Journals invite too few women to refereeJory Lerback and Brooks Hanson present an analysis that reveals evidence of gender bias in peer review for scholarly publications. US geoscientists on an expedition in
The scientific community is becoming more demographically diverse, and team science is becoming more common. Here, we compare metrics of success in academic research, acceptance rates, and citations, among/across differing team compositions regarding demographic diversity. We collected the final decisions and citations as of 2019 of 91,427 manuscripts submitted from 2012-2018 to journals published by the American Geophysical Union. We matched the authors by email on each manuscript to self-provided demographic information within the American Geophysical Union's membership database. This resulted in 20,940 manuscripts matched to nation, gender, and career stage, and 6,015 manuscripts matched to race/ethnicity for manuscripts in which the entire authorship team was affiliated with the United States. Among similar sized authorship teams (teams of two to four), acceptance rates were 2.7, 4.5, and 0.9% higher (p nation < 0.01, p gender < 0.05, p career stage = 0.51) with more than one nation, gender, and career stage, respectively, than nondiverse authorship teams. Diverse papers had 1.2 more citations for international teams than single-nation teams (p nation < 0.01). There were 0.4 and 1.0 fewer citations for authorship teams with more than one gender or career stage than manuscripts with one gender or career stage (p gender = 0.21, p career stage = 0.36). Racially/ethnically diverse teams were associated with 5.5% lower acceptance rates (p < 0.01) and 0.8 fewer citations (p = 0.15) than racially/ethnically homogenous teams. Although not every difference is statistically significant, the overall results are consistent with the notion that diversity can benefit science, but equitable practices and inclusive cultures must also be fostered. Plain Language SummaryThis manuscript uses publication data from a large disciplinary scientific publisher, combined with self-reported demographic information, to understand team diversity as related to scientific outcomes. Acceptance rates and citations are used here to measure the quality of science and impact of a study on the scientific community. We find that in the case of nation, gender, and age diversity, demographically mixed teams have better outcomes. When U.S. author teams have multiracial/multiethnic teams, these scientific outcomes are lower than single-race/ethnicity teams. This is important to reinforce that diversity has the capacity to better science, but also, critically, diversity must be understood within other social contexts regarding opportunity, networks, and resource distribution.We compare each type of demographic diversity to the scientific "quality" of team manuscript submissions to peer-reviewed journals to assess whether/the degree that diversity impacts science. The "quality" of
Author networks play a key role in doing science. Developing networks is critical for career advancement in a variety of ways, and differences in networks may be a core reason for persistence of implicit bias, particularly with regards to gender. Combining the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting abstracts from 2014-2018 with self-identified AGU member data on birth year and gender provides a large database of more than 400,000 unique coauthor interactions that we use to examine author networks by age, gender, and country. Age data are necessary to disambiguate the effect of a historic lack of women in the Earth and Space Science. The data show that women's networks are closer to those expected from the age-gender distribution of the overall membership; whereas, networks of men include more men than expected. Women also have more male coauthors within their age cohort than expected from the membership distribution. Women's networks are also less international than their male colleagues in most age cohorts. These differences start in the youngest age cohort. These data indicate that addressing implicit bias requires efforts at purposefully encouraging and developing more balanced author networks, particularly in early-career scientists. Recent work suggests that this will also improve science outputs.Plain Language Summary Today, most research is conducted in teams, which allows different techniques and expertise to be applied to a scientific investigation. It also allows for sharing skills among team members, which especially benefits students. The size of these research teams, which translates to co-authorship of conference presentations and manuscripts, has been growing and increasingly involves members from multiple countries. Professional connections made through teams are also important for career advancement. In this paper, we examine the age, gender, and extent of international collaborations of scientists by looking at authors of meeting presentations of one of the largest scientific meetings in the world, AGU's annual Fall Meeting. We found that male scientists tended to have a higher proportion of male co-authors than would be expected at random and more international collaborations than women. These differences were apparent across most age groups, notably including authors in their twenties. This implies that actions are needed to help students of both genders equitably develop and expand their networks.
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