Women Are Underrepresented Among Authors of Retracted Publications: Retrospective Study of 134 Medical Journals

We examined the gender distribution of authors of retracted articles in 134 medical journals across 10 disciplines, compared it with the gender distribution of authors of all published articles, and found that women were underrepresented among authors of retracted articles, and, in particular, of articles retracted for misconduct.

Do male and female authors employ different journal choice strategies? - Scientometrics

Compared to their male colleagues, female scientists are less likely to secure senior positions and more likely to drop out of academia. The mechanisms behind these patterns have been the subject of debate in recent years, entailing serious policy implications. In this project we investigate one such mechanism, namely the journal submission strategies of male and female authors. In view of the evidence pertaining to higher self-confidence and/or risk acceptance among males, it may be expected that males would generally tend to follow a more ambitious journal choice strategy. To verify this conjecture, we developed a novel method and looked to acquire a new dataset, surveying scholars in three relatively gender-balanced disciplines representing humanities (history), social sciences (economics), and natural sciences (environmental sciences). Focusing on their specific, recently published papers, we ask about the journals to which they had submitted these papers and the journals to which they could potentially look to engage with. In the 1111 complete responses we found evidence that males are not only more self-confident but also more forward-looking in their journal choice.

ChatGPT identifies gender disparities in scientific peer review

Generative artificial intelligence, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, can be used to analyze scientific texts with specialized constructions, including peer review reports.

Are female scientists less inclined to publish alone? The gender solo research gap - Scientometrics

In solo research, scientists compete individually for prestige, sending clear signals about their research ability, avoiding problems in credit allocation, and reducing conflicts about authorship. We examine to what extent male and female scientists differ in their use of solo publishing across various dimensions. This research is the first to comprehensively study the “gender solo research gap” among all internationally visible scientists within a whole national higher education system. We examine the gap through mean “individual solo publishing rates” found in “individual publication portfolios” constructed for each Polish university professor. We use the practical significance/statistical significance difference (based on the effect-size r coefficient) and our analyses indicate that while some gender differences are statistically significant, they have no practical significance. Using a partial effects of fractional logistic regression approach, we estimate the probability of conducting solo research. In none of the models does gender explain the variability of the individual solo publishing rate. The strongest predictor of individual solo publishing rate is the average team size, publishing in STEM fields negatively affects the rate, publishing in male-dominated disciplines positively affects it, and the influence of international collaboration is negative. The gender solo research gap in Poland is much weaker than expected: within a more general trend toward team research and international research, gender differences in solo research are much weaker and less relevant than initially assumed. We use our unique biographical, administrative, publication, and citation database (“Polish Science Observatory”) with metadata on all Polish scientists present in Scopus (N = 25,463) and their 158,743 Scopus-indexed articles published in 2009–2018, including 18,900 solo articles.

Female early-career scientists have conducted less interdisciplinary research in the past six decades: evidence from doctoral theses - Humanities and Social Sciences Communications

Interdisciplinary research is a driving force of transformative and innovative science, yet it remains unclear how early-career scientists pursue interdisciplinary research paths. Analyzing data from 675,135 doctoral theses of U.S. Ph.D. graduates who graduated from 1950 to 2016, we study the development of interdisciplinary doctoral theses in the five scientific domains of behavioral sciences, biological sciences, engineering, health and medical sciences, and mathematical and physical sciences. We propose an indicator to measure the degree of interdisciplinarity embedded in the doctoral research by employing co-occurrence matrices of subjects assigned to doctoral theses in the ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Database. This study finds that interdisciplinary doctoral theses have exhibited a growing trend across different scientific domains, and universities of varying research intensity. Since the 1990s, interdisciplinary research has played a dominant role in doctoral theses within the five scientific domains. The results of multivariate regression models suggest persistent gender disparities in the interdisciplinarity level of doctoral theses. Specifically, male-authored doctoral theses demonstrate a higher level of interdisciplinarity than female-authored doctoral theses. In addition, this study suggests that being supervised by female advisors may amplify gender disparities in the interdisciplinarity level of their students’ doctoral theses. The findings indicate the potential underrepresentation of female scientists in pursuing interdisciplinary research at the early stages of their careers. Given that funding agencies have promoted interdisciplinary research and its potential benefits, the lower level of interdisciplinarity in the doctoral theses of female students may hinder their career advancement. Furthermore, our findings indicate that offering increased support to female faculty members may not only directly benefit their career development but also hold considerable significance in promoting future generations of female scientists. The findings of this study have important policy implications for advancing the careers of female scientists.

