Abstract

Seeking to understand how today's scholars may, indeed should go about building, maintaining and showcasing their professional reputation, the literature review presented here explores the reputational opportunities available to them in the increasingly open-values based, digital and networked environment of Science 2.0. Using a conceptual framework developed with the help of the European Commission and specifically designed for conducting analytical reviews and audits of the reputational value of scholarly activities, this study, examines in some detail the practices –more than 30 of them- that comprise the present-day scientific undertaking from a reputation-accruing angle.

Abstract

Gender disparities persist in UK research, with female minorities in most science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects but female majorities in others. The nature of the gender disparity differences between subjects needs to be understood if effective remedial actions are to be targeted at STEM subjects suffering from a lack of women, in contrast to other subjects without shortages. Evidence from the USA suggests that women engage more in people-related subjects, qualitative methods, veterinary science and cell biology and men engage more in thing-related subjects, power/control fields, patient-related research, abstraction and quantitative methods, except surveys. This article investigates gender disparity differences in UK first authorship for journal articles in nearly all of science split into 26 broad and 308 narrow Scopus fields. The results largely replicate the USA but suggest that more life science topics may be female-associated in the UK and patient-related research might not be male-associated. UK STEM gender parity initiatives might therefore emphasise people-oriented, and perhaps socially positive, aspects of currently masculine STEM topics and approaches (e.g., abstraction, mathematical quantitative methods), and promote female-friendly topics, methods and goals within male-dominated fields in addition to tacking implicit and explicit sexism and providing a supportive working environment.