Gender, names, and numbers: Recovering a national community of women scientists, 1975-2000

Abstract

Introduction. Databases of scientific publications are not only tools for researchers, but also become available sources for reconstructing scientific communities in the history of science and technology. A world of names of knowledgeable people in research and academia has been constructed from databases that rely on the association between authorship and authority. In this system of recognition, gender has been either absent or simply ignored, stabilizing male authority. Objective and methodology. With the aim of reconstructing a community of Spanish women microbiologists, we explore the presence of these women in the publication database Web of Science (WoS) and two specialised Spanish journals between 1975 and 2000. Results. A list of 33 women belonging to the scientific community of interest resulted from this endeavour. From this search process, we discuss the gender issues embodied in the sources available and analyse the related challenges and the methods and resources we employed. Our research highlights the concealed gender issues relating to the WoS, as well as the exclusion of many journals, particularly those published in languages other than English. We overcame these limitations by both utilising tools provided by the database and retrieving the scientific recognition given to women as authors in two Spanish journals. This experience of reconstructing collectives by focusing on women thus embodies a reflection on the sources used to identify women and the collectives in which they worked. A set of sources were identified, and the relationships developed between these sources enabled us to unveil the geopolitics of scientific authority through authorship and to reconstruct a gendered scientific community. Conclusions. This essay proposes a methodological approach in which limitations, such as the quantification of productivity and the association between authorship and authority, have been problematised yet sufficiently overcome to accomplish our objective. Instead of avoiding their use, a critical look at the construction of these sources has allowed us to recommend a useful methodology that challenges these limitations from within.