Most-cited scientists: still mostly men, but the gender gap is closing (IMAGE)
Caption
There have been very prominent gender disparities across science fields. Although some of these disparities are diminishing over time, there is still a gap between men and women across multiple dimensions, including recruitment, tenure and, notably, authorship and citation impact. In this article, a study has been carried out to evaluate the gender composition of top-cited authors within different subfields of research. All in all, the results show that men outnumbered women 1.88-fold among all authors, with a decrease from 3.93-fold pre-1992 to 1.36-fold post-2011. Interestingly, among top-cited author, men outnumbered women 3.21-fold, decreasing from 6.41-fold to 2.28-fold over time. There is a similar tendency with the proportion of women among top-cited authors across 174 scientific subfields either over their career or on single-year publications, showing large heterogeneity across scientific disciplines. In a nutshell, the proportion of women among top-cited authors increased over time but this evolution was slow overall and there are still fewer subfields where women had a competitive advantage against men to find themselves among the top-cited authors.
Credit
Anne-Lise Paris, (www.in-graphidi.com), PLOS, CC-BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
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Credit must be given to the creator.
License
CC BY