Abstract
The lack of females in many Science Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) subjects in the USA is an ongoing concern, with many initiatives attempting to redress this imbalance. Some life sciences are apparently areas of relatively good practice, with higher proportions of female researchers than most other STEM subjects. This paper assesses gender differences in research contributions to 14 biochemistry, genetics or molecular biology specialisms in the USA 1996–2014/8, seeking evidence of trends in publishing and citation impact that may give insights into female success. With four exceptions (biochemistry, biophysics, biotechnology, and structural biology), the fields achieved or maintained at least 40% female first authors by 2018, with developmental biology and endocrinology both attaining female first author majorities. A regression analysis found close to gender parity overall in citation impact but a small male first author citation advantage in more fields than the opposite: an up to 3% increase in logged citation ratio to the world mean. This was partly due to males first authoring with larger teams. Fields with relatively many females did not favour female-led research with more citations, however.
References
Ceci, S. J., Ginther, D. K., Kahn, S., & Williams, W. M. (2014). Women in academic science: A changing landscape. Psychological Science in the Public Interest,15(3), 75–141.
Cheryan, S., Ziegler, S. A., Montoya, A. K., & Jiang, L. (2017). Why are some STEM fields more gender balanced than others? Psychological Bulletin,143(1), 1–35.
de Araújo, C. G. S., de Oliveira, B. R. R., de Oliveira Brito, L. V., da Matta, T. T., Viana, B. F., de Souza, C. P., et al. (2012). Two-year citations of JAPPL original articles: Evidence of a relative age effect. Journal of Applied Physiology,112(9), 1434–1436.
Diekman, A. B., Steinberg, M., Brown, E. R., Belanger, A. L., & Clark, E. K. (2017). A goal congruity model of role entry, engagement, and exit: Understanding communal goal processes in STEM gender gaps. Personality and Social Psychology Review,21(2), 142–175.
Elsevier. (2017). Gender in the global research landscape. Retrieved from: https://www.elsevier.com/__data/assets/pdf_file/0008/265661/ElsevierGenderReport_final_for-web.pdf. Accessed 27 July 2019.
Garg, K. C., & Kumar, S. (2014). Scientometric profile of Indian scientific output in life sciences with a focus on the contributions of women scientists. Scientometrics,98(3), 1771–1783.
Gazni, A., & Didegah, F. (2011). Investigating different types of research collaboration and citation impact: A case study of Harvard University’s publications. Scientometrics,87(2), 251–265.
Guglielmi, G. (2019). Eastern European universities score highly in university gender ranking. Nature News. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-01642-4.
Holman, L., Stuart-Fox, D., & Hauser, C. E. (2018). The gender gap in science: How long until women are equally represented? PLoS Biology,16(4), e2004956.
Hopkins, A. L., Jawitz, J. W., McCarty, C., Goldman, A., & Basu, N. B. (2013). Disparities in publication patterns by gender, race and ethnicity based on a survey of a random sample of authors. Scientometrics,96(2), 515–534.
Larivière, V., Desrochers, N., Macaluso, B., Mongeon, P., Paul-Hus, A., & Sugimoto, C. R. (2016). Contributorship and division of labor in knowledge production. Social Studies of Science,46(3), 417–435.
Larivière, V., Gingras, Y., Sugimoto, C. R., & Tsou, A. (2015). Team size matters: Collaboration and scientific impact since 1900. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology,66(7), 1323–1332.
Larivière, V., Ni, C., Gingras, Y., Cronin, B., & Sugimoto, C. R. (2013). Bibliometrics: Global gender disparities in science. Nature News,504(7479), 211–213.
Levitt, J., & Thelwall, M. (2008). Is multidisciplinary research more highly cited? A macro-level study. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology,59(12), 1973–1984.
NCES (2019). Table 315.80. Full-time and part-time faculty and instructional staff in degree-granting postsecondary institutions, by race/ethnicity, sex, and program area: Fall 1998 and fall 2003, https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d17/tables/dt17_315.80.asp. Accessed 27 July 2019.
O’Dea, R. E., Lagisz, M., Jennions, M. D., & Nakagawa, S. (2018). Gender differences in individual variation in academic grades fail to fit expected patterns for STEM. Nature Communications,9(1), 3777.
Russell, P. H., Johnson, R. L., Ananthan, S., Harnke, B., & Carlson, N. E. (2018). A large-scale analysis of bioinformatics code on GitHub. PLoS ONE,13(10), e0205898.
Sax, L. J., Lim, G., Lehman, K., & Lonje-Paulson, L. (2018). Reversal of the Gender Gap: The biological sciences as a unique case within science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering,24(4), 291–324.
Thelwall, M. (2017). Three practical field normalised alternative indicator formulae for research evaluation. Journal of Informetrics,11(1), 128–151.
Thelwall, M. (2018). Do females create higher impact research? Scopus citations and Mendeley readers for articles from five countries. Journal of Informetrics,12(4), 1031–1041.
Thelwall, M., Bailey, C., Tobin, C., & Bradshaw, N. (2019). Gender differences in research areas, methods and topics: Can people and thing orientations explain the results? Journal of Informetrics,13(1), 149–169.
Tscharntke, T., Hochberg, M. E., Rand, T. A., Resh, V. H., & Krauss, J. (2007). Author sequence and credit for contributions in multiauthored publications. PLoS Biology,5(1), e18.
Waltman, L., van Eck, N. J., van Leeuwen, T. N., Visser, M. S., & van Raan, A. F. (2011). Towards a new crown indicator: An empirical analysis. Scientometrics,87(3), 467–481.
Yohai, V. J. (1987). High breakdown-point and high efficiency robust estimates for regression. The Annals of Statistics,15(2), 642–656.
Zhu, Y. (2017). Who support open access publishing? Gender, discipline, seniority and other factors associated with academics’ OA practice. Scientometrics,111(2), 557–579.
Zitt, M. (2012). The journal impact factor: Angel, devil, or scapegoat? A comment on JK Vanclay’s article 2011. Scientometrics,92(2), 485–503.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Electronic supplementary material
Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Thelwall, M., Nevill, T. No evidence of citation bias as a determinant of STEM gender disparities in US biochemistry, genetics and molecular biology research. Scientometrics 121, 1793–1801 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-019-03271-0
Received:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-019-03271-0