This study set out to investigate whether men and women engaged in dentistry and oral sciences research in Nigeria differ in how much they publish, the influence of their work, the types of collaborative networks they form and the roles they occupy in authorship. Using publication data gathered from the Web of Science (WoS), we compared gender patterns across several dimensions, including research productivity, citation impact, collaboration behaviour and authorship positions such as first author, last author and corresponding author. Journal standing was assessed through the field’s quartile system (Q1–Q4). Gender contrasts were examined with Chi-square tests, applying a significance threshold of p < 0.05. Between 2012 and 2021, 413 individual researchers produced 1,222 WoS-indexed papers relating to dentistry and oral sciences. Female researchers generated more documents per person than their male counterparts (3.7 vs. 2.6, p = 0.03). Women appeared slightly more often in Q2 and Q3 journals, whereas men were more represented in Q4 journals, although these differences did not reach statistical significance. Citation counts favoured female authors (25.0 vs. 14.9, p = 0.04), and women occupied first-author roles more frequently than men (26.6% vs. 20.5%, p = 0.048). Men, however, were more often found in last-author positions (23.6% vs. 17.7%, p = 0.04). For women, the proportion of papers in which they appeared as first authors correlated significantly with the proportion in which they were listed last (p = 0.002), whereas the same pattern was not significant for men (p = 0.06). Women also had a slightly higher—though not significant—share of corresponding authorship (26.4% vs. 20.6%), while men participated marginally more often in both domestic (46.8% vs. 44.7%) and international collaborations (27.4% vs. 25.1%). Gender differences were not observed for open access publishing (52.5% vs. 52.0%). Although gender-related contrasts in productivity, scholarly influence and collaborative tendencies were evident among Nigerian dentistry and oral sciences researchers, the greater output and citation impact observed among women may reflect deeper cultural dynamics that require additional investigation.
