This article assesses the balance of research concerning women and men over the past quarter century using the crude heuristic of counting Scopus-indexed journal articles relating to women or men, as suggested by their titles or abstracts. A manual checking procedure together with a word-based heuristic was used to identify whether an article related to women or men. The heuristic includes explicit mentions of women and men, implicit mentions, and a set of gender-focused health issues and medical terminology. Based on the results, more published articles now relate to women than to men. Moreover, more than twice as many articles relate exclusively to women than exclusively to men, with the ratio increasing from 2.16 to 1 in 1996 to 2.25 to 1 in 2020. Monogender articles mostly addressed primarily female health issues (maternity, breast cancer, cervical cancer) with fewer about primarily male health issues (testicular cancer, pancreatic cancer, health needs of men who have sex with men). Some articles also explicitly addressed gender inequality, such as empowering female entrepreneurs. The findings suggest that the androcentrism of early science has eroded in terms of research topics. This apparent progress should be encouraging for women researchers and society.

Within academia, mature researchers tend to be more senior, but do they also tend to write higher impact articles? This article assesses long-term publishing (16+ years) United States (U.S.) researchers, contrasting them with shorter-term publishing researchers (1, 6, or 10 years). A long-term U.S. researcher is operationalized as having a first Scopus-indexed journal article in exactly 2001 and one in 2016–2019, with U.S. main affiliations in their first and last articles. Researchers publishing in large teams (11+ authors) were excluded. The average field and year normalized citation impact of long- and shorter-term U.S. researchers’ journal articles decreases over time relative to the national average, with especially large falls for the last articles published, which may be at least partly due to a decline in self-citations. In many cases researchers start by publishing above U.S. average citation impact research and end by publishing below U.S. average citation impact research. Thus, research managers should not assume that senior researchers will usually write the highest impact papers.