IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/infome/v12y2018i4p1031-1041.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Do females create higher impact research? Scopus citations and Mendeley readers for articles from five countries

Author

Listed:
  • Thelwall, Mike

Abstract

There are known gender imbalances in participation in scientific fields, from female dominance of nursing to male dominance of mathematics. It is not clear whether there is also a citation imbalance, with some claiming that male-authored research tends to be more cited. No previous study has assessed gender differences in the readers of academic research on a large scale, however. In response, this article assesses whether there are gender differences in the average citations and/or Mendeley readers of academic publications. Field normalised logged Scopus citations and Mendeley readers from mid-2018 for articles published in 2014 were investigated for articles with first authors from India, Spain, Turkey, the UK and the USA in up to 251 fields with at least 50 male and female authors. Although female-authored research is less cited in Turkey (−4.0%) and India (−3.6%), it is marginally more cited in Spain (0.4%), the UK (0.4%), and the USA (0.2%). Female-authored research has fewer Mendeley readers in India (−1.1%) but more in Spain (1.4%), Turkey (1.1%), the UK (2.7%) and the USA (3.0%). Thus, whilst there may be little practical gender difference in citation impact in countries with mature science systems, the higher female readership impact suggests a wider audience for female-authored research. The results also show that the conclusions from a gender analysis depend on the field normalisation method. A theoretically informed decision must therefore be made about which normalisation to use. The results also suggest that arithmetic mean-based field normalisation is favourable to males.

Suggested Citation

  • Thelwall, Mike, 2018. "Do females create higher impact research? Scopus citations and Mendeley readers for articles from five countries," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 12(4), pages 1031-1041.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:infome:v:12:y:2018:i:4:p:1031-1041
    DOI: 10.1016/j.joi.2018.08.005
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S175115771830258X
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.joi.2018.08.005?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Beaudry, Catherine & Larivière, Vincent, 2016. "Which gender gap? Factors affecting researchers’ scientific impact in science and medicine," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 45(9), pages 1790-1817.
    2. Michel Zitt, 2012. "The journal impact factor: angel, devil, or scapegoat? A comment on J.K. Vanclay’s article 2011," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 92(2), pages 485-503, August.
    3. Mike Thelwall & Nabeil Maflahi, 2015. "Are scholarly articles disproportionately read in their own country? An analysis of mendeley readers," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 66(6), pages 1124-1135, June.
    4. Hajar Sotudeh & Nahid Khoshian, 2014. "Gender differences in science: the case of scientific productivity in Nano Science & Technology during 2005–2007," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 98(1), pages 457-472, January.
    5. Philippe Mongeon & Adèle Paul-Hus, 2016. "The journal coverage of Web of Science and Scopus: a comparative analysis," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 106(1), pages 213-228, January.
    6. Mike Thelwall & Paul Wilson, 2016. "Mendeley readership altmetrics for medical articles: An analysis of 45 fields," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 67(8), pages 1962-1972, August.
    7. Mike Thelwall, 2017. "Are Mendeley reader counts useful impact indicators in all fields?," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 113(3), pages 1721-1731, December.
    8. Waltman, Ludo & van Eck, Nees Jan & van Leeuwen, Thed N. & Visser, Martijn S. & van Raan, Anthony F.J., 2011. "Towards a new crown indicator: Some theoretical considerations," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 5(1), pages 37-47.
    9. Peter van den Besselaar & Ulf Sandström, 2017. "Vicious circles of gender bias, lower positions, and lower performance: Gender differences in scholarly productivity and impact," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 12(8), pages 1-16, August.
    10. Abramo, Giovanni & Cicero, Tindaro & D’Angelo, Ciriaco Andrea, 2015. "Should the research performance of scientists be distinguished by gender?," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 9(1), pages 25-38.
    11. Mike Thelwall, 2018. "Early Mendeley readers correlate with later citation counts," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 115(3), pages 1231-1240, June.
    12. Thelwall, Mike, 2016. "The precision of the arithmetic mean, geometric mean and percentiles for citation data: An experimental simulation modelling approach," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 10(1), pages 110-123.
