Research production in high-impact journals of contemporary neuroscience: A gender analysis

Abstract

Neuroscience or Neural Science is a very active and interdisciplinary field that seeks to understand the brain and the nervous system. In spite of important advances made in recent decades, women are still underrepresented in neuroscience research output as a consequence of gender inequality in science overall. This study carries out a scientometric analysis of the 30 neuroscience journals (2009–2010) with the highest impact in the Web of Science database (Thomson Reuters) in order to quantitatively examine the current contribution of women in neuroscientific production, their pattern of research collaboration, scientific content, and the analysis of scientific impact from a gender perspective. From a total of 66,937 authorships, gender could be identified in 53,351 (79.7%) of them. Results revealed that 67.1% of the authorships corresponded to men and 32.9% to women. In relative terms, women tend to be concentrated in the first position of the authorship by-line (which could be a reflection of new female incorporations into neuroscience research publishing their first studies), and much less in the last (senior) position. This double pattern suggests that age probably plays a role in (partly) explaining gender asymmetry, both in science in general and in neuroscience in particular.