Background and objective: Concern for encouraging gender equality makes it one of the high priority spheres of action for governments and organisations responsible for instigating scientific policies, with particular importance being placed on including the gender variable in evaluative analyses of scientific and technological activity. A comparative study was made, broken down by gender, of the scientific output of Spanish researchers with a high production in the field of substance abuse.
Material and method: We identified the gender of 338 authors who had published more than four different articles during the period from 1999-2004 and which were indexed in the IME/Indice Médico Español and the SCI/Science Citation Index databases, making a comparative analysis of their output and collaboration patterns, based on the gender variable.
Results: In the area of substance abuse, of those with the highest output (> 9 papers), 70% were men compared with 30% women. Among the average producers (5-9 papers), 57% of the authors identified were men and 43% women. Statistically significant differences were observed between men and women with the highest output with regard to the number of published works and those with whom they had collaborated.
Conclusions: There is no gender equality in the area of substance abuse, particularly when considering the top researchers. It is essential to make in-depth studies that evaluate scientific output, broken down by gender, in order to adopt the necessary corrective measures to eliminate the disparity between men and women.