Numerous studies have shown that female scientists tend to publish significantly fewer publications than do their male colleagues. In this study, we have analyzed whether similar differences also can be found in terms of citation rates. Based on a large-scale study of 8,500 Norwegian researchers and more than 37,000 publications covering all areas of knowledge, we conclude that the publications of female researchers are less cited than are those of men, although the differences are not large. The gender differences in citation rates can be attributed to differences in productivity. There is a cumulative advantage effect of increasing publication output on citation rates. Since the women in our study publish significantly fewer publications than do men, they benefit less from this effect. The study also provides results on how publication and citation rates vary according to scientific position, age, and discipline.

a b s t r a c tThis study investigates how scientific performance in terms of publication rate is influenced by the gender, age and academic position of the researchers. Previous studies have shown that these factors are important variables when analysing scientific productivity at the individual level. What is new with our approach is that we have been able to identify the relative importance of the different factors based on regression analyses (OLS) of each major academic field. The study, involving almost 12,400 Norwegian university researchers, shows that academic position is more important than age and gender. In the fields analysed, the regression model can explain 13.5-19 per cent of the variance in the publication output at the levels of individuals. This also means that most of the variance in publication rate is due to other factors.

While many studies have compared research productivity across scientific fields, they have mostly focused on the “hard sciences,” in many cases due to limited publication data for the “softer” disciplines; these studies have also typically been based on a small sample of researchers. In this study we use complete publication data for all researchers employed at Norwegian universities over a 4‐year period, linked to biographic data for each researcher. Using this detailed and complete data set, we compare research productivity between five main scientific domains (and subfields within them), across academic positions, and in terms of age and gender. The study's key finding is that researchers from medicine, natural sciences, and technology are most productive when whole counts of publications are used, while researchers from the humanities and social sciences are most productive when article counts are fractionalized according to the total number of authors. The strong differences between these fields in publishing forms and patterns of coauthorship raise questions as to whether publication indicators can justifiably be used for comparison of productivity across scientific disciplines.

This paper addresses gender differences in international research collaboration measured through international co-authorship. The study is based on a dataset consisting of 5600 Norwegian researchers and their publication output during a 3-year period (44,000 publications). Two different indicators are calculated. First, the share of researchers that have been involved in international collaboration as measured by co-authorship, and second, the share of their publications with international co-authorship. The study shows that the field of research is by far the most important factor influencing the propensity to collaborate internationally. There are large differences from humanities on the one hand, where international collaboration in terms of co-authorship is less common, to the natural sciences on the other, where such collaboration is very frequent. On an overall level, we find distinct gender differences in international research collaboration in Norway in the favour of men. However, men and women are not equally distributed across fields and there are relatively more female researchers in fields where the international collaboration rates generally are lower. When the data are analysed by scientific field, academic position, and publication productivity of the researchers, the gender differences in the propensity to collaborate with colleagues in other countries are minor only, and not statistically significant. Concerning gender inequality in science, the main challenge seems to be the lower productivity level of female researchers, which obviously hinders their academic career development. Differences in international collaboration are unlikely to be an important factor in this respect, at least not in the Norwegian research context analysed in this study.

The scientific performance of mobile and non-mobile researchers is analysed using publication and citation indicators in a study of more than 11,000 Norwegian university researchers. Two types of mobility are investigated: change of work place during the scientific career and mobility from an academic institution granting the highest degree to another work place for the scientific career. The study shows that mobile researchers tend to have slightly higher publication and citation rates than other researchers, but the results are not unambiguous.