The specific shapes of gender imbalance in scientific authorships: a network approach

TL;DR

This paper investigates gender imbalance in scientific authorships using a network approach, revealing unique structural patterns in co-authorship networks associated with male-only authored papers in economics.

Contribution

It introduces a network-based methodology to analyze gender-specific patterns in research collaboration, highlighting a distinct network shape linked to male-exclusive authorships.

Findings

Male-only authored papers form a unique network pattern.

Gender imbalance influences the topology of research collaboration networks.

The pattern is specific to economics papers from 2010-2015 with Portuguese affiliations.

Abstract

Gender differences in collaborative research have received little attention when compared with the growing importance that women hold in academia and research. Unsurprisingly, most of bibliometric databases have a strong lack of directly available information by gender. Although empirical-based network approaches are often used in the study of research collaboration, the studies about the influence of gender dissimilarities on the resulting topological outcomes are still scarce. Here, networks of scientific subjects are used to characterize patterns that might be associated to five categories of authorships which were built based on gender. We find enough evidence that gender imbalance in scientific authorships brings a peculiar trait to the networks induced from papers published in Web of Science (WoS) indexed journals of Economics over the period 2010-2015 and having at least one author affiliated to a Portuguese institution. Our results show the emergence of a specific pattern when the network of co-occurring subjects is induced from a set of papers exclusively authored by men. Such a male-exclusive authorship condition is found to be the solely responsible for the emergence that particular shape in the network structure. This peculiar trait might facilitate future network analyses of research collaboration and interdisciplinarity.