Research evaluation. Part II: gender effects of evaluation: are men more productive and more cited than women?

Abstract

Productivity and citedness of the staff of a German medical research institution are analyzed. It was found in our previous study (Pudovkin et al.: Scientometrics, doi:10.1007/s11192-012-0659-z, 2012) that male scientists are more prolific and cited more often than female scientists. We explain in our present study one of the possible causes for obtaining this result with reference to Abramo et al. (Scientometrics 84(3): 821–833, 2009), who found in the small subgroups of star scientists a higher performance of male star scientists with respect to female star scientists; but in the remaining complementary subpopulations the performance gap between the two sexes is marginal. In agreement with Abramo et al. (2009), in our small subgroup of star scientists a higher performance of male star scientists with respect to female star scientists could be found. Contrasting, in the large complementary subgroup even a slightly higher performance of female scientists with respect to male scientists was identified. The last is even stronger expressed in favor of women than Abramo’s result that the performance gap between the two sexes is truly marginal. In addition to Abramo et al. (2009), we already found in our previous study, special indexes characterizing the quality of papers (but not quantity) are not substantially different among sexes compared.