Peculiarities of gender disambiguation and ordering of non-English authors' names for Economic papers beyond core databases
O. Mryglod, S. Nazarovets, S. Kozmenko
TL;DR
This study extends a prior Crossref-based portrait of Ukrainian Economics by focusing on gender and author-ordering at the author level, using semi-automatic name disambiguation to cope with transliteration and Cyrillic-Latin variations. It leverages Crossref and OUCI data (2002–2020) to build a dataset of Ukrainian economics publications, applying gender inference from given names and surname endings to label authors, and examining first-author positioning and alphabetical ordering. Key findings include a higher proportion of female authors at the individual level, substantial cross-gender collaboration, and a surprisingly low level of alphabetization—especially in journals indexed by Scopus or Web of Science—raising questions about credit signaling and career incentives in Ukrainian Economics. The work highlights both the value of using Crossref/Open Ukrainian Citation Index for SSH research in non-English contexts and the critical metadata gaps that hinder full author disambiguation, underscoring the need for unique identifiers and improved transliteration metadata.
Abstract
This paper presents the results of further exploration of Crossref data related to Ukrainian Economics research (the first part can be found in [Mryglod, O., Nazarovets, S. & Kozmenko, S. (2021) Scientometrics, 126, 8187]). Our purpose is to supplement the quantitative portrait of Ukrainian Economics discipline with the results of gender and author ordering analysis at the level of individual authors, special methods of working with bibliographic data with a predominant share of non-English authors are used. The properties of gender mixing, the likelihood of male and female authors occupying the first position in the authorship list, as well as the arrangements of names are studied. A data set containing bibliographic records related to Ukrainian journal publications in the field of Economics is constructed using Crossref metadata. The described stages for working with such specific data help to work at the level of authors and analyse, in particular, gender issues. Despite the larger number of female authors, gender equality is more likely to be reported at the individual level for the discipline of Ukrainian Economics. The tendencies towards collaborative or solo-publications and gender mixing patterns are found to be dependent on the journal: the differences for publications indexed in Scopus and/or Web of Science databases are found. It has also been found that Ukrainian Economics research is characterized by rather a non-alphabetical order of authors. To our knowledge, this is the first large-scale quantitative study of Ukrainian Economic discipline. The results obtained are valuable not only at the national level, but also contribute to general knowledge about Economic research, gender issues and authors' names ordering. Here, for the first time, attention is drawn to the explicit use of the features of the Slavic authors' names.