Gender Gaps in International Research Collaboration. A Bibliometric Approach

Men and women have been shown to perform differently according to various indicators related to the process of scientific publishing. In particular, women on average tend to be less productive than men in terms of number of publications (e.g. Kyvik & Teigen, 1996; Piro, Aksnes & Rørstad, 2013). In this presentation, we apply a gender perspective on another dimension: international collaboration measured through international co-authorship.

While most previous analyses have been based on Web of Science or Scopus data, this study is based on the bibliographic Cristin database which has a complete coverage of all peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly publication output, including books. The data material consists of almost 55,000 researchers and their publication output during the period 2011-2017, in total 199,000 publications. We analyze the data at an overall level and in terms of the age, gender, and academic positions of the individuals included. Across disciplines, there are large differences in the collaboration rate, and this dimension is also analyzed.

Preliminary results show that 51 per cent of the female researchers were involved in international collaboration measured by co-authorship compared to 60 per cent for men. Thus, our study shows that male researchers more often are involved in international collaboration than their female colleagues.