The purpose of MPK is to identify all the critical work that has been published, including what topics were researched, who carried out the research, on what countries, using what theories and methods, published in what languages, and what findings, etc. Mapping the literature will be followed by qualitative systematic reviews and critical analyses of the published scholarly work on women and gender in the Arab region under the thematic of socialities. The specific objectives are:

1) To identify and map the production of knowledge that has been produced about women and gender in the Arab region since the 1970s under the thematic of socialities.

2) To carry out scoping reviews, qualitative systematic reviews, and critical reviews of the research.

3) To develop an integrative analysis of the findings of the research.

4) To plan for mapping the production of knowledge that has been produced under the thematics of the political and the economic in the future.

The MPK database was created with the intention to collect, analyze, and map literature and research on women and gender in the Arab Region around six initial themes: 1) Cross-Thematic; 2) Class Kinship; 3) Media & Pop Culture; 4) Religion;  5) Sexuality; 6) Space;  7) War Violence Refugees.  In addition to the six thematics, searches can be done by 8) Geography (location).

To launch the searches to build the databases, the team worked with UC Davis librarian Adam Siegel to identify the appropriate databases. To train on the databases to identify which one to start with, the GSRs and SS did “blast” searches, global searches with key terms for each of the subthematics to identify the key terms that could be used for the Scoping Review.  From the review of the available databases, the team decided to launch the work focusing on Sociological Abstracts and to run through all the steps of the project with this one database in order to identify all the steps needed. To begin the work with Sociological Abstracts, the team developed Boolean Operators from the “blast” searches. The Boolean Operators, formed the basis for the Codebook that the team developed to help map the subthematics of Socialities. The Sociological Abstracts searches resulted in ~ 8,000 relevant references, and the final searchable database published to the MPK website contains more than 20,000 relevant resources.