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Research Evaluation

received less funding than men and were at a slight disadvantage in terms
of scientific impact as measured by citations. Similar disadvantages with
respect to women scientists were observed among Spanish Ph.D holders
(Borrego et al., 2010). Yet these colleagues found one remarkable differ-
ence, namely that female Ph.D. holders were cited significantly more
often. Kretschmer et al. (2012) found that in a group of German medical
researchers male scientists were more prolific and received more citations
than female scientists. Removing, however, the top performers (male and
female) removed this difference. Yet, recently Larivie `re et al. (2013),
Zeng et al. (2016), and Wagner (2016) found that women are still under-
represented in terms of authorship, coauthorship, and being granted sci-
entific prizes.
Bias with respect to female students still exists as shown in (Moss-
Racusin et al., 2012). In a randomized double-blind study science faculty
rated the application materials of a student for a laboratory manager
position. This student was randomly assigned a male or female name. The
“female” student was less likely to be hired while “male” applicants were
offered a higher starting salary and better career mentoring.
Van den Besselaar and Sandstro ¨m (2016) followed a group of male and
female researchers over a period of 10 years. Differences in performance
were not present at the start of their career and after 10 years field nor-
malized citation impact indicators remained about equal for male and
female researchers. Yet, productivity of male researchers had grown faster
as did their careers. They concluded that the process of hiring academic
staff is still biased against women.
Finally, we note the hopeful contribution by Campbell et al. (2013)
who found that gender-heterogeneous teams produced journal articles
that were perceived to be of higher quality by peers than those written by
teams of the same gender. They concluded that promoting gender diver-
sity not only promotes fairness but may also lead to better science.
It is clear that research evaluation should be unbiased with respect to
women and all minority groups.

8.13.6 Age
It is generally accepted that genius and productivity decline with age.
It seems indeed to be the case that for the majority of Nobel laureates
the most significant scientific contribution in their career—usually the