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

Abstract

Initiatives addressing the lack of women in many academic fields, and the general lack of senior women, need to be informed about the causes of any gender differences that may affect career progression, including citation impact. Previous research about gender differences in journal article citation impact has found the direction of any difference to vary by country and field, but has usually avoided discussions of the magnitude and wider significance of any differences and has not been systematic in terms of fields and/or time. This study investigates differences in citation impact between male and female first-authored research for 27 broad fields and six large English-speaking countries (Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the UK, and the USA) from 1996 to 2014. The results show an overall female first author citation advantage, although in most broad fields it is reversed in all countries for some years. International differences include Medicine having a female first author citation advantage for all years in Australia, but a male citation advantage for most years in Canada. There was no general trend for the gender difference to increase or decrease over time. The average effect size is small, however, and unlikely to have a substantial influence on overall gender differences in researcher careers.

Greater female first author citation advantages do not associate with reduced or reducing gender disparities in academia

“…Full results and details of regression fitting are in the supplementary materials on FigShare (about 20,000 pages at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.9036884), together with additional analyses not included here. As background information, in all countries, whichever model was used, there was a female first-author citation advantage in more fields than the reverse (Table 2), as previously found with the same data (Thelwall, 2020a).…”

“…Although this study found fewer citations per paper for female-authored research overall, subsequent studies with a normalizing technique that did not allow individual highly cited articles to dominate found the opposite overall (Thelwall, 2018). For English-speaking nations, a female citation advantage has been found for most broad fields (Thelwall, 2020a), and for most narrow fields (Thelwall, 2020c). There have also been studies of gender differences in citation rates within individual fields (e.g., Østby, Strand, et al, 2013).…”

“…This was mainly due to more female first-authored highly cited articles (Thelwall, 2020c). The second investigated 27 broad fields (Scopus categories) for six large English-speaking nations, 1996English-speaking nations, -2014 showing considerable variation between fields in the nature and magnitude of the citation advantages, with smaller variations between countries (Thelwall, 2020a). The current paper advances from these papers by using regression to estimate gender factors, taking into account team size, and comparing the results with the proportions of authors in narrow fields to study the relationship between gender compositions of narrow fields and gender differences in citation impact.…”

¿Citan las mujeres investigadoras más a las otras mujeres que a los hombres?

“…Si bien estos errores no son en general comunes, su frecuencia depende acusadamente del género del autor citado: las investigadoras son citadas como si fueran hombres más de diez veces más a menudo de lo que sucede al contrario, lo que probablemente revela que las citas están influenciadas por el estereotipo de género en la ciencia. El género del autor citante y la disciplina parecen tener poco efecto (contrariamente a lo señalado por Thelwall, 2020).…”

“…Como síntesis de nuestra revisión bibliográfica se puede decir que en general las mujeres salen perjudicadas en la mayoría de los casos estudiados, pero en algunas disciplinas en las que son más prolíficas, la situación del reconocimiento a su trabajo está equilibrada (Thelwall, 2020; Torres-Salinas; Muñoz-Muñoz; Jiménez-Contreras) o incluso está a su favor (Nielsen, 2017).…”