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

Abstract

Female academics are more likely to be in teaching-related roles in some countries, including the USA. As a side effect of this, female-authored journal articles may tend to be more useful for students. This study assesses this hypothesis by investigating whether female first-authored research has more uptake in education than male first-authored research. Based on an analysis of Mendeley readers of articles from 2014 in five countries and 100 narrow Scopus subject categories, the results show that female-authored articles attract more student readers than male-authored articles in Spain, Turkey, the UK and USA but not India. They also attract fewer professorial readers in Spain, the UK and the USA, but not India and Turkey, and tend to be less popular with senior academics. Because the results are based on analysis of differences within narrow fields they cannot be accounted for by females working in more educationrelated disciplines. The apparent additional educational impact for female-authored research could be due to selecting more accessible micro-specialisms, however, such as health-related instruments within the instrumentation narrow field. Whatever the cause, the results suggest that citation-based research evaluations may undervalue the wider impact of female researchers.

Gender differences in the aims and impacts of research

“…Publications by female 1 st authors also perform slightly better by the Mendeley and Social Media indicators. Although these findings seem to confirm earlier studies by Thelwall (2018a;2018b), our results from using the two latter altmetric indicators did not pass the significance test. Hence, in the following, we will concentrate on the indicators of citation impact and usage.…”

“…As in other gender studies using bibliometric data (e.g. Thelwall, 2018a;2018b), we chose to focus on 1 st authors because they often take most of the responsibility for the specific project. However, this may not be the case when authors are presented in alphabetical order.…”

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

“…If women are more likely to choose an academic subject for its affordance of communal benefits, then it is possible that women would also be more likely to target wider societal impact for their work. There is a little evidence in support of this in the form of apparently greater educational impact for research authored by women (Thelwall, 2018b).…”

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

“…This is a distinct possibility because females in the USA, and probably other countries, are more likely to choose careers with a positive societal impact (Diekman, Steinberg, Brown, Belanger, & Clark, 2017) and so their research might naturally be more useful. This would be difficult to assess empirically, but one study has suggested that female first-authored research generates more educational impact per citation compared to male first-authored research in Spain, Turkey, UK and USA, but conversely for India (Thelwall, 2018b). This evidence came from users of the social reference sharing site Mendeley that were registered as students.…”