Gender Disparity Among Indian Library and Information Science Professionals: a 20-year sample of publications from 1999-2018

Gender disparity is present in many research fields including in Library and Information Science (LIS). This paper studied gender disparity among Indian LIS professionals and measure the intellectual output 20 years. The study reviewed 1,195 publications in the LIS field from 1999 to 2018, determining the gender of the first author. An analysis of the publication list determined the yearly contributions of male and female authors, together with the average distributions, yearly citation rates and other metrics, by gender. Across the whole study period, publications first-authored by men outnumbered those by women. Similarly, overall contributions by men were higher than by women. BM Gupta and M Tripathi were the most prolific male and female authors, respectively. India was the most common keyword used by both first author genders. “Bibliometrics”, “Digital Library”, “Scientometrics”, “Academic Libraries”, “E-resources” and “web 2.0” were the core research areas of both men and women. When journals were divided into national and international scope, articles by men outnumbered those by women on both levels. However, 65% of the articles published by women were in international journals, compared to 58% of the articles published by men (59% overall), suggesting that the quality of work produced by women was comparable to or higher than the quality of work published by men. Consequently, gender parity in Indian LIS publications may be some way off. As such, further research is required to highlight and mitigate the issues experienced by women in academia in order to increase productivity in the LIS field in India