Gender shapes the relationship between productivity and journal prestige in science

Why this study matters

For anyone who cares about fair chances in science, a key question is whether men and women must make different trade-offs to succeed. This study looks beyond simple counts of papers or prizes and asks a deeper question: how do male and female scientists balance how much they publish against where they publish, and how does that play out over their entire careers?

Looking at careers through a new lens

The researchers examined the full publication histories of just over six thousand of Brazil’s most highly recognized scientists. Rather than only tallying lifetime papers or citations, they tracked each scientist year by year, recording both how many papers they published and the average prestige of the journals where those papers appeared. Because different fields and time periods have very different publishing habits, the team used a standardization method that compares each person to peers in the same discipline and year. This allowed them to place every career year onto a common "map" with one axis for productivity and another for journal prestige.

Different paths for men and women

When the authors plotted all these career years on their map, clear gendered patterns emerged. Male scientists were far more likely to follow productivity-driven paths: they appeared more often in regions where output is well above the disciplinary average, and they dominated the rare "hyperprolific" zone of extremely high publication rates. Female scientists, though fewer in number in this elite group, were more likely to occupy regions where journal prestige was above expectation even when productivity was modest. In other words, women tended to publish fewer papers but in relatively more selective venues. Despite men’s higher productivity in nearly every region of the map, there were few consistent gaps in average journal prestige, and in some areas women’s prestige slightly exceeded that of men.

How careers change over time

The study also followed how these patterns evolve as scientists age. Early in their careers, both men and women cluster in lower-productivity zones. As time passes, men shift more strongly into high-productivity regions and into hyperprolific zones, while women remain more evenly spread, including in regions that favor journal prestige over volume. Men show greater stability from year to year, tending to stay in the same part of the productivity–prestige map and rarely changing both dimensions at once. Women, in contrast, change their profiles more often. Among the small group of outliers with exceptional careers, male scientists again publish substantially more, but female outliers often achieve higher average journal prestige, especially at later career stages, following a distinctive "U-shaped" pattern in impact over time.

Digging into individual patterns

To understand these dynamics at the level of individuals, the authors used Bayesian hierarchical models, a statistical approach that estimates both personal career effects and broader population trends. For non-outlier researchers, they found that increasing productivity and advancing career age are both associated with lower average journal prestige, for men and women alike. This suggests that constantly producing more papers, or simply getting older in one’s career, does not automatically lead to publishing in more prestigious venues. The negative effects are slightly stronger for women on average, and the size and even direction of gender differences vary from field to field, underscoring that there is no single, universal gender pattern across disciplines.

What this means for scientific fairness

Taken together, the findings show that male and female scientists in Brazil’s research elite traverse the landscape of productivity and prestige in systematically different ways. Men are overrepresented among high-volume publishers, while women more often take paths that favor the selectivity of journals over sheer paper counts. Yet these contrasting strategies yield broadly similar levels of journal prestige, especially for the most exceptional careers. The authors argue that evaluation systems that heavily reward volume risk sidelining impact-oriented or non-linear career paths, which women are more likely to follow. Rethinking how we judge scientific success—placing less emphasis on quantity alone and more on the quality and diversity of trajectories—could foster a fairer and more innovative research ecosystem.

Citation: Ribeiro, V.H., Sunahara, A.S., Shahtahmassebi, G. et al. Gender shapes the relationship between productivity and journal prestige in science. Sci Rep 16, 10854 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-45844-z

Keywords: gender disparities, research productivity, journal prestige, science careers, research evaluation