A new research report has suggested that male scientists have more expertise in framing research findings when compared to their female counterparts. It should be noted that this superiority of males often happens irrespective of the relevance or novelty of those findings.
Crucial significance in career progress
This new study report published in the Christmas issue of the BMJ suggests that positive framing of research is usually associated with higher rates of subsequent citations. Interestingly, citations are often used to gauge a researcher's influence, and it has a huge significance in determining the career of the person.
The research report revealed that women often earn lower salaries, few research grants, and receive fewer citations when compared to their male colleagues. As per the research report, women mostly remain underrepresented in academic medicine and the life sciences.
As per researchers, one crucial factor that may be the reason behind this gender gap is mainly due to the differences in the extent to which women promote their accomplishments of research when compared to men.
Writing in research articles
Comparing 100,000 clinical research articles and over six million general life science articles, researchers found that men often used the words 'unique', 'novel' and 'unprecedented' in their titles more when compared to women. Out of these analyzed research articles, 17 percent had women as the first and last author, while 83 percent involved a man as the first or last author.
"Clinical articles involving a male first or last author were more likely to present research findings positively in titles and abstracts compared with articles in which both the first and last authors were women, particularly in the highest impact journals. Positive presentation of research findings was associated with higher downstream citations," wrote the researchers in their study report.
Men and women age differently
A few weeks ago, another study conducted by a team of researchers had found that aging is not a continuous process that moves at the same speed throughout the lives of human beings, instead, the body used to shift gears three times during the life of an individual at the ages of 34,60, and 78.
The research that calculated the age of people using protein levels in their blood also suggested that men and women age differently.
