The specific shapes of gender imbalance in scientific authorships : a network approach

Gender di���erences in collaborative research have received little at- tention when compared with the growing importance that women hold in academia and research. Unsurprisingly, most of bibliomet- ric databases have a strong lack of directly available information by gender. Although empirical-based network approaches are often used in the study of research collaboration, the studies about the in���uence of gender dissimilarities on the resulting topological outcomes are still scarce. Here, networks of scienti���c subjects are used to characterize patterns that might be associated to ���ve categories of authorships which were built based on gender. We ���nd enough evidence that gen- der imbalance in scienti���c authorships brings a peculiar trait to the networks induced from papers published in Web of Science (WoS) in- dexed journals of Economics over the period 2010-2015 and having at least one author a���liated to a Portuguese institution. Our re- sults show the emergence of a speci���c pattern when the network of co-occurring subjects is induced from a set of papers exclusively au- thored by men. Such a male-exclusive authorship condition is found to be the solely responsible for the emergence that particular shape in the network structure. This peculiar trait might facilitate future network analyses of research collaboration and interdisciplinarity.