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

Does Female-authored Research have More Educational Impact than Male-authored Research? Evidence from Mendeley

“…The Indian results stand out in that for many reader types, it is the only country with an overall male bias, and for all reader types except two (lecturer, associate professor) it is the country that reads the lowest proportion of female firstauthored articles (Figure 1). This deepens the results of a previous study with citation counts and overall reader counts for the same Mendeley data as the current paper (Thelwall 2018b) by showing that this relative male reading bias is prevalent at all levels of academia in India. A possible explanation is that a minority of academics do not value the work of females in India (Gupta 2015(Gupta , 2016.…”

“…The evidence is not conclusive because of the potential confounding factors mentioned in the research limitations. It adds to prior findings of more citations (Thelwall 2018b), downloads (Elsevier 2017) and total Mendeley readers (Thelwall 2018b) for female first-authored research in many countries.…”

“…Although the goal of this paper is to look for evidence of gender differentials in educational impact, the research question is widened to take advantage of the additional reader types available in Mendeley. This paper is a follow-up (with the same data) to a previous study using field normalised logged readership counts that found female-authored research to have more Mendeley readers than male-authored research in Spain, Turkey, the UK and the USA, but not India for Scopus articles in 2014 (Thelwall 2018b).…”

“…Male-authored research has also been claimed to be more cited overall, perhaps because of a gender bias in citing (Larivière & Sugimoto 2017). Conversely, female first-authored research has been shown to be slightly more cited in Spain, the UK, and the USA, using a field-normalising method that reduces the influence of individual highly cited articles (Thelwall 2018b). In terms of audiences, female-authored research is more downloaded (Elsevier 2017) and more read (at least according to Mendeley data: Thelwall 2018b) in many, but not all, countries, suggesting that femaleauthored research might tend to have a wider audience, although the nature of the additional audience is unknown.…”

Female citation impact superiority 1996–2018 in six out of seven English‐speaking nations

“…In contrast, the higher average citation impact of female first-authored research in most of the large English-speaking countries examined points to the possibility that each female first-authored output is more valuable. This is supported by some evidence that female first-authored research may have more non-academic impacts (Thelwall, 2018a). This and the greater female ability to write high impact research (e.g., in the top 3.5% for impact for the USA) may be a side-effect of a tendency for female socialisation processes that lead to valuing societal or communal goals within careers.…”