Gender research is an important factor that considers social, cultural, political, and economic differences related to race, gender, and class. Gender research in nursing provides an analytic method for understanding the structure of healthcare and social and cultural contexts, thereby illuminating many issues, including discriminatory practices, inequality, and cultural differences. Gender research can expand the knowledge base of nursing education and determine future directions in professional nursing research. Adopting a feminist approach in nursing is a meaningful attempt to expand the body of nursing knowledge and improve the quality of nursing services by revising the existing, male-oriented knowledge base and providing a vision for empowering women. Furthermore, in nursing, the feminist approach presumably contributes to the development of nursing knowledge by combining feminist research and qualitative research. Nursing knowledge will ultimately play an important role in providing an interactive relationship that goes beyond “male-centered” and “human-centered” by introducing feminism in the field extended by subjective experience derived from a qualitative approach [5].

Nursing research has carved out its contributions to improving patient care and adding to the knowledge base of health research. Adapting a gender research framework will encourage collaboration between nursing and researchers in other fields to identify gaps in current research and advance new research areas through mutual collaboration.

Nursing research that fails to consider gender research lacks perspective in terms of gender, as seen in many existing studies across various fields that fall short of considering gender bias or gender sensitivity; thus, limited to ‘half the picture.’ To identify limitations in existing nursing research and move toward change and innovation, it is essential to incorporate gender research into nursing research.

The lack of SGBA, including the insufficient proportion of female study participants, poses a barrier to our understanding of health. For example, while about half of coronary heart disease (CHD) patients are women, women only comprised around 25% of participants in CHD trials [6]. To address these issues, it is important to consider (1) factors such as age, socioeconomic status, race, and ethnicity in research and reports; as well as (2) sex and gender and their interactions [7]. Research ethics committees (RECs; any committee established by an organization or institution to review the ethical aspects of research with human being) can play a pivotal role in designing studies and identifying sex and gender gaps in the early stages of research protocol development. A study investigating whether RECs deliberate on sex and gender analysis in health-related research pointed out a lack of awareness of the importance of gender in research design and gender-related education offered by RECs [8].

The Canadian Institutes of Health Research introduced an SGBA policy in 2009, and the European Commission has called for an integrated approach to incorporating “gender dimension” in biomedical research for the analysis of sex and gender [9]. Given such international trends, the active response of nursing research encompassing SGBA would serve to expand the scope of research and spur its action.

According to the SAGER guidelines, gender-based analysis requires a different approach than usual, requiring additional time and expenses to use as large a sample as possible. Several research funding agencies have provided funding/grants for this type of analysis, which led to the establishment of the SAGER guidelines as a successful model.

Journal editors may lack the time, ability, and resources to compel authors to comply with SAGER guidelines. In addition, journals with relatively few published works per year may find it very difficult to enforce SAGER guidelines. However, efforts should be made to implement these guidelines to improve the scientific quality of research papers.

Some journals may refuse to comply with SAGER guidelines or find them inapplicable to their fields. All journals, however, should perform routine education and promotion for peer reviewers related to sex and gender. Online training courses developed by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (training resources at https://cihr-irsc.gc.ca/e/50509.html; sex and gender training modules at https://www.cihr-irsc-igh-isfh.ca/) will help enhance the understanding of sex and gender inclusion in health research.

To minimize technical challenges, journal editors or publishers can implement checklists in their submission systems to integrate or customize the form for authors and peer reviewers to comply with SAGER guidelines.

The SAGER guidelines provide journals with an opportunity to improve their research and reporting practices. In the short-term, many journals have incorporated the SAGER guidelines into their author instructions, but a broader understanding and further efforts are needed to ensure better implementation of the SAGER guidelines. In addition, efforts to include age, race, ethnicity, social identity, and geographic diversity in the SAGER guidelines should continue to positively affect health and societal outcomes. Although it is important for publishers and journals to implement the SAGER guidelines, this should not just be their responsibility, but rather the responsibility of everyone involved in a published work, especially the authors.