Google Scholar and Web of Science: Examining gender differences in citation coverage across five scientific disciplines

Abstract

Many studies demonstrate differences in the coverage of citing publications in Google Scholar (GS) and Web of Science (WoS). Here, we examine to what extent citation data from the two databases reflect the scholarly impact of women and men differently. Our conjecture is that WoS carries an indirect gender bias in its selection criteria for citation sources that GS avoids due to criteria that are more inclusive. Using a sample of 1, 250 U.S. researchers in Sociology, Political Science, Economics, Cardiology and Chemistry, we examine gender differences in the average citation coverage of the two databases. We

On the relationship between supervisor–supervisee gender difference and scientific impact of doctoral dissertations: Evidence from Humanities and Social Sciences in China

“…For example, in the field of astronomy, papers authored by women received 10.4 ± 0.9% fewer citations than papers written by men [41]. The other suggests that there exists negligible gender difference in citations [42][43][44]. For example, there remains a marginal gender difference in citation impact among scholars in the field of management [45].…”

Gender Gap in Natural Language Processing Research: Disparities in Authorship and Citations

“…1 It indicated that only 22% of the professionals in AI are women and that this low representation in a transformative field requires urgent action-otherwise, the AI gap has the potential to widen other gender gaps. Other studies have identified substantial gender gaps in science (Håkanson, 2005;Larivière et al, 2013;King et al, 2017;Andersen and Nielsen, 2018).…”

“…Most of these have found substantial gender disparities in favor of male researchers. They include work on journals of library and information science (Håkanson, 2005), on articles from the Web of Science (for Sociology, Political Science, Economics, Cardiology and Chemistry) (Ghiasi et al, 2016;Andersen and Nielsen, 2018), on articles from PubMed life science and biomedical research (Mishra et al, 2018), on articles from fifty disciplines published in JSTOR (King et al, 2017), and on publications from US research universities (Duch et al, 2012). There also exists some work that shows that in fields such as linguistics (LSA, 2017) and psychology (Willyard, 2011), the gender balance is either close to parity or tilted in favor of women.…”

Gender Gap in Natural Language Processing Research: Disparities in Authorship and Citations

“…4 Most studies on gender and authorship have found substantial gender disparities in favor of male researchers. They include work on ∼1700 articles from journals of library and information science (Håkanson, 2005), on ∼12 million articles from the Web of Science (for Sociology, Political Science, Economics, Cardiology and Chemistry) (Ghiasi et al, 2016;Andersen and Nielsen, 2018), on ∼2 million mathematics articles (Mihaljević-Brandt et al, 2016), on ∼1.6 million articles from PubMed life science and biomedical research (Mishra et al, 2018), on ∼1.5 million articles from fifty disciplines published in JSTOR (King et al, 2017), and on ∼0.5 million publications from US research universities (Duch et al, 2012). There also exists some work that shows that in fields such as linguistics (LSA, 2017) and psychology (Willyard, 2011), female and male participation is either close to parity or tilted in favor of women.…”

“…It indicated that only 22% of the professionals in AI are women and that this low representation in a transformative field requires urgent action-otherwise, the AI gap has the potential to widen other gender gaps. Other studies have identified substantial gender gaps in science (Håkanson, 2005;Larivière et al, 2013;King et al, 2017;Andersen and Nielsen, 2018). Perez (2019) discusses, through numerous examples, how there is a considerable lack of disaggregated data for women and how that is directly leading to negative outcomes in all spheres of their lives, including health, income, safety, and the degree to which they succeed in their endeavors.…”