Are Information Science female researchers more interdisciplinary than their male colleagues? An analysis of Spanish faculty

The scientific activity of women differs in several ways from men’s, and several studies have found differences in terms of production and impact. The present work compares the research activity of 349 LIS professors with a Spanish affiliation by studying their Scopus publications. The sample is analyzed from an interdisciplinary perspective in terms of variety, balance and disparity. Disparity was measured through methods of NLP and IR. Despite not finding important differences in the three dimensions for male and female professors, the data obtained point to the possible inadequacy of citation indexes with respect to the spectrum of academic activities carried out by women in all its variety, as well as the need to compare the production of men and women based on the thematic analysis of the contents produced.