COVID-19 effect on the gender gap in academic publishing

The authors wanted to verify a popular belief that women scholars have been disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. We studied the first names of authors of 266,409 articles from 2813 journals in 21 disciplines, and we found no significant differences between men and women in publication patterns between 2021, 2020, and 2019 overall. However, we found significant differences in publication patterns between gender in different disciplines. In addition, in disciplines where the proportion of women authors is higher, there are fewer single-authored articles. In the multi-author articles if the first author is female, there is more gender balance among authors, although there are still fewer women co-authors.