    13. Jappelli, Tullio & Nappi, Carmela Anna & Torrini, Roberto, 2017. "Gender effects in research evaluation," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 46(5), pages 911-924.
    14. Per O. Seglen, 1992. "The skewness of science," Journal of the American Society for Information Science, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 43(9), pages 628-638, October.
    15. Rørstad, Kristoffer & Aksnes, Dag W., 2015. "Publication rate expressed by age, gender and academic position – A large-scale analysis of Norwegian academic staff," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 9(2), pages 317-333.
    16. Ludo Waltman & Nees Jan Eck & Thed N. Leeuwen & Martijn S. Visser & Anthony F. J. Raan, 2011. "Towards a new crown indicator: an empirical analysis," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 87(3), pages 467-481, June.
    17. Brooks, Chris & Fenton, Evelyn M. & Walker, James T., 2014. "Gender and the evaluation of research," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 43(6), pages 990-1001.
    18. Thelwall, Mike, 2017. "Three practical field normalised alternative indicator formulae for research evaluation," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 11(1), pages 128-151.
    19. Ehsan Mohammadi & Mike Thelwall & Kayvan Kousha, 2016. "Can Mendeley bookmarks reflect readership? A survey of user motivations," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 67(5), pages 1198-1209, May.
    20. Levitt, Jonathan M. & Thelwall, Mike, 2013. "Alphabetization and the skewing of first authorship towards last names early in the alphabet," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 7(3), pages 575-582.
    21. Lundberg, Jonas, 2007. "Lifting the crown—citation z-score," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 1(2), pages 145-154.
    22. Dag W. Aksnes & Kristoffer Rorstad & Fredrik Piro & Gunnar Sivertsen, 2011. "Are female researchers less cited? A large-scale study of Norwegian scientists," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 62(4), pages 628-636, April.
    23. Dag W. Aksnes & Kristoffer Rorstad & Fredrik Piro & Gunnar Sivertsen, 2011. "Are female researchers less cited? A large‐scale study of Norwegian scientists," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 62(4), pages 628-636, April.
    24. Derek De Solla Price, 1976. "A general theory of bibliometric and other cumulative advantage processes," Journal of the American Society for Information Science, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 27(5), pages 292-306, September.
    25. Mike Thelwall, 2016. "Interpreting correlations between citation counts and other indicators," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 108(1), pages 337-347, July.
    26. Namrata Gupta & A. K. Sharma, 2003. "Gender Inequality in the Work Environment at Institutes of Higher Learning in Science and Technology in India," Work, Employment & Society, British Sociological Association, vol. 17(4), pages 597-616, December.
    27. Ehsan Mohammadi & Mike Thelwall & Stefanie Haustein & Vincent Larivière, 2015. "Who reads research articles? An altmetrics analysis of Mendeley user categories," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 66(9), pages 1832-1846, September.
    28. Rodrigo Costas & Zohreh Zahedi & Paul Wouters, 2015. "Do “altmetrics” correlate with citations? Extensive comparison of altmetric indicators with citations from a multidisciplinary perspective," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 66(10), pages 2003-2019, October.
    29. Thelwall, Mike & Fairclough, Ruth, 2015. "Geometric journal impact factors correcting for individual highly cited articles," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 9(2), pages 263-272.
    30. Abramo, Giovanni & Cicero, Tindaro & D’Angelo, Ciriaco Andrea, 2011. "Assessing the varying level of impact measurement accuracy as a function of the citation window length," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 5(4), pages 659-667.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Kong, Xiangjie & Mao, Mengyi & Jiang, Huizhen & Yu, Shuo & Wan, Liangtian, 2019. "How does collaboration affect researchers’ positions in co-authorship networks?," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 13(3), pages 887-900.
    2. Zhang, Lin & Sivertsen, Gunnar & Du, Huiying & HUANG, Ying & Glänzel, Wolfgang, 2021. "Gender differences in the aims and impacts of research," SocArXiv 9n347, Center for Open Science.
