Gender inequities in the online dissemination of scholars’ work

Unbiased science dissemination has the potential to alleviate some of the known gender disparities in academia by exposing female scholars’ work to other scientists and the public. And yet, we lack comprehensive understanding of the relationship between gender and science dissemination online. Our large-scale analyses, encompassing half a million scholars, revealed that female scholars’ work is mentioned less frequently than male scholars’ work in all research areas. When exploring the characteristics associated with online success, we found that the impact of prior work, social capital, and gendered tie formation in coauthorship networks are linked with online success for men, but not for women—even in the areas with the highest female representation. These results suggest that while men’s scientific impact and collaboration networks are associated with higher visibility online, there are no universally identifiable facets associated with success for women. Our comprehensive empirical evidence indicates that the gender gap in online science dissemination is coupled with a lack of understanding the characteristics that are linked with female scholars’ success, which might hinder efforts to close the gender gap in visibility.

Global Trends in Coffee Agronomy Research

This article empirically provides a scientific production trends overview of coffee agronomy at the global level, allowing us to understand the structure of the epistemic community on this topic. The knowledge contributions documented are examined using a bibliometric approach (spatial, productive, and relational) based on data from 1618 records stored in the Web of Science (JCR and ESCI) between 1963 and May 2021, applying traditional bibliometric laws and using VOSviewer for the massive treatment of data and metadata. At the results level, there was an exponential increase in scientific production in the last six decades, with a concentration on only 15 specific journals; the insertion of new investigative peripheral and semiperipheral countries and organizations in worldwide relevance coauthorship networks, an evolution of almost 60 years in relevant thematic issues; and a co-occurring concentration in three large blocks: environmental sustainability of forestry, biological growth variables of coffee, and biotechnology of coffee species; topic blocks that, although in interaction, constitute three specific communities of knowledge production that have been delineated over time.

Citations driven by social connections? A multi-layer representation of coauthorship networks

To what extent is the citation rate of new papers influenced by the past social relations of their authors? To answer this question, we present a data-driven analysis of nine different physics journals. Our analysis is based on a two-layer network representation constructed from two large-scale data sets, INSPIREHEP and APS. The social layer contains authors as nodes and coauthorship relations as links. This allows us to quantify the social relations of each author, prior to the publication of a new paper. The publication layer contains papers as nodes and citations between papers as links. This layer allows us to quantify scientific attention as measured by the change of the citation rate over time. We particularly study how this change correlates with the social relations of their authors, prior to publication. We find that on average the maximum value of the citation rate is reached sooner for authors who have either published more papers or who have had more coauthors in previous papers. We also find that for these authors the decay in the citation rate is faster, meaning that their papers are forgotten sooner.

Transfer of knowledge through international scientific mobility: Introduction of a network-based bibliometric approach to study different knowledge types

Although international mobility is associated with various positive outcomes, the process of knowledge transfer resulting from working abroad has not yet been sufficiently investigated. The main reason why the relationship between international mobility and knowledge transfer is still underresearched is that there are not yet reliable methods to identify knowledge transfer. The current study aims to close this research gap by introducing a network-based approach that is capable of indicating knowledge flows. Assuming that coauthorship constitutes one instance through which knowledge transfer can take place, the approach relies on coauthorship networks. In the first approach to be presented, the transfer of published knowledge is operationalized as the use of rarely cited publications. In the second approach, the transfer of methodological know-how is operationalized as the occurrence of lexical terms in abstracts of publications. The study focuses on German scientists who were internationally mobile and acted as knowledge transmitters between the country of mobility and Germany. The results show that the network-based approach is well suited to identifying the sources of knowledge, knowledge transmitters, and the recipients of knowledge. Moreover, the findings suggest that knowledge transfer processes are field specific.