Gender-based homophily in research: A large-scale study of man-woman collaboration

Marek Kwiek and Wojciech Roszka

Journal of Informetrics, 2021, vol. 15, issue 3

Abstract: We examined the male-female collaboration practices of all internationally visible Polish university professors (N = 25,463) based on their Scopus-indexed publications from 2009–2018 (158,743 journal articles). We merged a national registry of 99,935 scientists (with full administrative and biographical data) with the Scopus publication database, using probabilistic and deterministic record linkage. Our unique biographical, administrative, publication, and citation database (“The Polish Science Observatory”) included all professors with at least a doctoral degree employed in 85 research-involved universities. We determined what we term an “individual publication portfolio” for every professor, and we examined the respective impacts of biological age, academic position, academic discipline, average journal prestige, and type of institution on the same-sex collaboration ratio. The gender homophily principle (publishing predominantly with scientists of the same sex) was found to apply to male scientists—but not to females. The majority of male scientists collaborate solely with males; most female scientists, in contrast, do not collaborate with females at all. Across all age groups studied, all-female collaboration is marginal, while all-male collaboration is pervasive. Gender homophily in research-intensive institutions proved stronger for males than for females. Finally, we used a multi-dimensional fractional logit regression model to estimate the impact of gender and other individual-level and institutional-level independent variables on gender homophily in research collaboration.

Keywords: Research collaboration; co-authorships; gender gap; sociology of science; homophily; scientific careers; publishing patterns; probabilistic record linkage; sex differences (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (20)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1751157721000420
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:infome:v:15:y:2021:i:3:s1751157721000420

DOI: 10.1016/j.joi.2021.101171

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Informetrics is currently edited by Leo Egghe

More articles in Journal of Informetrics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().