Do females create higher impact research? Scopus citations and Mendeley readers for articles from five countries

Trends of women's authorship in an Iranian medical journal from 1999 to 2019

Author's gender is a potential factor in scientific publications. We evaluated the trends of authorship gender by focusing on women in an Iranian medical journal and followed two aims: A) Mapping gender trends in authorship positions; B) Drawing the patterns among authors. Our results showed that between 1999 and 2019, the role of women as first author was 26.7% and 54.9% (p < 0.05); as last authors 33.3% and 37.3% and as corresponding author 23.3% and 36.7%, respectively. Despite progresses made by women, they were not significantly successful as corresponding and last authors. Further researchers around the world can have similar focus and be useful in making decisions for equality issues.

Same-gender citations do not indicate a substantial gender homophily bias

Can the male citation advantage (more citations for papers written by male than female scientists) be explained by gender homophily bias, i.e., the preference of scientists to cite other scientists of the same gender category? Previous studies report much evidence that this is the case. However, the observed gender homophily bias may be overestimated by overlooking structural aspects such as the gender composition of research topics in which scientists specialize. When controlling for research topics at a high level of granularity, there is only little evidence for a gender homophily bias in citation decisions. Our study points out the importance of controlling structural aspects such as gendered specialization in research topics when investigating gender bias in science.

Investigating Patterns of Research Collaboration and Citations in Science and Technology: A Case of Chiang Mai University

This study investigates 3883 articles published by researchers affiliated with Chiang Mai University in science and technology from January 2010 to December 2019 to test whether research team characteristics and collaboration patterns can determine a citation rate. Citations were retrieved from the Scopus database and compared with their (1) number of authors, (2) type of publication, (3) gender of authors, (4) SJR values, (5) country of international collaborators, (6) number of affiliated institutions, and (7) international diversity index. The findings were based on quantile regressions and indicated that the number of authors strongly influenced citations, which increases the likelihood of being cited. The citation advantage of being a foreign-first author only existed at the 0.25th quantile; however, the evidence of foreign-first author citation advantages or disadvantages for the moderate and very productive publications was not found. A significantly positive effect of SJR value on citations was found while being a female first author negatively impacted the citation rate. These findings can be used in the planning and managing process of producing scientific and technological research to improve the research quality, boost the research impact, and increase opportunities for research results to be utilized.

Further Divided Gender Gaps in Research Productivity and Collaboration during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Evidence from Coronavirus-related Literature

Based on publication data on coronavirus-related fields, this study applies a difference in differences approach to explore the evolution of gender inequalities before and during the COVID-19 pandemic by comparing the differences in the numbers and shares of authorships, leadership in publications, gender composition of collaboration, and scientific impacts. We find that, during the pandemic: (1) females’ leadership in publications as the first author was negatively affected; (2) although both females and males published more papers relative to the pre-pandemic period, the gender gaps in the share of authorships have been strengthened due to the larger increase in males’ authorships; (3) the share of publications by mixed-gender collaboration declined; (4) papers by teams in which females play a key role were less cited in the pre-pandemic period, and this citation disadvantage was exacerbated during the pandemic; and (5) gender inequalities regarding authorships and collaboration were enhanced in the initial stage of COVID-19, widened with the increasing severity of COVID-19, and returned to the pre-pandemic level in September 2020. This study shows that females’ lower participation in teams as major contributors and less collaboration with their male colleagues also reflect their underrepresentation in science in the pandemic period. This investigation significantly deepens our understanding of how the pandemic influenced academia, based on which science policies and gender policy changes are proposed to mitigate the gender gaps.

Why so Few, Still? Challenges to Attracting, Advancing, and Keeping Women Faculty of Color in Academia

From its earliest beginnings, the university was not designed for women, and certainly not for women of color. Women of color in the United States are disproportionately under-represented in academia and are conspicuous by their absence across disciplines at senior ranks, particularly at research-intensive universities. This absence has an epistemic impact and affects future generations of scholars who do not see themselves represented in the academy. What are the barriers to attracting, advancing, and retaining women faculty of color in academia? To address this question we review empirical studies that document disparities in the assessment of research, teaching, and service in academia that have distinct implications for the hiring, promotion, and professional visibility of women of color. We argue that meaningful change in the representation, equity, and prestige of women faculty of color will require validating their experiences, supporting and valuing their research, creating opportunities for their professional recognition and advancement, and implementing corrective action for unjust assessment practices.

Knowledge management in the classroom using Mendeley technology

Research in higher education institutions is present in all courses, and academic instruction in research methodology is vital, with educational technologies being an essential component of this process. With the Covid-19 pandemic, there were changes in teaching, learning, and in performing scientific research in undergraduate courses. Among the technologies, the Mendeley reference management tool has become increasingly helpful in these contexts. Therefore, this manuscript is an account of workshop experiences for the use of the Mendeley tool in the teaching of Research Methodology and Scientific Methodology offered in the distance education modality in undergraduate courses at the Universidade do Contestado, Brazil. After basic instruction on Mendeley, students participating in the workshops were guided to apply the tool using Bardin's content analysis technique. This technique is usually laborious and seldom involved in literature reviews by undergraduate students; Mendeley technology makes it more accessible. From experiences with the 2020 and 2021 workshops, during the COVID-19 pandemic, it is suggested that the content analysis method combined with the Mendeley technology can help students present better literature reviews, especially for final graduation projects such as course completion monographs.

