Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Authors and Reviewers of American Geophysical Union Journals

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic affected the scientific workforce in many ways. Many worried that stay-at-home orders would disproportionately harm the productivity and well-being of women and early-career scientists, who were expected to shoulder more childcare, homeschooling, and other domestic duties while also interrupting field and lab research, essential for career advancement. AGU journal submission and author and reviewer demographic data allowed us to investigate the effect the pandemic may have had on many Earth and space scientists, especially on women and early career scientists. However, we found that submissions to AGU journals increased during the pandemic as did total submissions from women (with no difference in the proportion). Although the rate at which women agreed to review decreased slightly (down 0.5%), women still made up a larger proportion of agreed reviewers during the pandemic compared to two years earlier. Little difference was seen overall in median times to complete reviews except with women in their 40s and 70s, suggesting that they were affected more during the pandemic than other age and gender groups. Although AGU's data do not show that the effects of the pandemic decreased the participation of women in AGU journals, the lag between research and writing/submitting may still be seen in later months. The stay-at-home orders may also have allowed people to devote time to writing up research conducted pre-pandemic; writing too can be done at down-time hours, which may have supported the increase in submissions to and reviews for AGU journals.

Gender Equity in Oceanography

“…Data on submissions, reviewers and final publications are needed to answer this question. For the AGU journal Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans (JGR:Oceans) for the period 2016-2021, for those corresponding authors where gender can be determined GDS4 , the proportion of corresponding authors who are women has increased from 21% in 2016 to 25% in 2021, being roughly constant over the period 2018-2021, with a small decrease in 2020/2021 compared to 2019 (perhaps due to covid-19, although for AGU journals as a whole no change in gender ratio for submissions was noted in Wooden & Hanson (2022)). The improvement in corresponding author gender ratio for this journal is more marked than for other AGU journals, where the average gender ratio in 2016 was similar to JGR oceans (at 21.4%), but has only increased very slightly to 22.4% by 2021.…”

Gender Equity in Oceanography

“…Data on submissions, reviewers, and final publications are needed to answer this question. In the American Geophysical Union (AGU) journal Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans (JGR Oceans) for the period 2016-2021, for those corresponding authors whose gender can be determined GDS4 , the proportion of corresponding authors who are women has increased from 21% in 2016 to 25% in 2021, being roughly constant over the period 2018-2021, with a small decrease in 2020-2021 compared with 2019 [perhaps due to COVID-19, although for AGU journals as a whole, Wooden & Hanson (2022) found no change in gender ratio for submissions]. The improvement in corresponding author gender ratio for this journal is more marked than that for other AGU journals, where the average proportion of women corresponding authors in 2016 was similar to that for JGR Oceans (at 21.4%) but had increased only very slightly by 2021 (to 22.4%).…”