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Author: search.filters.author.Thelwall, M.Discipline: search.filters.discipline.Mathematics

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  • Item type:Publication,
    A gender equality paradox in academic publishing: Countries with a higher proportion of female first-authored journal articles have larger first-author gender disparities between fields Open PDF 
    (2020)
    Thelwall, M.
    ;
    Mas-Bleda, A.
    Current attempts to address the shortfall of female researchers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) have not yet succeeded, despite other academic subjects having female majorities. This article investigates the extent to which gender disparities are subject-wide or nation-specific by a first-author gender comparison of 30 million articles from all 27 Scopus broad fields within the 31 countries with the most Scopus-indexed articles 2014–2018. The results show overall and geocultural patterns as well as individual national differences. Almost half of the subjects were always more male (seven; e.g., Mathematics) or always more female (six; e.g., Immunology & Microbiology) than the national average. A strong overall trend (Spearman correlation 0.546) is for countries with a higher proportion of female first-authored research to also have larger differences in gender disparities between fields (correlation 0.314 for gender ratios). This confirms the international gender equality paradox previously found for degree subject choices: Increased gender equality overall associates with moderately greater gender differentiation between subjects. This is consistent with previous United States-based claims that gender differences in academic careers are partly due to (socially constrained) gender differences in personal preferences. Radical solutions may therefore be needed for some STEM subjects to overcome gender disparities. © 2020 Mike Thelwall and Amalia Mas-Bleda. Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license.
  • Item type:Publication,
    No evidence of citation bias as a determinant of STEM gender disparities in US biochemistry, genetics and molecular biology research Open PDF 
    (2019)
    Thelwall, M.
    ;
    Nevill, T.
    The lack of females in many Science Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) subjects in the USA is an ongoing concern, with many initiatives attempting to redress this imbalance. Some life sciences are apparently areas of relatively good practice, with higher proportions of female researchers than most other STEM subjects. This paper assesses gender differences in research contributions to 14 biochemistry, genetics or molecular biology specialisms in the USA 1996–2014/8, seeking evidence of trends in publishing and citation impact that may give insights into female success. With four exceptions (biochemistry, biophysics, biotechnology, and structural biology), the fields achieved or maintained at least 40% female first authors by 2018, with developmental biology and endocrinology both attaining female first author majorities. A regression analysis found close to gender parity overall in citation impact but a small male first author citation advantage in more fields than the opposite: an up to 3% increase in logged citation ratio to the world mean. This was partly due to males first authoring with larger teams. Fields with relatively many females did not favour female-led research with more citations, however. © 2019, Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, Hungary.
  • Item type:Publication,
    Do females create higher impact research? Scopus citations and Mendeley readers for articles from five countries Open PDF 
    (2018)
    Thelwall, M.
    There are known gender imbalances in participation in scientific fields, from female dominance of nursing to male dominance of mathematics. It is not clear whether there is also a citation imbalance, with some claiming that male-authored research tends to be more cited. No previous study has assessed gender differences in the readers of academic research on a large scale, however. In response, this article assesses whether there are gender differences in the average citations and/or Mendeley readers of academic publications. Field normalised logged Scopus citations and Mendeley readers from mid-2018 for articles published in 2014 were investigated for articles with first authors from India, Spain, Turkey, the UK and the USA in up to 251 fields with at least 50 male and female authors. Although female-authored research is less cited in Turkey (-4.0%) and India (-3.6%), it is marginally more cited in Spain (0.4%), the UK (0.4%), and the USA (0.2%). Female-authored research has fewer Mendeley readers in India (-1.1%) but more in Spain (1.4%), Turkey (1.1%), the UK (2.7%) and the USA (3.0%). Thus, whilst there may be little practical gender difference in citation impact in countries with mature science systems, the higher female readership impact suggests a wider audience for female-authored research. The results also show that the conclusions from a gender analysis depend on the field normalisation method. A theoretically informed decision must therefore be made about which normalisation to use. The results also suggest that arithmetic mean-based field normalisation is favourable to males. © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.