The authors wanted to verify a popular belief that women scholars have been disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. We studied the first names of authors of 266,409 articles from 2813 journals in 21 disciplines, and we found no significant differences between men and women in publication patterns between 2021, 2020, and 2019 overall. However, we found significant differences in publication patterns between gender in different disciplines. In addition, in disciplines where the proportion of women authors is higher, there are fewer single-authored articles. In the multi-author articles if the first author is female, there is more gender balance among authors, although there are still fewer women co-authors. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Journal of Information Science is the property of Sage Publications, Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)
COVID-19 effect on the gender gap in academic publishing