subject has been increasing, in 1969 the first published document was identified, reaching a peak of 52 in 2021 and 13 in the first quarter of 2022. Scientific production has predominated in Eurasia, Latin America, Canada, South Africa and Korea. The co-occurrence of keywords has shown changes over time: human, adult, child, caregiver, family and homecare (2005-2010), gender, care, migration, women and feminist economics (2010-2015), care economy, economy, domestic work, gender inequality, pandemics, coronavirus pandemic, Covid-19 (2019-2022).

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