More women than ever are starting careers in science

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But a study of the publications of millions of researchers also suggests that women are less likely to continue their academic careers than their male counterparts.

Women are more likely to start a research career now than they were 20 years ago, reveals a longitudinal study of the publishing records of millions of researchers around the world. But they are less likely to continue their academic careers than are their male contemporaries, and in general publish fewer papers.

Ludo Waltman, a quantitative scientist at Leiden University in the Netherlands, and his colleagues took a deep dive into the huge Scopus citation and abstract database, hosted by Elsevier. They looked at the publication careers of some six million researchers globally who had authored at least three papers between 1996 and 2018. The team posted its findings on the preprint server arXiv.org1.