The scientometrics of successful women in science

This paper examines the effects of gender differences in collaboration on research outcomes. We analyzed network characteristics of seventeen medical research institutions that are Clinical and Translational Science Awardees (CTSA) to determine if network connectivity characteristics have the potential to help mitigate the performance gap between the sexes. We determined betweenness centrality to identify well-connected researchers. Then we used clustering coefficient to determine how tightly connected their collaborators were with each other. We correlate these scores with productivity (number of total publications for each author), and h-index (the number of papers h for which an author has h citations). We also provide data on how network characteristics vary by role for each gender studied. Our results indicate that being well connected is more highly correlated with success for women than men for most of the institutions we studied. We believe these results can be leveraged to improve success rates for women in the future.