Can Altmetric help create a level playing field for women in STEM?
Can Altmetric solutions provide a clearer picture of how a researcher’s gender might influence their recognition, achievements, and impact within STEM fields? Can Altmetric be one of the means to address current gender disparities within STEM research?
On 22 December 2015, the UN General Assembly established February 11th as the “International Day for Women and Girls in Science” to address the fact that women and girls are underrepresented in the STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics) fields. The 2024 theme to mark the day focuses on implementing measures to close the gender gap in science. Encouraging women and girls to pursue STEM fields is essential, but equally critical is addressing the bias experienced by women researchers within these fields. Studies reveal that despite having established careers in science, women encounter obstacles such as pay disparities, missed funding opportunities, and unconscious gender bias in evaluation metrics, which hinder their progress.
Today, along with traditional evaluation metrics (publishing in journals with a high impact factor and citation counts), there exist tools like altmetrics (short for alternative metrics) to quantify the amount of interest a paper garners on digital platforms such as online news and social media. But could altmetrics be used to inform if a researcher’s gender plays any role in garnering recognition, success and impact in STEM fields? And perhaps more importantly, can it be leveraged to address existing gender disparities in the world of STEM research?
Unmasking gender disparities
Altmetric Attention Score (AAS) has been designed to offer a quick and simple way to identify how much and what type of attention a research output has received. In a 2023 study published in Nature titled “Gender disparities in altmetric attention scores for cardiovascular research,” researchers investigated more than 6000 articles in the top five cardiology and cardiovascular field journals (2015–2021) with corresponding article-level AAS. The results revealed that papers with women first and last authors received significantly less attention and that the lower attention scores in turn affected the future citations (Fig. 1).
In addition, the results showed that women authors receive up to 20% fewer citations than men for articles that receive the same amount of attention. Underlining the importance of attention across the board trickling down to the traditional metrics, the authors write, “Attention to research articles is a theoretical antecedent to citations since scholars can only cite articles they are aware of. Attention to research may thus serve as an early indicator of citation potential.”
Qualifying and quantifying the disparity
While the above-mentioned study focussed on cardiology, a subfield of life science research where women are particularly challenged in their career advancement, another 2023 study “Does society show differential attention to researchers based on gender and field?” looked at 22 research disciplines to understand if gender differences exist across disciplines when it comes to social attention. The authors examined the most mentioned researchers in Spain in the 22 disciplines, as recorded in Altmetric between 2016 and 2020. Their study found that differences in attention exist and they vary not only across disciplines but also across what they define as dimensions (media influence (mentions in mainstream news), political influence (mentions in public policy reports), social media influence (mentions in Twitter), and educational influence (mentions in Wikipedia)). Among other points, the authors concluded that interpreting altmetrics within the context of each field and alongside traditional metrics is crucial for gaining a comprehensive understanding of research attention and impact across diverse disciplines especially when it comes to gaining a clearer understanding of gender disparities.
Democratizing academic evaluation
The above-mentioned studies show that Altmetric can be used to gain a better understanding of gender biases , but can tools like Altmetric support in levelling the playing field for women in STEM? Yes, according to a study published in the journal Scientometrics, where the authors, Fortin et al., analyzed the Altmetric Attention Score of more than 200,000 articles published in seven major journals, including Nature, PNAS, PLOS One, and New England Journal of Medicine, Cell. “Our findings qualify Altmetric, for many types and disciplines of journals, as a potentially unbiased measure of science communication in academia and suggest that new technologies, such as those on which Altmetric is based, might help to democratize academic evaluation,” they write.
However, this is not to say that women researchers do not face disparities in gaining attention online. In fact, some studies have found that women find the same barriers in the online world, which altmetrics draws from, as they do in the traditional offline world which informs traditional evaluation metrics. But altmetrics allows a clearer picture of where and how the disparities arise. For example, in the above-mentioned study “Does society show differential attention to researchers …,” the authors were able to identify that the most egalitarian dimensions are the mainstream news and policy while Twitter and Wikipedia mentions show gender differences in 9 of the 22 fields, with men consistently receiving more mentions than women. This type of granular information could be a step in first identifying and then mitigating the factors that result in gender bias in altmetric attention and possibly be applied to traditional metrics to make evaluation more equitable across the board.
Looking ahead
Tools like Altmetric have the potential to play a crucial role in uncovering gender bias by providing transparent and thorough data regarding the dissemination and attention garnered by research. Through the analysis of Altmetric data, one can scrutinize patterns of attention and engagement with scholarly works. Research, exemplified by those referenced here, illustrates how Altmetric solutions can pinpoint potential disparities in recognition and visibility. Thus, Altmetric solutions could provide insights to mitigate gender disparity in STEM fields through targeted interventions. Stakeholders can utilize this information to devise strategies for promoting greater equity in research dissemination and recognition. Importantly, studies utilizing Altmetric data can raise awareness about gender bias in scholarly communication, and Altmetrics itself can be an integral component of evaluation criteria that is more inclusive and equitable.
Talk to us for access to Altmetric data or speak to our support team to learn more about how to explore the data.
Further reading