The identification of articles was carried out by mapping studies that included sex and gender as categories and that were funded by DECIT/MS, during the period between 2004 and 2016. Data were extracted from the “Health Research” public repository (http://pesquisasaude.saude.gov.br/), which contains the titles and summaries of the projects funded by DECIT/MS, the name of the research coordinator, the title of the call for research support, the year of funding, and the Brazilian state and region in which the coordinator's institution is located, among other information. The search for studies occurred on August 21, 2019, based on the keywords sex(es), gender(s), gay, transvestite, man/men, woman/women, masculinity(ies), femininity(ies), transsexual, intersex, intersexual, intergender, transgender(s). This repository does not store complete research information or final conclusions.
The collected data generated 3077 titles and abstracts of studies, names of the main research coordinator, and other data mentioned above, which were recorded and organized in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. From this total number, 1585 were excluded due to duplication. After reading and analyzing the titles and abstracts of the studies, 1029 other studies were excluded. The exclusion criteria were the use of the term “gender” to refer to the classification of living beings in studies on diseases transmitted by animals or in plants, tissues, cells, or derivatives. In the end, 463 titles and abstracts of research in humans were considered eligible, in which the term “sex” was used to indicate differences in relation to the problem studied or the description of participants (men, women, intersex) in the sample, and “gender” as a category analysis.
Then, the mapping of articles produced by the 463 eligible surveys was carried out by searching the curricula of the coordinators stored on the Lattes Platform (http://lattes.cnpq.br) for the period between April and June 2020. The criterion for attributing each article as a product of the study was the reference to the title of the original research and/or the source of funding described with the name of the funding notice (data obtained in the initial search). No articles were identified or attributed in 319 studies. A total of 144 studies were considered, with the total production of 350 articles on various topics (Fig. 1).

Flowchart of research search results (title and abstracts) and inclusion of full articles

Projects were classified by type of study to examine the trend in use and the quality of sex and gender integration by study type. This classification was performed after reading the full text of at least one article produced by each study, according to the definitions of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences (CAHS): (i) biomedical research (BR), which investigates mechanisms of health and disease and produces knowledge on the development of diagnostic methods, treatments, and methods for preventing injury and disease; (ii) clinical research (CR), which involves human patients with the aim of improving the diagnosis and treatment of diseases or conditions; (iii) health services research (HSR), which evaluates the health system or services in relation to the organization, financing, access, and costs of healthcare; and (iv) population and public health research (PPHR), which investigates the health determinants of a population (CIHR 2022 ).