Indicadores de gênero no periódico Scientometrics (1981-2017)
Abstract
Introduction – The scientific evaluation by indicators demands a reflection in addition
to the quantitative data. Gender in science plays complex roles, gender indicators should
include in their analysis the context of social, economic, and political interests that are
intrinsic to the science structure. An analysis that shows a more comprehensive scenario
should use references that relate the genders within its social structure. Therefore, the
research question about this project asks how are the bibliometric and scientometric
indicators of gender characterized in the journal Scientometrics? The aim was to
conceptualize and describe the bibliometric and scientometric indicators that can
express the gender issue in science articles published in the journal Scientometrics.
Methodology – Scientific research has been shaped by descriptive bibliometrics, which
comprises statistical techniques for extracting and indicators counting. The data source
used was the academic journal Scientometrics. The search carried out through the
subjects (keywords) without temporal delimitation. Thus, the corpus was composed of
177 articles covering the period from 1981 through the early part of 2017. The
indicators used were the quantity and gender of the authors, the amount of references
used, as well as the title, country, area, type of study, and keyword. Results – The data
analysis was initially evaluated in three time-frames periods such as 1981–2000 (n=15),
2001–2008 (n=23) and 2009–2017 (n =139). The males amounted to 260 authors, on the
other hand, the females added up to a total of 113 authors. The type of authorship was
mostly co-authorship with 142 articles out of 177 totals. There were only 35 articles
characterized as individual authorship. Regarding the cited references, about 22%
(n=1712) contained reference related to gender and 78% (n=5992) contained references
without gender issue. The countries with more applied research were the United States
and Germany. The most frequent field of studies found was Mathematical sciences and
Humanities. The majority of data were empirical research and the data sources most
used by the articles were the multidisciplinary databases. Web of Science and Scopus
stood out from all the rest. Conclusion – Even observing the first decades (1980, 1990
and 2000), coauthors were superior to individual articles. In addition, more than 90% of
female authorships were in collaboration. The gender researches were more active in
this current century, whereas they were the main issues to be searched. A good part of
the main research on gender was due to the participation in women. The clear majority
of men who dedicated to the study of gender had this variable incorporated into their
research, but it was not the focus on the study.