Sex and its relation to the academic impact on researchers in Latin America

Women are underrepresented in scientific production. Several studies show that women have less participation in the authorship of scientific articles. The objective of the present study was to determine if sex is associated with academic impact in researchers of Latin American countries. A comparison between the h-index and the number of citations was carried out. A bibliometric study was conducted with data from the Webometrics Ranking of World Universities page that periodically publishes rankings of researchers according to their profiles in Google Scholar. The first 150 positions from 12 Latin American countries were reviewed and the differences in academic impact according to sex were evaluated. Of a total 1 750 researchers, only 17.3% (303) were women. Of the 12 countries analyzed, the majority (8) did not present significant differences in academic impact by sex and only four presented these differences, although with a small effect size (r < 0.3). Less than one-fifth of the researchers considered in the sample were women; however, in most countries the academic impact of women was similar and in some cases greater than that of their male counterparts.