Is There a Gender Gap in Social Media Metrics?

The gender gap in science has been the focus of many analyses which have, for the most part, documented lower research productivity and citation impact for papers authored by female researchers. Given the rise of scholarly use of social media to disseminate scientific production and the healthy proportion of women on these sites, further investigation of potential gender disparities in social media metrics are warranted. Comparing event counts from Twitter, blogs, and news with citations, this study examines whether publications with male and female authors differ regarding their visibility on the social web and whether gender disparities can be observed in terms of social media metrics. Findings demonstrate increased gender parity using social media metrics than when considering scientific impact as measured by citations. It is acknowledged that this could be the results of the different impact communities, as the scientific community constituting the citing audience is more maledominated than the social media environment. The implications for the use of social media metrics as measures of scientific quality are discussed. Conference Topic Altmetrics