The Impact of Gender and Collaboration Patterns on Research Performance of the Scientists in GCC Countries

Abstract

The aim of this research is to study gender disparity, scientific performance and collaboration behavior of the researchers in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. Furthermore, the impact of various collaboration patterns on the scientific output of the researchers was estimated. The data used for the study comes from the SCOPUS database. The main analysis involves the full records on 27,690 journal articles co-authored by at least one researcher affiliated to an institution in GCC country. Automated program was used to determine the gender of the researchers. For the descriptive part of the thesis bibliometric analysis and social network analysis were employed. Regression models were estimated to assess the impact of gender-related and collaboration-related variables on the quantity and quality of the scientific output of individual researchers. We observe that in GCC countries not only are the male authors on average more productive than female authors, but also the average citation counts are higher for male authors. Moreover, the gap between male and female authors is slowly increasing with time. These differences are more remarkable in Qatar or Saudi Arabia and more negligible in Bahrain. We also evaluated the tendency of each researcher towards the collaboration with the same or opposite gender. The highest propensity to collaborate with the same-sex researchers was observed in Saudi Arabia and UAE, whereas the females with the greatest interest in mixed-gender research teams were found in Bahrain and Kuwait. We also found that the researchers who prefer working within same-gender teams tend to produce more articles, but it is the researchers whose preferences lie in mixed-gender teams who will receive higher number of citations for their articles. Our results also show that the position of researchers in the collaboration networks plays an important role in the scientific production. Especially we confirm a positive impact of central positions and a negative effect of the positions within tightly clustered network communities on the quantity and quality of papers published.

Date of Award	May 2017
Original language	American English
Supervisor	Andrea Schiffauerova (Supervisor)