    3. Tove Faber Frandsen & Rasmus Højbjerg Jacobsen & Jakob Ousager, 2020. "Gender gaps in scientific performance: a longitudinal matching study of health sciences researchers," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 124(2), pages 1511-1527, August.
    4. Jyoti Paswan & Vivek Kumar Singh, 2020. "Gender and research publishing analyzed through the lenses of discipline, institution types, impact and international collaboration: a case study from India," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 123(1), pages 497-515, April.
    5. Mike Thelwall, 2020. "Female citation impact superiority 1996–2018 in six out of seven English‐speaking nations," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 71(8), pages 979-990, August.
    6. Yuanyuan Shang & Gunnar Sivertsen & Zhe Cao & Lin Zhang, 2022. "Gender differences among first authors in research focused on the Sustainable Development Goal of Gender Equality," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 127(8), pages 4769-4796, August.
    7. Maria-Victoria Uribe-Bohorquez & Juan-Camilo Rivera-Ordóñez & Isabel-María García-Sánchez, 2023. "Gender disparities in accounting academia: analysis from the lens of publications," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 128(7), pages 3827-3865, July.
    8. Lin Zhang & Gunnar Sivertsen & Huiying Du & Ying Huang & Wolfgang Glänzel, 2021. "Gender differences in the aims and impacts of research," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(11), pages 8861-8886, November.
    9. Shang, Yuanyuan & Sivertsen, Gunnar & Cao, Zhe & Zhang, Lin, 2021. "Gender differences in research focused on the Sustainable Development Goal of Gender Equality," SocArXiv 3fapz, Center for Open Science.
    10. Rodrigo Dorantes-Gilardi & Aurora A. Ramírez-Álvarez & Diana Terrazas-Santamaría, 2023. "Is there a differentiated gender effect of collaboration with super-cited authors? Evidence from junior researchers in economics," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 128(4), pages 2317-2336, April.
    11. Mike Thelwall & Tamara Nevill, 2019. "No evidence of citation bias as a determinant of STEM gender disparities in US biochemistry, genetics and molecular biology research," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 121(3), pages 1793-1801, December.
    12. Wang, Yukai & Yang, Zhongkai & Liu, Lanjian & Wang, Xianwen, 2020. "Gender bias in patenting process," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 14(3).
    13. Nunkoo, Robin & Hall, C. Michael & Rughoobur-Seetah, Soujata & Teeroovengadum, Viraiyan, 2019. "Citation practices in tourism research: Toward a gender conscientious engagement," Annals of Tourism Research, Elsevier, vol. 79(C).
    14. Khosrowjerdi, Mahmood & Bornmann, Lutz, 2021. "Is culture related to strong science? An empirical investigation," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 15(4).
    15. Liu, Meijun & Zhang, Ning & Hu, Xiao & Jaiswal, Ajay & Xu, Jian & Chen, Hong & Ding, Ying & Bu, Yi, 2022. "Further divided gender gaps in research productivity and collaboration during the COVID-19 pandemic: Evidence from coronavirus-related literature," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 16(2).
    16. Mike Thelwall, 2019. "The influence of highly cited papers on field normalised indicators," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 118(2), pages 519-537, February.
    17. Cruz-Castro, Laura & Sanz-Menendez, Luis, 2021. "What should be rewarded? Gender and evaluation criteria for tenure and promotion," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 15(3).
    18. Zoltán Krajcsák, 2021. "Researcher Performance in Scopus Articles ( RPSA ) as a New Scientometric Model of Scientific Output: Tested in Business Area of V4 Countries," Publications, MDPI, vol. 9(4), pages 1-23, October.
    19. Yasaman Sarabi & Matthew Smith, 2023. "Gender diversity and publication activity—an analysis of STEM in the UK," Research Evaluation, Oxford University Press, vol. 32(2), pages 321-331.
    20. Mike Thelwall, 2018. "Do gendered citation advantages influence field participation? Four unusual fields in the USA 1996–2017," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 117(3), pages 2133-2144, December.
