03/08/2017

The Global Gender Gap: Research and Researchers

While although women publish less than men, their publications are cited, downloaded about the same

Whether as writers, editors, publishers or disseminators of science and scholarship, everyone working in scholarly communications can play a role in shining a light on the research we are responsible for. To celebrate International Women’s Day, Elsevier is doing just that in their analysis of 20 years of global research from a gender perspective, published today.

“Gender in the Global Research Landscape” uses data from Elsevier’s Scopus database of over 62 million documents to identify trends in global research from a gender perspective over 20 years, 12 countries and regions, and 27 subject areas. The three main topics covered in the report are: the global research landscape through a gender lens; gender and research leadership, collaboration, interdisciplinarity and mobility; and the gender research landscape. Elsevier used tools that provide information on first names and gender by country, such as Genderize.io, NamSor socio-linguistic analysis and Wikipedia name lists to assign a gender to author profiles with a first name. This information wasn’t available for all authors and, together with the geographical focus on just 12 countries/regions (China, for example, is notable for its absence), this somewhat limits the value of the study. However, it contains much of interest and the findings are still likely to be directionally accurate.

First, the good news.

To read the complete article from The Scholarly Kitchen, please click here.