Impact as equalizer: the demise of gender-related differences in anti-doping research

Abstract

In general, the presence and performance of women in science have increased significantly in recent decades. However, gender-related differences persist and remain a global phenomenon. Women make a greater contribution to multidisciplinary research, which renders anti-doping research a compelling area for investigating the gendered aspects of academic research. The research design was based on the overall research aim to investigate whether gender in a specific field (ADS) has an effect on different aspects of research impact, including (1) the size of citation impact obtained by the research output, (2) the impact on the development of the knowledge base of ADS, expressed as the capacity of integrating knowledge from different research areas, and (3) the (expected) type of research impact targeting either societal or scientific developments (or both). We used a previously compiled dataset of 1341 scientific outputs. Using regression analysis, we explored the role of authors’ gender in citations and the effect of authorship features on scientific impact. We employed network analysis and developed a novel indicator (LinkScore) to quantify gendered authors’ knowledge integration capacity. We carried out a content analysis on a subsample of 210 outputs to explore gender differences in research goal orientation as related to gender patterns. Women’s representation has been considerably extended in the domain of ADS throughout the last two decades. On average, outputs with female corresponding authors yield a higher average citation score. Regarding women's knowledge integration roles, we can infer that no substantial gender differences can be detected. Dominantly female papers were overrepresented among publications classified as aimed at scientific progress, while the share of male-authored papers was higher in publications classified as aimed at societal progress. Although no significant gender difference was observed in knowledge integration roles, in anti-doping women appear to be more interdisciplinary than men.