Gender differences in research performance and in academic careers

We take up the issue of performance differences between male and female researchers, and investigate the change of performance differences during the early career. In a previous paper it was shown that among starting researchers gendered performance differences seem small to non-existent (Van Arensbergen et al. 2012). If the differences do not occur in the early career anymore, they may emerge in a later period, or may remain absent. In this paper we use the same sample of male and female researchers, but now compare performance levels about 10 years later. We use various performance indicators: full/fractional counted productivity, citation impact, and relative citation impact in terms of the share of papers in the top 10 % highly cited papers. After the 10 years period, productivity of male researchers has grown faster than of female researcher, but the field normalized (relative) citation impact indicators of male and female researchers remain about equal. Furthermore, performance data do explain to a certain extent why male careers in our sample develop much faster than female researchers’ careers; but controlling for performance differences, we find that gender is an important determinant too. Consequently, the process of hiring academic staff still remains biased

Studying the effects of virtual biodiversity research infrastructures

Abstract. The research environment of scholars is increasingly web-based. This makes it urgent to study the effects of moving to the Web on research practices, scholarly output and innovation. We propose a theoretical framework and a methodology to study these effects. In a pilot study, we apply theory and method on an online community in biodiversity research, to demonstrate the feasibility of the approach. We also indicate the practical relevance of this kind of analysis for improving the quality of virtual research environments. In the last section, directions for further research are suggested

A comparative analysis of the publication behaviour of MSCA fellows

MSCA applicants from South and Eastern European countries underperform researchers from North Western Europe before receiving the grant. However, the median difference disappears by the time of the grant and in the period after this. Due to a higher number of outliers (top performers) among the researchers from North Western Europe, the mean impact scores do remain significantly higher