Gender differences in scientific productivity and visibility in core neurosurgery journals: Citations and social media metrics

Abstract

Social media has provided new opportunities for both female and male academics to disseminate their research results, and presence on the Internet is found to increase the visibility of scholars. Thus, this study examined whether there were differences in terms of scientific productivity or the visibility (both in terms of citations and social media metrics) of female and male scholars in the field of neurosurgery. To do this, 11,127 articles and reviews from 2012 to 2014 were extracted from the Thomson Reuters Web of Science database. This accounted for 14,944 unique authors. To study the visibility of neurosurgery scholars in terms of social media metrics, the following altmetric indicators were used: Mendeley readers, the post count of news, tweets, blogs, LinkedIn, and Facebook. The methodology and procedures employed included descriptive statistics, chi-square test, two-sample proportion test, and analysis of covariance. The results demonstrated that the number of female scholars was significantly lower compared to their male counterparts. Additionally, female neurosurgery scientists were found to be slightly less prolific in terms of scientific productivity. However, women were slightly more visible with regard to citations, readership, and tweets. Finally, both genders were similarly successful in terms of receivingmentions from blogs, news, Facebook, or LinkedIn.