Is the scientific impact of the LIS themes gender-biased? A bibliometric analysis of the evolution, scientific impact, and relative contribution by gender from 2007 to 2022

Abstract

Gender equity remains a challenge both globally and within academia, despite recent efforts to change it. Moreover, beyond the authors’ productivity, studies have reported that women often achieve lower scientific impact than their peers. To shed light on this complex relationship between the scientific impact and the themes addressed, this study conducts a comprehensive analysis of Library and Information Science field from 2007 to 2022 in four consecutive slides, identifying the principal themes covered in the field, analyzing the relative gender contribution rate, employing strategic diagrams, and assessing impact metrics, such as mean normalized citation score, 1% of most cited papers, and H-Classic. We employed science mapping analysis to explore a core of 45,650 documents from the Web of Science, with gender identification in 94.25% of cases. Our findings revealed a slight increase in the percentage of women authors within the field across the time, and a decline during the COVID-19 pandemic, demonstrating consistency in the themes addressed over the years. Women were overrepresented in the classic themes of LIS, human, and health-related fields, with these themes displaying lower performance rates. In contrast, men authors were overrepresented in STEM-related fields and innovation themes, associated with higher metric values. Our findings underlined the potential association between research themes and scientific performance, and provide societal and structural explanations for these observations. This study contributes valuable insights into the relationship between research themes and the scientific impact achieved by researchers in LIS, highlighting the importance of encouraging women’s participation in diverse knowledge domains and challenging prevailing stereotypes within academic and professional spheres.