Biographical articles in scientific literature: analysis of articles indexed in Web of Science

Biographical articles in scientific journals offer a platform for the commemoration of distinguished individuals from the world of science. Despite so important a role for the scientific community, research on biographical articles is scarce. To fill this gap, we have analyzed 190,350 biographical articles indexed in Web of Science, written by 251,908 authors in 1945–2014. We have analyzed the development of this article type over the studied period and research areas, how women and men are represented in the subject of articles, and who the authors are. Over the time the number of biographical articles has been increasing, with the highest number in Life Sciences and Biomedicine. Around 20% of the articles were written about women, with the highest share of 24% in Arts and Humanities. Both male and female authors write more often about men than about women, a stable situation for the last 70 years.