An analysis of scientific fields by gender diversity through research paper metadata

The act of identifying interest in scholarly articles and research papers has long been difficult to quantify, let alone gather. In the past few years, altmetric data has allowed both researchers and the general public to access a wealth of information that was once difficult to collect. The ability to analyze public interest on scholarly articles and research papers allows for the writers themselves to identify general interest in a quantifiable manner. With such a large wealth of accessible information, general trends in regards to viewership can be extrapolated. Through social media, research articles are discussed, and their popularity is recorded into Altmetric’s database. A major disparity plaguing most STEM fields currently is the lack of women in comparison to men in the STEM workforce. Thus, this study attempts to identify what scientific fields most interest each gender. To accomplish this, names and subjects were pulled from altmetric data. The names were input into a script to identify the gender of each name. The articles that a person has commented on has that person’s name associated with its related scientific fields. The resulting data was combined and placed into various graphs to clearly visualize the disparity between different subjects and views by gender. The information was then analyzed. It was discovered that in terms of social media, more females viewed scholarly articles compared to men in most fields. However, it was found that papers relating to social sciences were viewed by more females compared to articles relating to material sciences, which garnered more male viewers.