Are female scientists less inclined to publish alone? The gender solo research gap

Abstract

In solo research, scientists compete individually for prestige, sending clear signals about their research ability, avoiding problems in credit allocation, and reducing conflicts about authorship. We examine to what extent male and female scientists differ in their use of solo publishing across various dimensions. This research is the first to comprehensively study the “gender solo research gap” among all internationally visible scientists within a whole national higher education system. We examine the gap through mean “individual solo publishing rates” found in “individual publication portfolios” constructed for each Polish university professor. We use the practical significance/statistical significance difference (based on the effect-size r coefficient) and our analyses indicate that while some gender differences are statistically significant, they have no practical significance. Using a partial effects of fractional logistic regression approach, we estimate the probability of conducting solo research. In none of the models does gender explain the variability of the individual solo publishing rate. The strongest predictor of individual solo publishing rate is the average team size, publishing in STEM fields negatively affects the rate, publishing in male-dominated disciplines positively affects it, and the influence of international collaboration is negative. The gender solo research gap in Poland is much weaker than expected: within a more general trend toward team research and international research, gender differences in solo research are much weaker and less relevant than initially assumed. We use our unique biographical, administrative, publication, and citation database (“Polish Science Observatory”) with metadata on all Polish scientists present in Scopus (N = 25,463) and their 158,743 Scopus-indexed articles published in 2009–2018, including 18,900 solo articles.

A machine learning approach to quantify gender bias in collaboration practices of mathematicians

“…Existing studies on sole authorship seem to agree that women write a smaller proportion of their publications alone (West et al, 2013 ; Ductor et al, 2018 ; Sarsons et al, 2021 ; Yamamoto and Frachtenberg, 2022 ). In one of the few works addressing the question of gender and solo research in more detail, however, Kwiek and Roszka ( 2022 ) find only marginal gender differences among researchers at Polish universities. They formally introduce the gender solo research gap and extensively study its underlying hypothesis that “female scientists are less involved in publishing alone than male scientists.” They find statistically significant gender differences only among young academics, and with rather small effect.…”

“…For example, research has shown for various disciplines that the network size, i.e., the number of one's distinct coauthors, is positively correlated with a larger number of citations (Wuchty et al, 2007 ; Sarigöl et al, 2014 ; Servia-Rodríguez et al, 2015 ) and higher productivity (Ductor, 2015 ; Servia-Rodríguez et al, 2015 ). At the same time, publishing in groups reduces various risks, such as openly hostile criticism or the responsibility for errors (Kwiek and Roszka, 2022 ).…”

“…This makes solo publications especially valuable at an early career stage (Kuld and O'Hagan, 2018 ), sending a clear signal to the academic job market. Moreover, in contrast to collaboration, writing a paper alone does not require making compromises, it comes without unclear responsibilities and communication issues commonly referred to as “coordination costs” (Olechnicka et al, 2020 ; Kwiek and Roszka, 2022 ), and it is not affected by unclear credit attribution. The latter has shown to be associated with strong gender bias for research in economics, putting female economists collaborating with men at a disadvantage (Sarsons et al, 2021 ).…”

Once Highly Productive, Forever Highly Productive? Full Professors’ Research Productivity from a Longitudinal Perspective

“…The results showed that full professors were the most productive: the "higher the more productive" principle applied to all academic ranks, and male scholars were more productive than female scholars for all publication types (Puuska 2020: 428-430). Full professors were also more productive than lower ranks in the soft sciences, where solo research is important, and therefore the impact of leading large research grants is marginal (see Kwiek & Roszka 2022a). In several male-dominated fields, female full professors were shown to be more productive than male full professors, which may indicate that in these fields only exceptionally productive women are appointed to full professorships, whereas in other fields, possibly less merit in research is required for women in this rank (Puuska 2010: 435).…”

Evaluating the research performance of women scientists in Indian research laboratories based on Scopus citation database: A bibliometric analysis

“…Either nationally or globally, the contributions of women scientists have been measured in different dimensions including gender gap in scientific output (see for example Kretschmer and Kretschmer 2013;Lewison and Markusova 2011), the comparative contribution of women of different countries as well as different subject fields (see for example Muñoz-Muñoz 2005;Nourmohammadi and Hodaei 2014). Several studies on gender have shown a https://www.newindianexpress.com/nation/2019/jul/13/ 2896-scientist-posts-lying-vacant-in-70-institutesunder-ministry-of-science-and-technology-govern-2003071.html that women scientists tend to publish fewer articles than their male colleagues of the same age (Abramo and D'Angelo 2009;Duch et al 2012;Kwiek and Roszka 2022;Bird 2011;Zuckerman 1991), publish papers in less reputed journals (Holman, Stuart-Fox and Hauser 2018;Lerback and Hanson 2017;Lerchenmüller, Lerchenmueller and Sorenson 2018) and received fewer citations (Caplar, Tacchella and Birrer 2016;King et al 2017;Larivière et al 2013). An explanation of low contribution by women has been pointed out by Ward and Grant (1996), where they mentioned that the female scientists devote more time to teaching and administrative work, while the male scientists focus more on the research and supervision of doctoral students.…”