The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in school closures and distancing requirements that have disrupted both work and family life for many. Concerns exist that these disruptions caused by the pandemic may not have influenced men and women researchers equally. Many medical journals have published papers on the pandemic, which were generated by researchers facing the challenges of these disruptions. Here we report the results of an analysis that compared the gender distribution of authors on 1893 medical papers related to the pandemic with that on papers published in the same journals in 2019, for papers with first authors and last authors from the United States. Using mixed-effects regression models, we estimated that the proportion of COVID-19 papers with a woman first author was 19% lower than that for papers published in the same journals in 2019, while our comparisons for last authors and overall proportion of women authors per paper were inconclusive. A closer examination suggested that women’s representation as first authors of COVID-19 research was particularly low for papers published in March and April 2020. Our findings are consistent with the idea that the research productivity of women, especially early-career women, has been affected more than the research productivity of men.

Sex and gender differences impact the incidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 mortality. Furthermore, sex differences influence the frequency and severity of pharmacological side effects. A large number of clinical trials to develop new therapeutic approaches and vaccines for COVID-19 are ongoing. We investigated the inclusion of sex and/or gender in COVID-19 studies on ClinicalTrials.gov, collecting data for the period January 1, 2020 to January 26, 2021. Here, we show that of the 4,420 registered SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 studies, 935 (21.2%) address sex/gender solely in the context of recruitment, 237 (5.4%) plan sex-matched or representative samples or emphasized sex/gender reporting, and only 178 (4%) explicitly report a plan to include sex/gender as an analytical variable. Just eight (17.8%) of the 45 COVID-19 related clinical trials published in scientific journals until December 15, 2020 report sex-disaggregated results or subgroup analyses.

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Citations are important building blocks for status and success in science. We used a linked dataset of more than 4 million authors and 26 million scientific papers to quantify trends in cumulative citation inequality and concentration at the author level. Our analysis, which spans 15 y and 118 scientific disciplines, suggests that a small stratum of elite scientists accrues increasing citation shares and that citation inequality is on the rise across the natural sciences, medical sciences, and agricultural sciences. The rise in citation concentration has coincided with a general inclination toward more collaboration. While increasing collaboration and full-count publication rates go hand in hand for the top 1% most cited, ordinary scientists are engaging in more and larger collaborations over time, but publishing slightly less. Moreover, fractionalized publication rates are generally on the decline, but the top 1% most cited have seen larger increases in coauthored papers and smaller relative decreases in fractional-count publication rates than scientists in the lower percentiles of the citation distribution. Taken together, these trends have enabled the top 1% to extend its share of fractional- and full-count publications and citations. Further analysis shows that top-cited scientists increasingly reside in high-ranking universities in western Europe and Australasia, while the United States has seen a slight decline in elite concentration. Our findings align with recent evidence suggesting intensified international competition and widening author-level disparities in science.

Gender and sex analysis is increasingly recognized as a key factor in creating better medical research and healthcare. Using a sample of more than 1.5 million medical research papers, our study examined the potential link between women’s participation in medical science and attention to gender- and sex-related factors in disease-specific research. Adjusting for variations across countries, disease topics and medical research areas, we compared the participation of women authors in studies that do and do not involve gender and sex analysis. Overall, our results show a robust positive correlation between women’s authorship and a study’s likelihood of engaging gender and sex analysis. These findings corroborate discussions of how women’s participation in medical science links to research outcomes, and illustrate the mutual benefits of promoting both women’s scientific advancement and the integration of gender and sex analysis into medical research.

A number of studies suggest that scientific papers with women in leading-author positions attract fewer citations than those with men in leading-author positions. We report the results of a matched case-control study of 1,269,542 papers in selected areas of medicine published between 2008 and 2014. We find that papers with female authors are, on average, cited between 6.5 and 12.6% less than papers with male authors. However, the standardized mean differences are very small, and the percentage overlaps between the distributions for male and female authors are extensive. Adjusting for self-citations, number of authors, international collaboration and journal prestige, we find near-identical per-paper citation impact for women and men in first and last author positions, with self-citations and journal prestige accounting for most of the small average differences. Our study demonstrates the importance of focusing greater attention on within-group variability and between-group overlap of distributions when interpreting and reporting results of gender-based comparisons of citation impact.

This paper studies the production of dissertations in eight research fields in the natural sciences, the social sciences and the humanities. In using doctoral dissertations it builds on De Solla Prices seminal study which used PhD dissertations as one of several indicators of scientific growth (Price, Little science, big science, 1963). Data from the ProQuest: Dissertations and Theses database covering the years 1950-2007 are used to depict historical trends, and the Gompertz function was used for analysing the data. A decline in the growth of dissertations can be seen in all fields in the mid-eighties and several fields show only a modest growth during the entire period. The growth profiles of specific disciplines could not be explained by traditional dichotomies such as pure/applied or soft/hard, but rather it seems that the age of the discipline appears to be an important factor. Thus, it is obvious that the growth of dissertations must be explained using several factors emerging both inside and outside academia. Consequently, we propose that the output of dissertations can be used as an indicator of growth, especially in fields like the humanities, where journal or article counts are less applicable.

Publishing is part and parcel of a successful academic career, and Covid-19 has amplified gender disparities in manuscript submissions and authorships. We used longitudinal publication data on 431,207 scientists in biology, chemistry, and clinical and basic medicine to quantify the differential impact of Covid-19 on women's and men's annual publishing rates. In a difference-in-differences analysis, we estimated that the average gender difference in publication productivity increased from -0.26 in 2019 (corresponding to a 17% lower output for women than men) to -0.35 in 2020 (corresponding to a 24% lower output for women than men). An age-group comparison showed a widening gender gap for both early career and mid-career scientists. The increasing gender gap was most pronounced among highly productive authors and scientists in clinical medicine and biology. Our study demonstrates the importance of reinforcing institutional commitments to diversity through policies that support the inclusion and retention of women researchers.