    21. Shen, Hongquan & Cheng, Ying & Ju, Xiufang & Xie, Juan, 2022. "Rethinking the effect of inter-gender collaboration on research performance for scholars," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 16(4).
    22. Rodrigo Dorantes-Gilardi & Aurora A. Ramírez-Álvarez & Diana Terrazas-Santamaría, 2021. "Is there a differentiated gender effect of collaboration with supercited authors? Evidence from early-career economists," Serie documentos de trabajo del Centro de Estudios Económicos 2021-05, El Colegio de México, Centro de Estudios Económicos.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Mike Thelwall, 2018. "Early Mendeley readers correlate with later citation counts," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 115(3), pages 1231-1240, June.
    2. Mike Thelwall, 2017. "Are Mendeley reader counts useful impact indicators in all fields?," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 113(3), pages 1721-1731, December.
    3. Mike Thelwall, 2018. "Differences between journals and years in the proportions of students, researchers and faculty registering Mendeley articles," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 115(2), pages 717-729, May.
    4. Thelwall, Mike, 2017. "Three practical field normalised alternative indicator formulae for research evaluation," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 11(1), pages 128-151.
    5. Mike Thelwall, 2020. "Female citation impact superiority 1996–2018 in six out of seven English‐speaking nations," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 71(8), pages 979-990, August.
    6. Waltman, Ludo, 2016. "A review of the literature on citation impact indicators," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 10(2), pages 365-391.
    7. Thelwall, Mike & Sud, Pardeep, 2016. "National, disciplinary and temporal variations in the extent to which articles with more authors have more impact: Evidence from a geometric field normalised citation indicator," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 10(1), pages 48-61.
    8. Thelwall, Mike, 2016. "Are there too many uncited articles? Zero inflated variants of the discretised lognormal and hooked power law distributions," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 10(2), pages 622-633.
    9. Thelwall, Mike, 2018. "Microsoft Academic automatic document searches: Accuracy for journal articles and suitability for citation analysis," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 12(1), pages 1-9.
    10. Thelwall, Mike & Nevill, Tamara, 2018. "Could scientists use Altmetric.com scores to predict longer term citation counts?," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 12(1), pages 237-248.
    11. Fairclough, Ruth & Thelwall, Mike, 2015. "More precise methods for national research citation impact comparisons," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 9(4), pages 895-906.
    12. Zahedi, Zohreh & Haustein, Stefanie, 2018. "On the relationships between bibliographic characteristics of scientific documents and citation and Mendeley readership counts: A large-scale analysis of Web of Science publications," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 12(1), pages 191-202.
    13. Amalia Mas-Bleda & Mike Thelwall, 2016. "Can alternative indicators overcome language biases in citation counts? A comparison of Spanish and UK research," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 109(3), pages 2007-2030, December.
    14. Mike Thelwall & Kayvan Kousha, 2017. "ResearchGate versus Google Scholar: Which finds more early citations?," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 112(2), pages 1125-1131, August.
    15. Mike Thelwall, 2018. "Does Microsoft Academic find early citations?," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 114(1), pages 325-334, January.
    16. Michael Thelwall, 2018. "Can Microsoft Academic be used for citation analysis of preprint archives? The case of the Social Science Research Network," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 115(2), pages 913-928, May.
    17. Mojisola Erdt & Aarthy Nagarajan & Sei-Ching Joanna Sin & Yin-Leng Theng, 2016. "Altmetrics: an analysis of the state-of-the-art in measuring research impact on social media," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 109(2), pages 1117-1166, November.
    18. Marina Pilkina & Andrey Lovakov, 2022. "Gender disparities in Russian academia: a bibliometric analysis," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 127(6), pages 3577-3591, June.
    19. Thelwall, Mike, 2016. "Are the discretised lognormal and hooked power law distributions plausible for citation data?," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 10(2), pages 454-470.
    20. Thelwall, Mike, 2016. "The precision of the arithmetic mean, geometric mean and percentiles for citation data: An experimental simulation modelling approach," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 10(1), pages 110-123.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:infome:v:12:y:2018:i:4:p:1031-1041. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/joi .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.