Patterns of Gender-Based Research Performance: The case of the University of Aveiro.

Gender differences in research performance are widely acknowledged in the literature, with several studies revealing that men have higher productivity rates in terms of outputs than women. However, concerning citations per publication, gender differences are not so evident and there are even some studies showing that women have higher citation scores than men. In Portugal, women are still underrepresented in the researchers' population, but their presence has been steadily increasing in the last years. The country has now a proportion of female researchers above the EU-28 average and, in the higher education sector, the proportion of women working as researchers is particularly high in comparison to other countries (European Commission, 2019). This paper intends to be a first step in the characterization of gender differences in Portuguese research performance taking the University of Aveiro (UAVR) as a case study. Based on a data set exported from SciVal the productivity and impact indicators of the UAVR Top 500 authors (from 2017 to 2019) were analyzed according to their sex. The publications' FORD area was considered in this analysis since it is well known that research patterns tend to be substantially different by scientific area. The results indicate that there is still, to some extent, a performance gap between men and women at UAVR, particularly when indicators consider the number of outputs (Scholarly Output and h-index). When indicators are a proxy for the quality of outputs (Citations, Citations per publication and Field/Weighted Citation Impact) this performance gap is not present with gender differences being less evidenced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]