Researcher Performance in Scopus Articles (RPSA) as a New Scientometric Model of Scientific Output: Tested in Business Area of V4 Countries

The purpose of this study is to present a new scientometric model for measuring individual scientific performance in Scopus article publications in the field of Business, Management, and Accounting (BMA). With the help of this model, the study also compares the publication performance of the top 50 researchers according to SciVal in the field of BMA, in each of the Central European V4 countries (Czech Republic; Hungary; Poland; Slovakia). To analyze the scientific excellence of a total of top 200 researchers in the countries studied, we collected and analyzed the data of a total of 1844 partially redundant and a total of 1492 cleansed BMA publications. In the scope of the study, we determined the quality of the journals using SCImago, the individual contributions to the journal articles, and the number of citations using Scopus data. A comparison of individual performance, as shown by published journal articles, can be made based on the qualities of the journals, the determination of the aggregated co-authorship ratios, and the number of citations received. The performance of BMA researchers in Hungary lags behind the average of V4s in terms of quantity, but in terms of quality it reaches this average. As for BMA journal articles, the average number of co-authors is between two and three; concerning Q4 to Q2 publications, this number typically increases. In fact, in the case of these Q journals multiple co-authorship results in higher citations, but it is not the case concerning Q1 journals.

What Are the Drivers of Citations?: Application in Tourism and Hospitality Journals

In line with the qualitative and quantitative growth of academic papers, it is critical to understand the factors driving citations in scholarly articles. This study discovered the up-to-date academic structure in the tourism and hospitality literature and tested the comprehensive sets of factors driving citation counts using articles published in first-tier hospitality and tourism journals found on the Web of Science. To further test the effects of research topic structure on citation counts, unsupervised topic modeling was conducted with 9910 tourism and hospitality papers published in 12 journals over 10 years. Articles specific to online media and the sharing economy have received numerous citations and that recently published papers with particular research topics (e.g., rural tourism and eco-tourism) were frequently cited. This study makes a major contribution to hospitality and tourism literature by testing the effects of topic structure and topic originality discovered by text mining on citation counts.

Gender issues in fundamental physics: A bibliometric analysis

I analyze bibliometric data about fundamental physics worldwide from 1970 to now, extracting quantitative data about gender issues. I do not find significant gender differences in hiring rates, hiring timing, career gaps and slowdowns, abandonment rates, citation, and self-citation patterns. Furthermore, various bibliometric indicators (number of fractionally counted papers, citations, etc.) exhibit a productivity gap at hiring moments, at career level, and without integrating over careers. The gap persists after accounting for confounding factors and manifests as an increasing fraction of male authors going from average to top authors in terms of bibliometric indices, with a quantitative shape that can be fitted by higher male variability.

On the relationship between supervisor–supervisee gender difference and scientific impact of doctoral dissertations: Evidence from Humanities and Social Sciences in China

This article explores the relationships between supervisor–supervisee gender difference and the scientific impact of doctoral dissertations. We use the China Doctoral Dissertations Full-text Database and pay special attention to the fields of Humanities and Social Sciences in China in our empirical study. By establishing regression models, we find that the ranks of the scientific impact regarding doctoral dissertations are female–female (first), female–male (second), male–male (third) and male–female (fourth) pairs (sequence: student gender and then supervisor gender). The finding has many interesting implications for science policy and gender inequality.

Greater female first author citation advantages do not associate with reduced or reducing gender disparities in academia

Ongoing problems attracting women into many Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) subjects have many potential explanations. This article investigates whether the possible undercitation of women associates with lower proportions of, or increases in, women in a subject. It uses six million articles published in 1996–2012 across up to 331 fields in six mainly English-speaking countries: Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. The proportion of female first- and last-authored articles in each year was calculated and 4,968 regressions were run to detect first-author gender advantages in field normalized article citations. The proportion of female first authors in each field correlated highly between countries and the female first-author citation advantages derived from the regressions correlated moderately to strongly between countries, so both are relatively field specific. There was a weak tendency in the United States and New Zealand for female citation advantages to be stronger in fields with fewer women, after excluding small fields, but there was no other association evidence. There was no evidence of female citation advantages or disadvantages to be a cause or effect of changes in the proportions of women in a field for any country. Inappropriate uses of career-level citations are a likelier source of gender inequities.

All downhill from the PhD? The typical impact trajectory of U.S. academic careers

Within academia, mature researchers tend to be more senior, but do they also tend to write higher impact articles? This article assesses long-term publishing (16+ years) United States (U.S.) researchers, contrasting them with shorter-term publishing researchers (1, 6, or 10 years). A long-term U.S. researcher is operationalized as having a first Scopus-indexed journal article in exactly 2001 and one in 2016–2019, with U.S. main affiliations in their first and last articles. Researchers publishing in large teams (11+ authors) were excluded. The average field and year normalized citation impact of long- and shorter-term U.S. researchers’ journal articles decreases over time relative to the national average, with especially large falls for the last articles published, which may be at least partly due to a decline in self-citations. In many cases researchers start by publishing above U.S. average citation impact research and end by publishing below U.S. average citation impact research. Thus, research managers should not assume that senior researchers will usually write the highest impact papers.

Gender differences in citation impact for 27 fields and six English-speaking countries 1996–2014

Initiatives addressing the lack of women in many academic fields, and the general lack of senior women, need to be informed about the causes of any gender differences that may affect career progression, including citation impact. Previous research about gender differences in journal article citation impact has found the direction of any difference to vary by country and field, but has usually avoided discussions of the magnitude and wider significance of any differences and has not been systematic in terms of fields and/or time. This study investigates differences in citation impact between male and female first-authored research for 27 broad fields and six large English-speaking countries (Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the UK, and the USA) from 1996 to 2014. The results show an overall female first author citation advantage, although in most broad fields it is reversed in all countries for some years. International differences include Medicine having a female first author citation advantage for all years in Australia, but a male citation advantage for most years in Canada. There was no general trend for the gender difference to increase or decrease over time. The average effect size is small, however, and unlikely to have a substantial influence on overall gender differences in researcher careers.