Female scientists lag in producing papers.

• Position: Your Life

Whether from the trickle-down effects of having fewer female elders in science or the increased opportunities for male researchers to participate in international collaborations, barriers to women in science remain widespread worldwide, according to research led by professors at Indiana University's School of Informatics and Computing, Bloomington.

The cross-disciplinary quantitative analysis of academic publication patterns relating gender and research output found that female authors are represented at a 30% to 70% authorship rate with males, and that for every female first author on a scientific paper there are nearly two (1.93) male first authors.

Led by professors Cassidy Sugimoto and Blaise Cronin, the team analyzed nearly 5,500,000 research papers and over 27,300,000 authorships, assigned gender using U.S. Social Security databases and other international records, and then aggregated the data by country, discipline, and U.S. state.

Generally, the work found that female authorship is more prevalent in countries with lower scientific output, that women's publication portfolios are more domestic than their male colleagues, and that articles with women in dominant author positions --either first or last author--receive fewer citations than men in the same positions.

'Women profited less from the extra citations that international collaborations accrue," Sugimoto says, "and since citations play a central part in evaluating researchers, this situation can only...