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Its impossible to say. All the data is self reported and both sexes have massive incentives to lie, though in different directions. Short of tracking chips implanted at puberty this one will remain a mystery. I did read some interesting research once about the topic of lying on self report surveys about sex and relationships, hinting that perhaps the dishonesty was somewhat uniform and predictable. I've since tried to find this paper multiple times to no avail and much frustration. I do remember that they determined men tend to double their partner count and women reduce theirs by 2/3rds, but lacking the methodology at present these figures can't be trusted.
No idea what papers you read, but I've seen some research along these lines. I think the most amusing was when Fisher and Alexander found that college women hooked up to a (fake) lie detector reported an average of 4.4 sexual partners, vs 3.4 for women who expected their answers to be anonymized and 2.4 for women who expected their answers to be read.
There are other factors influencing self-reporting (women report more and men report fewer lifetime partners on the GSS when they have a male interviewer? Male overreporting is massive when asked about lifetime partners, large when asked about recent partners, and maybe only 20% when asked about very-recent partners?) but I'm not sure what methodology could let anyone properly calibrate any of this. Bayes says "women are underreporting and men are overreporting" is the most likely explanation of the discrepancy between the two, but either "women are honest and men are grossly overreporting" or "men are honest and women are grossly underreporting" would be consistent too.
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