JASs Correspondence & Notes Journal of Anthropological Sciences Vol. 96 (2018), pp. 1-8 the JASs is published by the Istituto Italiano di Antropologia www.isita-org.com Gender balance in the scientiic production of the Atapuerca archaeological and palaeontological research project Xosé-Pedro Rodríguez-Álvarez 1,2 & Sergi Lozano 2,1 1) Àrea de Prehistòria, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Av. Catalunya 35, 43002, Tarragona, Spain e-mail: xprodriguez@iphes.cat 2) Institut Català de Paleoecologia Humana i Evolució Social (IPHES), Zona educacional 4 (Ediici W3), Campus Sescelades URV, 43007, Tarragona, Spain Introduction In recent years, many studies have addressed gender balance in science and, more specifically, the role of women in scientific production. The results from these studies reveal differences accord- ing to country, time period and, in particular, sci- entific discipline (Abramo et al., 2009, Larivière et al., 2013; Torres-Salinas et al., 2011; West et al., 2013). Less attention has been paid, however, to gender balance in the scientific production specific to individual research projects. In order to explore this little-known aspect of gender balance, we focus on the Atapuerca archaeo-palaeontological project (Burgos, Spain), a large-scale mission dedi- cated to the study of human evolution (Lozano et al., 2014). The scientific output generated by this project embraces various disciplines including; anthropology, palaeontology, geosciences, evolu- tionary biology, and genetics. Although developed in Spain, this project includes researchers from numerous institutions in 21 countries on five con- tinents. The Atapuerca project is one of the most outstanding research programs to study world pre- history in terms of economic investment, relevance of excavated sites, number of scientists engaged, organisational complexity, and volume of scien- tific production. From 1978 to 2016, more than 1,000 people participated in excavations at the Atapuerca sites. Subsequent research generated publications in highly rated international scien- tific journals, including 6 papers in Nature, 6 in Science and 15 in PNAS. In addition, the project has generated a significant social impact with a total of 2,349,052 visitors to the facilities related to the project between 2010 and 2015 (the archaeologi- cal sites, the archaeological park and the Museum of Human Evolution). Moreover, Atapuerca is a UNESCO’s World Heritage Site since 1997. Our starting point was to record the number of publications related to this project, as indexed by the Web of Science (WOS) (papers and editorials in journals, and book chapters, excluding abstracts), from 1977 (date of the first indexed publication on Atapuerca) to 2013. We thus compiled a list of pub- lications centred on the Atapuerca archeological sites, as well as those in which data from Atapuerca had been used to perform comparative studies or to address different aspects of human evolution. In order to observe changes over time, we subdivided the study period into “time windows” of five years. A longer time window was employed to englobe the first 17 years of the Atapuerca project (from 1977 to 1993) in order to obtain a balanced num- ber of publications across periods. The final result was a database of 299 publications. The gender of each author in the database was then manually defined and, when possible, we assessed gender balance by performing statisti- cal tests. Specifically, we assumed a null hypoth- esis based on the actual ratio of male and female authors in the database and applied binomial tests. For example, to determine the statistical sig- nificance of finding a total of 13 articles authored exclusively by women, we took into account the total number of articles published, the average number of authors per article and the overall ratio of female/male authors in the database. All tests e-pub ahead of print doi 10.4436/jass.96002