Gender imbalances in the editorial activities of a selective journal run by academic editors

The fairness of decisions made at various stages of the publication process is an important topic in meta-research. Here, based on an analysis of data on the gender of authors, editors and reviewers for 23,876 initial submissions and 7,192 full submissions to the journal eLife, we report on five stages of the publication process. We find that the board of reviewing editors (BRE) is men-dominant (69%) and that authors disproportionately suggest male editors when making an initial submission. We do not find evidence for gender bias when Senior Editors consult Reviewing Editors about initial submissions, but women Reviewing Editors are less engaged in discussions about these submissions than expected by their proportion. We find evidence of gender homophily when Senior Editors assign full submissions to Reviewing Editors (i.e., men are more likely to assign full submissions to other men (77% compared to the base assignment rate to men RE of 70%), and likewise for women (41% compared to women RE base assignment rate of 30%))). This tendency was stronger in more gender-balanced scientific disciplines. However, we do not find evidence for gender bias when authors appeal decisions made by editors to reject submissions. Together, our findings confirm that gender disparities exist along the editorial process and suggest that merely increasing the proportion of women might not be sufficient to eliminate this bias. Measures accounting for women’s circumstances and needs (e.g., delaying discussions until all RE are engaged) and raising editorial awareness to women’s needs may be essential to increasing gender equity and enhancing academic publication.

You are being redirected...

Negating the Gender Citation Advantage in Political Science | PS: Political Science & Politics | Cambridge Core

Negating the Gender Citation Advantage in Political Science - Volume 50 Issue 2

Nature publishes too few papers from women researchers — that must change

This journal will double down on efforts to diversify the pool of corresponding authors and referees.

Women, academia and the unequal production of knowledge – An LSE Impact Blog review

Higher education is often presumed to be a uniquely egalitarian and meritocratic field. However, persistent inequalities within academic work and increasingly the current and historic mechanisms un…

Analysis of editor in chief gender and associated journal variables among 126 pathology journals

AbstractObjectives. Gender equity studies have shown that women are underrepresented in journal editor in chief positions, which confer major professional oppor

CHAPTER 15 MARRIAGE, MOTHERHOOD, AND RESEARCH PERFORMANCE IN SCIENCE (1987)

CHAPTER 15 MARRIAGE, MOTHERHOOD, AND RESEARCH PERFORMANCE IN SCIENCE (1987) was published in Smoother Pebbles on page 329.

Gender differences and bias in open source: Pull request acceptance of women versus men

Biases against women in the workplace have been documented in a variety of studies. This paper presents the largest study to date on gender bias, where we compare acceptance rates of contributions from men versus women in an open source software community. Surprisingly, our results show that women's contributions tend to be accepted more often than men's. However, women's acceptance rates are higher only when they are not identifiable as women. Our results suggest that although women on GitHub may be more competent overall, bias against them exists nonetheless.

How I’m using AI tools to help universities maximize research impacts

Artificial-intelligence algorithms could identify scientists who need support with translating their work into real-world applications and more. Leaders must step up.

Women’s strength in science: exploring the influence of female participation on research impact and innovation - Scientometrics

Prevailing attention centers on the plight of female scientists in modern academia. However, female contributions and potential remain insufficiently recognized. To unravel this veil, we leverage large-scale cross-disciplinary datasets from SciSciNet to portray female participation over the past 20 years and quantify the female effect on research using bibliometric indicators. Female ratio is utilized to gauge gender composition within teams. Through successive modeling including mixed-effect and multivariate regressions, we disentangle the intricate effects of female presence and extent of female participation on research impact and dual innovation metrics. We find a steady rise in female-inclusive teams and per-team female ratios over time, with variations across disciplines and broad categories. We demonstrate an inverted U-shaped relationship between female ratio and citation counts—gender-balanced teams typically garner peak citations, while highly-cited vertices drift toward male-skewed teams in male-majority areas. Increasing female participation yields significant gains in innovation. In the upstream of knowledge flow, as captured by novelty (z-scores), female-skewed teams tend to combine more unconventional knowledge. For the downstream, as encapsulated through disruption, female-skewed teams’ innovation efforts have been recognized by follow-on citations. Notably, the female advantage in innovation becomes more evident in male-dominated fields and intensifies over time. Our study offers insights into the unique academic value and the tremendous scientific contributions of females, providing important visions for institutional and policy reforms.

