Phys.org September 16, 2024
An international team of researchers (Poland, Germany, USA – University of Colorado) explored how members of the scientific community leave academic science and how attrition (defined as ceasing to publish) differs across genders, academic disciplines, and over time. They tracked individual male and female scientists over time and quantified the phenomenon, using publication metadata from Scopus, following the details of the publishing careers of scientists from 38 OECD countries who started publishing in 2000 and 2010. The study was restricted to 16 STEMM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine). They tracked the individual scholarly output of the two cohorts until 2022. They compared attrition of men and women scientists. With more women in science and more women within cohorts, attrition was becoming ever less gendered. In addition to the combined aggregated changes at the level of all STEMM disciplines, widely nuanced changes were found to occur at the discipline level and over time. Attrition in science means different things for men versus women depending on the discipline. Global bibliometric datasets were tested in the current study, opening new opportunities to explore gender and disciplinary differences in attrition… read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE
Dataflow: subsequent steps to define the 2000 (left) and 2010 (right) cohorts of scientists. Credit: Higher Education, 23 August 2024Â