Journals occasionally solicit manuscripts for special collections, in which all papers are focused on a particular topic within the journal’s scope. For the Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics, there have been 51 special collections from 2005 through 2018, with a total of 1009 papers out of the 8881 total papers in the journal over those years (11%). Taken together, the citations to special collection papers, as well as other metrics, are essentially the same as the non-special-collection papers. Several paper characteristics were examined to assess whether they could explain the higher citation and download values for SC papers, but they cannot. In addition, indirect methods were conducted for assessing self-citations as an explanation for the increased citations, but no evidence was found to support this hypothesis. It was found that some paper types, notably Commentaries and Technical Reports, have lower average citations but higher average downloads than Research Articles (the most common type of paper in this journal). This implies that such paper types have a different kind of impact than “regular” science-result-focused papers. In addition to having higher average citations and downloads, special collections focus community attention on that particular research topic, providing a deadline for manuscript submissions and a single webpage at which many related papers are listed. It is concluded that special collections are worth the extra community effort in organization, writing, and reviewing these papers.

When the COVID-19 pandemic forced institutions to close their physical spaces, many researchers and professors were required to work from home. Media outlets and individuals wondered if women specifically would be shouldering the childcare and/or homeschooling responsibilities, decreasing the time they had for professional activities. Preliminary analyses show mixed results: some have seen decreased submissions from women (Vincent-Lamarre et al., 2020; Del Boca et al., 2020), with at least one other showing an increase in submissions from women (Dolan & Lawless, 2020); and another suggests the rate of male-athored submissions to preprint archives are growing faster than those from women (Frederickson 2020). AGU has been monitoring our monthly submission data to understand how the pandemic and stay-at home orders are affecting our submissions from specific demographics—based on author gender, age, and country. Our analysis finds that the pandemic so far has not resulted in a decrease in submissions to AGU journals; nor has there so far been a decrease in the participation of women as submitting authors. Instead, we have seen an increase in submissions from most author groups compared to year-to-date numbers in previous years.

The scientific community is becoming more demographically diverse, and team science is becoming more common. Here, we compare metrics of success in STEM, such as acceptance rates and citations, between differing team compositions regarding nationality, gender, career stage, and race/ethnicity. We collected the final decisions and citations as of 2019 of 91,427 manuscripts submitted from 2012-2018 to journals published by the American Geophysical Union. We matched the authors by email on each manuscript to self-provided demographic information within the American Geophysical Union’s membership database. This resulted in 20,940 manuscripts matched to nation, gender, and career stage, and 6,015 manuscripts matched to race/ethnicity for manuscripts whose entire authorship team was affiliated with the U.S. Among similar sized authorship teams (teams of 2-4), acceptance rates were 2.7, 4.5, and 0.9% higher (pnation < 0.01, pgender < 0.05, pcareer stage = 0.51) with more than one nation, gender, and career stage, respectively, than non-diverse authorship teams. Diverse papers had 1.2 more citations for international teams than single-nation teams (pnation < 0.01). There were 0.4 and 1.0 fewer citations for authorship teams with more than one gender or career stage than manuscripts with one gender or one career stage (pgender = 0.21, pcareer stage = 0.36). However, racially/ethnically diverse teams were associated with 5.5% lower acceptance rates (p < 0.01) and 0.8 fewer citations (p = 0.15) than racially/ethnically homogenous teams. These results show that diversity can have tangible benefits to science, but equitable practices and inclusive cultures must also be fostered.

Author networks play a key role in doing science. Developing networks is critical for career advancement in a wide variety of ways, and differences in networks may be a core reason for persistence of implicit gender bias. Combining the AGU Fall Meeting abstracts from 2014-2018 with self-identified AGU member data on birth year and gender provides a large database of more than 400,000 unique co-author interactions that we use to examine author networks by age, gender, and country. Age data are necessary to disambiguate the effect that a historic lack of women in the Earth and space science. The data show that women’s networks are closer to those expected from the age-gender distribution of the overall membership; whereas networks of men include more men than expected, although women are also interacting with men of similar age more than expected from the membership. Women’s networks are also less international than their male colleagues in most age cohorts. These differences start in the youngest age cohort. These data indicate that addressing implicit bias requires efforts at encouraging and developing more balanced author networks, particularly in early-career scientists. Recent work suggest that this will also improve science outputs.

The COVID-19 pandemic affected the scientific workforce in many ways. Many worried that stay-at-home orders would disproportionately harm the productivity and well-being of women and early-career scientists, who were expected to shoulder more childcare, homeschooling, and other domestic duties while also interrupting field and lab research, essential for career advancement. AGU journal submission and author and reviewer demographic data allowed us to investigate the effect the pandemic may have had on many Earth and space scientists, especially on women and early career scientists. However, we found that submissions to AGU journals increased during the pandemic as did total submissions from women (with no difference in the proportion). Although the rate at which women agreed to review decreased slightly (down 0.5%), women still made up a larger proportion of agreed reviewers during the pandemic compared to two years earlier. Little difference was seen overall in median times to complete reviews except with women in their 40s and 70s, suggesting that they were affected more during the pandemic than other age and gender groups. Although AGU’s data do not show that the effects of the pandemic decreased the participation of women in AGU journals, the lag between research and writing/submitting may still be seen in later months. The stay-at-home orders may also have allowed people to devote time to writing up research conducted pre-pandemic; writing too can be done at down-time hours, which may have supported the increase in submissions to and reviews for AGU journals.

The American Geophysical Union (AGU) has extensive journal submission and annual meeting abstract data that we can use to study effects within the Earth and space science (E&SS) community. We had provided an initial analysis based on data through June of 2020 (Wooden, 2020), and here we provide journal submission data analysis through October 2020 and analyze author team demographics of both journal submissions and our annual Fall Meeting abstracts. This most recent analysis shows: 1) Monthly journal article submissions have increased in 2020, while the proportion submitted by women have remained at 23% with monthly fluctuations of +/- 1-3 points. 2) 2020 journal article submissions from China surpassed those from the U.S. in every month except April. However, AGU Fall Meeting abstracts from China decreased 57% compared to last year. 3) Submissions from men and women in their 20s decreased while submissions from women in their 30s and 50s and men in their 40s increased. 4) Among journal articles and meeting abstracts, average author team size has increased; the proportion of mixed gender teams have increased while all-male teams have decreased. All-female teams have remained steady. 5)The age of submitting abstract authors has decreased but surprisingly with a smaller proportion of students submitting and a larger proportion of early-career researchers submitting abstracts.