Gender and authorship in energy studies: Is there an impact?

Abstract

Although gender inequality has been examined and debated as one of the most prominent challenges within the scientific community, relatively little attention has been paid to gender differences with regard to authorship. The aim of this paper is to identify whether gender differences exist with respect to the impact factors of the journals in which male and female authors publish their research. Existing studies use machine-assisted tools to determine author gender. Given the limitations of this type of approach to data collection and coding, we opted for a manual approach that ensured both the inclusion of a high number of journals and greater precision in determining author gender. This paper focuses on authors who published articles on a concrete area of research (energy) in a specific region (Central and Eastern Europe) over a 14-year period (2004–2017). Our study identified a gender bias within energy-related research: male authors (or male-dominated teams) publish more often and on average in journals with higher impact factors than female authors.