Distribution of women and men among highly cited scientists

Abstract

Dear Sir,In 2014, Thomson Reuters (provider of the Web of Science) published a list of scientists who had published the most highly cited papers in their discipline (www.highlycit-ed.com).The Thomson Reuters database contains a total of 3,215 highly cited scientists worldwide.In the first evaluation of the data, we analyzed the affiliations provided by the highly cited scientists and identified those institutions at which the most highly cited scientists work (Bornmann & Bauer, in press).In a second evaluation, we examined the distribution of men and women among the scientists.There is great general interest in this evaluation: As the literature overview from Dehdarirad, Villarroya, and Barrios (2015) shows, "numerous reports and initiatives have emerged in Europe but also in different parts of the world with the aim of analyzing the presence of women in science and higher education" (p.796).In a first step, the gender of the highly cited scientists was determined from a database that associates first names with a gender (see the description in Walker, Barros, Conejo, Neumann, & Telefont, 2015).Since this assignment did not lead to an unambiguous identification in every case, 705 scientists had to be manually researched in a second step.After the manual search, reliable information was available for 3,190 (99%) of the scientists.Overall, the highly cited scientists include 2,787 men and 403 women; there are significantly more men (87%) than women (13%) among the scientists.Table 1 shows the share of highly cited male and female scientists in individual disciplines.The share of women is highest in "Social Sciences, general," with 31%; in "Engineering" it is the lowest, with 4%.Twelve disciplines in the table represent those where the share of women is below the share over all disciplines (12.63%): "Environment/Ecology," "Clinical Medicine," "Space Science," "Economics & Business," "Computer Science," "Materials Science," "Pharmacology & Toxicology," "Neuroscience & Behavior," "Mathematics," "Chemistry," "Physics," and "Engineering."Our results on the unequal distribution of men and women among the highly cited scientists support statements like that of Sugimoto, Ni, and Larivière (2015) that "gender disparities in science remain, despite more than a decade of policies aimed at achieving gender parity."

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