Research Article: “Does Female-Authored Research Have More Educational Impact Than Male-Authored Research? Evidence from Mendeley”
The following research article appears in The Journal of Altmetrics (a new open access, peer-reviewed publication) from Levy Library Press.
Title
Does Female-Authored Research Have More Educational Impact Than Male-Authored Research? Evidence from Mendeley
Author
Mike Thelwall
University of Wolverhampton
Source
Journal of Altmetrics (1,1)
DOI: 10.29024/joa.2
Abstract
Female academics are more likely to be in teaching-related roles in some countries, including the USA. As a side effect of this, female-authored journal articles may tend to be more useful for students. This study assesses this hypothesis by investigating whether female first-authored research has more uptake in education than male first-authored research. Based on an analysis of Mendeley readers of articles from 2014 in five countries and 100 narrow Scopus subject categories, the results show that female-authored articles attract more student readers than male-authored articles in Spain, Turkey, the UK and USA but not India. They also attract fewer professorial readers in Spain, the UK and the USA, but not India and Turkey, and tend to be less popular with senior academics. Because the results are based on analysis of differences within narrow fields they cannot be accounted for by females working in more education-related disciplines. The apparent additional educational impact for female-authored research could be due to selecting more accessible micro-specialisms, however, such as health-related instruments within the instrumentation narrow field. Whatever the cause, the results suggest that citation-based research evaluations may undervalue the wider impact of female researchers.
Direct to Full Text Article
See Also: The Journal of Altmetrics is Launched (September 15, 2018)
Hat Tip and Thanks: Jason Priem
Filed under: Journal Articles, Libraries, News, Open Access
About Gary Price
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com. Gary is also the co-founder of infoDJ an innovation research consultancy supporting corporate product and business model teams with just-in-time fact and insight finding.
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