Female engineers publish in better journals but get fewer citations

Gita Ghiasi and her team at Concordia University, Canada, used data drawn from Web of Science, a huge database of academic publications. Filtering for engineering journals from 2008 to 2013, the team gathered 679,338 articles with one million co-authors, assigning gender using a separate database of male and female first names. The journals selected from this database were then ranked by prestige, using Web of Science's 'Impact Factor'.

The research garnered good news and bad news... and some more bad news. Women made up only 20 percent of the authors on the papers -- significantly less than the 30 percent rate across all scientific disciplines. It also found, however, that these women were publishing in more prestigious journals on average than their male counterparts -- a 2 percent increase in Impact Factor. Despite this, however, women's papers were cited 3 percent less frequently.