Gender and research publishing analyzed through the lenses of discipline, institution types, impact and international collaboration: a case study from India

Abstract

Higher participation of women in higher education and research is a very important development goal in many countries across the world, with several countries creating special initiatives and schemes to increase participation of women in higher education and research. This article looks at a case study from India and aims to characterize the participation of women in research, by analysing the parameters of institution-type, discipline, citation impact and international collaboration. Research publication data from 50 most productive Indian institutions, along with data for 5 major institution systems, for a period of 10 years (2008–2017), as indexed in Web of Science, is obtained as sample data and analysed. Results obtained show that participation of women is found to vary in different disciplines, with biology (37%), agriculture science (32%), social science (31%) and medical science (32%) having relatively higher number of female 1st authored papers as compared to engineering (20%), information science (21%) and mathematics (22%). It is also observed that institutions specializing in medical sciences and social science have relatively better participation of women. In terms of location of institution in a big metropolitan city or an urban area, it was found that there do not exist any significant differentiation in levels of participation of women in research between institutions located in bigger cities or smaller towns. Further, analysis of citation and collaboration patterns show that though male authored papers have an edge in citation impact, women researchers get more internationally collaborated papers.