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Gender differences among first authors in research focused on the Sustainable Development Goal of Gender Equality

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Abstract

In 2016, the United Nations officially launched the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to address urgent global challenges over the next 15 years. Among the seventeen SDGs, Gender Equality (SDG5) is recognized as important for the achievement of the other 16 goals because gender inequality exists across education, employment opportunities, healthcare facilities, life expectancy, family life, and political participation, thereby holding back the capacity of half of the world’s population to contribute to solutions to the global challenges. This bibliometric study explores gender balance and differences among first authors within SDG5 oriented research during the first 5 years after the implementation of SDG5 in 2016. Compared with other SDGs, the field of SDG5 produces relatively less scientific publications, which feature a dominance of female first authors. Within the field, male and female first authors focus on partly different topics. Potential readers show more interest in publications by female first authors. This investigation highlights the importance of increasing gender diversity in SDG5-related studies, which is helpful for the achievement of sustainable development.

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Notes

  1. https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/development-agenda/.

  2. https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/gender-equality/.

  3. https://aurora-universities.eu/resources/educational/sdg-analysis-bibliometrics-relevance/.

  4. It should be noted that “Elsevier 2021 SDG mapping” doesn’t cover SDG 17 Partnerships for the Goals. Because SDG17 is very difficult to quantify, there is no satisfactory search query to define it.

  5. In particular, we excluded authors from China (Mainland, Hong Kong, Macau, & Taiwan), Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, South Korea, Indonesia, Thailand, Viet Nam, Philippines, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Mongolia. In total 12,377 (17.1%) authors were excluded from our dataset.

  6. https://github.com/lmullen/gender.

  7. https://pypi.python.org/pypi/gender-guesser/.

  8. We randomly selected some lists of faculty members from U.S. universities and manually marked the gender information of the names based on faculty members’ profile photos.

  9. A researcher’s focus on SDGs/SDG5-related research is based on one’s articles related to SDGs/SDG5 published in 2016–2020.

  10. https://www.elsevier.com/solutions/scival/features/topic-prominence-in-science.

  11. https://www.elsevier.com/solutions/scival/features/topic-prominence-in-science.

  12. Similar publications are those publications in the Scopus database that have the same publication year, publication type, and discipline, as represented by the Scopus journal classification system.

  13. Since a publication may be classified into more than one research field, the full counting approach is used in counting the number of a publication’s research fields. Here, the research fields refer to the third level of ASJC in Scopus.

  14. https://www.scimagojr.com/.

  15. https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/gender-equality/.

  16. https://www.education-inequalities.org/indicators/eduyears#ageGroup=%22eduyears_2024%22.

  17. https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/development-agenda/.

  18. https://www.unwomen.org/en/news/in-focus/women-and-the-sdgs/sdg-2-zero-hunger.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 71974150, 72004169, 72074029), the National Laboratory Centre for Library and Information Science at Wuhan University, and the Research Council of Norway, Grant 256223, FORINNPOL.

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  1. Center for Science, Technology & Education Assessment (CSTEA), Wuhan University, Wuhan, China

    Yuanyuan Shang, Zhe Cao & Lin Zhang

  2. Center for Studies of Information Resources, School of Information Management, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China

    Yuanyuan Shang, Zhe Cao & Lin Zhang

  3. Nordic Institute for Studies in Innovation, Research and Education, Oslo, Norway

    Gunnar Sivertsen

  4. Centre for R&D Monitoring (ECOOM) and Department MSI, KU Leuven, Louvain, Belgium

    Lin Zhang

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Shang, Y., Sivertsen, G., Cao, Z. et al. Gender differences among first authors in research focused on the Sustainable Development Goal of Gender Equality. Scientometrics 127, 4769–4796 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-022-04430-6

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