Impact as equalizer: the demise of gender-related differences in anti-doping research - Scientometrics

In general, the presence and performance of women in science have increased significantly in recent decades. However, gender-related differences persist and remain a global phenomenon. Women make a greater contribution to multidisciplinary research, which renders anti-doping research a compelling area for investigating the gendered aspects of academic research. The research design was based on the overall research aim to investigate whether gender in a specific field (ADS) has an effect on different aspects of research impact, including (1) the size of citation impact obtained by the research output, (2) the impact on the development of the knowledge base of ADS, expressed as the capacity of integrating knowledge from different research areas, and (3) the (expected) type of research impact targeting either societal or scientific developments (or both). We used a previously compiled dataset of 1341 scientific outputs. Using regression analysis, we explored the role of authors’ gender in citations and the effect of authorship features on scientific impact. We employed network analysis and developed a novel indicator (LinkScore) to quantify gendered authors’ knowledge integration capacity. We carried out a content analysis on a subsample of 210 outputs to explore gender differences in research goal orientation as related to gender patterns. Women’s representation has been considerably extended in the domain of ADS throughout the last two decades. On average, outputs with female corresponding authors yield a higher average citation score. Regarding women's knowledge integration roles, we can infer that no substantial gender differences can be detected. Dominantly female papers were overrepresented among publications classified as aimed at scientific progress, while the share of male-authored papers was higher in publications classified as aimed at societal progress. Although no significant gender difference was observed in knowledge integration roles, in anti-doping women appear to be more interdisciplinary than men.

First All-Women Class Of Top Law Journal Editors Leaves Behind A Byline And Legacy

The last three years of reported data all show women leading men in representation in law schools in the US. This past academic year ushered in a new first: women leading the masthead of each top law journal.

GandS_metascience_call.pdf

Major Developments and Events in the Humanities and Scholarly Publishing: 2000–2014

A number of substantive trends in the humanities were evaluated, including undergraduate and graduate student enrollments, the number of college faculty members, humanities degrees and major humanities subjects, the impact of the “serials crisis,”...

IOS Press Ebooks - Gender and Geographical Representation on Editorial Board Members of Medical Informatics Journals

Why the gender gap in physics has been stable for more than a century

As a physicist and data scientist with a keen interest in gender inequality, Fariba Karimi was amazed to discover that the gender gap in physics has remained almost unchanged since 1900. As the citation and coauthorship networks in physics expand, women still make up a small proportion—and the gaps between male and female are getting larger in terms of absolute numbers.

Taru Publications

Why is there a citations gender gap in Indian materials science?

Shobhana Narasimhan, chair of the Indian Academy of Science’s initiative on women in science, says attitudes in the field must change more quickly.

Who Gets Recommended? Investigating Gender, Race, and Country Disparities in Paper Recommendations from Large Language Models

This paper investigates the performance of several representative large models in the tasks of literature recommendation and explores potential biases in research exposure. The results indicate that not only LLMs' overall recommendation accuracy remains limited but also the models tend to recommend literature with greater citation counts, later publication date, and larger author teams. Yet, in scholar recommendation tasks, there is no evidence that LLMs disproportionately recommend male, white, or developed-country authors, contrasting with patterns of known human biases.

Sex and gender reporting in scientific papers now strongly recommended by the Emergency Medicine Journal

Editorial linked to: Astin-Chamberlain R, Pott J, Cole E, et al . Sex and gender reporting in UK emergency medicine trials from 2010 to 2023: a systematic review. Emergency Medicine Journal Published Online First: 11 September 2024. doi: 10.1136/emermed-2024-214054. The under-representation of women in clinical trials has been well documented but even less appreciated is the lack of attention to potential differences in outcomes according to sex and gender. Due to differences in body size and composition, sex hormones and metabolism, as well as important social determinants of health, we cannot infer that research findings in men can always be generalised to women. Just like age, race, education, socioeconomic status, comorbidities and many other categories that our patients fall into, sex and gender can have an effect on the way patients present with the same illness, the way patients respond to medications and the potential for toxicity. Studies have suggested that women with acute myocardial infarction are more likely than men to experience symptoms such as dyspnoea or palpitations in addition to chest pain1 and (once diagnosed) women receive evidence-based treatments less often than men.2 For reasons still not clear, we know that men were more likely to have severe …

Inequality in measuring scholarly success: Variation in the h-index within and between disciplines

Scholars and university administrators have a vested interest in building equitable valuation systems of academic work for both practical (e.g., resource distribution) and more lofty purposes (e.g., what constitutes “good” research). Well-established inequalities in science pose a difficult challenge to those interested in constructing a parsimonious and fair method for valuation as stratification occurs within academic disciplines, but also between them. The h-index, a popular research metric, has been formally used as one such method of valuation. In this article, we use the case of the h-index to examine how the distribution of research metrics reveal within and between discipline inequalities. Using bibliometric data from 1960-2019 on over 50,000 high performing scientists—the top 2% most frequently cited authors—across 174 disciplines, we construct random effects within-between models predicting the h-index. Results suggest significant within-discipline variation in several forms, specifically sole-authorship and female penalties. Results also show that a sole authorship penalty plays a significant role in well-known between-discipline variation. Field-specific models emphasize the “apples-to-oranges,” or incommensurable, property of cross-discipline comparison with significant heterogeneity in sole-authorship and female penalties within fields. In conclusion, we recommend continued caution when using the h-index or similar metrics for valuation purposes and the prioritization of substantive valuations from disciplinary experts.