How COVID-19 Affected the Researchers' Fraternity

The COVID-19 pandemic has had both beneficial and detrimental effects on astronomy research. While overall research output has grown, fewer fresh or junior researchers are joining the field. A recent study published in Nature Astronomy also revealed that no one nation's female astronomers produced more work than their male counterparts on average. Jia Liu, an associate professor on the project, moved to Tokyo in 2021 to work at the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU) amid a pandemic.

”As a new mother and an early career scientist, my life has been heavily affected by the pandemic- lost childcare, dropped productivity, disconnection from my colleagues, and a tough job market. While rebuilding my research and life routines, I couldn’t stop wondering: how are others in my field affected by the pandemic? Am I alone," said Liu.

After failing to locate the answers in the few papers that were then accessible, the researchers decided to conduct their research in cooperation with the University of California, Berkeley Postdoctoral Fellow Vanessa Böhm.

Computational cosmologists downloaded more than 1.2 million records of astronomical publications since 1950 using their data mining skills. They intended to examine publication trends by gender and nation, but such data must remain private. The researchers determined each author's gender likelihood based on their given name and assigned a nation based on the affiliation(s) of the author(s) of the study specified in their paper.

The outcomes were unexpected, according to Liu.

The annual paper count, a measure of astronomy's overall production, had grown.

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Effect of COVID-19 on the World

"While one may assume that COVID has mostly negative impacts on the world, this positive phenomenon may not be hard to understand: COVID-induced changes such as increased flexibility in work arrangement, reduced commutes and business trips, as well as improved virtual technologies, among others, are potentially favorable for conducting scientific research," said Liu.

The researchers discovered that the latter was primarily to blame for the trend when they examined whether the favorable outcome was the consequence of more researchers entering the field or an increase in individual output.

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"When we counted the average number of papers each researcher produced, we saw boosted individual productivity seen across most countries. Meanwhile, a decreasing number of incoming new researchers is seen in most of the countries we studied. This result indicates larger barriers for new researchers to enter the field, or for junior researchers to complete their very first project during COVID," said Liu.

Female Researchers' Productivity Affected During the Pandemic

Finally, the researchers discovered that female astronomers' productivity was most adversely impacted. There were fewer publications authored by women and fewer women researchers entering the astronomy field in 14 of the 25 nations evaluated. Even in nations like the Netherlands, Australia, and Switzerland, where female academics had been equally prolific as male colleagues before the epidemic, no female researchers have so far been able to outperform their male colleagues during COVID-19.

As the pandemic is still ongoing, the researchers claim that their data only examines trends over a brief period. The quality of these papers has not yet been examined, although they were able to examine quantitative outputs during the pandemic.

Source-Medindia