By Paul Basken

The Internet has proved itself to be a democratizing force for a range of human endeavors, such as the simple act of selling a car or the complex task of shaming a repressive government. Could it also be leveling the playing field in scientific research?

A new study led by Waverly W. Ding, an assistant professor of business at the University of California at Berkeley, suggests that it is.

For their research, Ms. Ding and colleagues at Georgia State University and the University of Missouri at St. Louis compared user data involving Bitnet, an Internet forerunner established by Yale University and the City University of New York, and the Domain Name System, which is the naming protocol used to identify addresses on the Internet.

Their findings, published at the end of August by the National Bureau of Economic Research, are based on a random sample of 3,771 life scientists from 430 U.S. institutions over a 25-year period. The study concludes that in all three groups that were examined—female scientists, young scientists, and scientists at lower-ranked institutions—researchers showed greater increases in publishing productivity attributable to their use of the Internet than did researchers outside their group.

"The gender and research-tier results suggest that IT has been an equalizing force," the authors write, "at least in terms of the number of publications and gain in co-authorship, enabling scientists outside the inner circle to participate more fully."