Examining Gender Imbalance in Chemistry Authorship.

Despite decades of progress toward a more equitable society, gender representation in the sciences continues to be heavily skewed toward men. We were interested in gender representation in chemistry through the lens of scientific publishing. Publications are a central academic currency and are critical for funding, recruiting, and promotion in academia. Here we report the results of an analysis that compared the percentage of female first and last authors across 10 chemistry, 3 chemical biology, and 3 general journals from 2005 to 2020. We show that women are substantially underrepresented in chemistry authorship even when compared with their relative populations in academia and are not predicted to achieve parity within the next 50 years at the current rate in any journal. Our findings highlight the need for changes to the publishing process to achieve a more equitable publishing environment.

A genealogical approach to academic success.

We analyse academic success using a genealogical approach to the careers of over 95,000 scientists in mathematics and associated fields in physics and chemistry. We look at the effect of Ph.D. supervisors (one's mentors) on the number of Ph.D. students that one supervises later on (one's mentees) as a measure of academic success. Supervisors generally provide important inputs in Ph.D. projects, which can have long-lasting effects on academic careers. Moreover, having multiple supervisors exposes one to a diversity of inputs. We show that Ph.D. students benefit from having multiple supervisors instead of a single one. The cognitive diversity of mentors has a subtler effect in that it increases both the likelihood of success (having many mentees later on) and failure (having no mentees at all later on). We understand the effect of diverse mentorship as a high-risk, high-gain strategy: the recombination of unrelated expertise often fails, but sometimes leads to true novelty.

The impact of penalties for wrong answers on the gender gap in test scores.

Multiple-choice examinations play a critical role in university admissions across the world. A key question is whether imposing penalties for wrong answers on these examinations deters guessing from women more than men, disadvantaging female test-takers. We consider data from a large-scale, high-stakes policy change that removed penalties for wrong answers on the national college entry examination in Chile. The policy change reduced a large gender gap in questions skipped. It also narrowed gender gaps in performance, primarily among high-performing test-takers, and in the fields of math, social science, and chemistry.

Healthy, wealthy and wise: the benefits of chemical research.

Chemistry is the great enabling subject that is central to progress in solving global problems. In today's world, these problems are as vital, as new energy sources, food, clean water and healthcare. David Philips presents some current research in these areas as well as his own work in the field of targeted photodynamic therapy of cancer.

The use of principal component analysis and discriminant analysis in differential sensing routines.

Statistical analysis techniques such as principal component analysis (PCA) and discriminant analysis (DA) have become an integral part of data analysis for differential sensing. These multivariate statistical tools, while extremely versatile and useful, are sometimes used as "black boxes". Our aim in this paper is to improve the general understanding of how PCA and DA process and display differential sensing data, which should lead to the ability to better interpret the final results. With various sets of model data, we explore several topics, such as how to choose an appropriate number of hosts for an array, selectivity compared to cross-reactivity, when to add hosts, how to obtain the best visually representative plot of a data set, and when arrays are not necessary. We also include items at the end of the paper as general recommendations which readers can follow when using PCA or DA in a practical application. Through this paper we hope to present these statistical analysis methods in a manner such that chemists gain further insight into approaches that optimize the discriminatory power of their arrays.

Productivity in physical and chemical science predicts the future economic growth of developing countries better than other popular indices.

Scientific productivity of middle income countries correlates stronger with present and future wealth than indices reflecting its financial, social, economic or technological sophistication. We identify the contribution of the relative productivity of different scientific disciplines in predicting the future economic growth of a nation. Results show that rich and poor countries differ in the relative proportion of their scientific output in the different disciplines: countries with higher relative productivity in basic sciences such as physics and chemistry had the highest economic growth in the following five years compared to countries with a higher relative productivity in applied sciences such as medicine and pharmacy. Results suggest that the economies of middle income countries that focus their academic efforts in selected areas of applied knowledge grow slower than countries which invest in general basic sciences.

The two faces of chemistry in the developing world.

Chemistry creates both agony and hope in less-developed countries ­ although it may provide solutions to many of the problems faced there, the lack of expertise and poor infrastructure renders research extremely difficult. What challenges must scientists overcome and what can be done to improve matters?