Female Scholars’ Contribution to Research Topics in Microbiology (2012-2016) and Its Relationship with the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) Index

There is an absolute divergence in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) between developed and developing countries, which has an impact on what they can devote to research. High-income countries allocate more capital to investment and have better infrastructure for research and development (R&D) activities. R&D investment can be linked to academic output. However, in low-income countries, the funding gender gaps are often larger, and women may have less access to financial resources for R&D than in high-income countries. Additionally, as females and male researchers choose different research topics, this has an important impact on their research performance. Therefore, this study has two objectives: First, to study female scholars' contribution to research topics in microbiology. Second, to examine whether there was a relationship between the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) index and the proportion of female authors per paper in the identified topics. The data set of this study comprised 167,874 articles and reviews from 2012 to 2016, which were extracted from the Web of Science Medline. To identify and visualize the topics addressed during the studied period, VOSviewer was used. The construction and visualization of the term map were done based on 5,918 MESH subject headings. GDP (current US$) data was gathered from the World Data Bank website and an average value calculated for the five-year study period (2012-2016) for each paper. Gender API was used in order to detect the gender of authors.