Citation inequity and gendered citation practices in contemporary physics

Abstract

The historical and contemporary under-attribution of women's contributions to scientific scholarship is wellknown and well-studied, with effects that are felt today in myriad ways by women scientists. One measure of this under-attribution is the so-called citation gap between men and women: the under-citation of papers authored by women relative to expected rates coupled with a corresponding over-citation of papers authored by men relative to expected rates. We explore the citation gap in contemporary physics, analyzing over one million articles published over the last 25 years in 35 physics journals that span a wide range of subfields. Using a model that predicts papers' expected citation rates according to a set of characteristics separate from author gender, we find a global bias wherein papers authored by women are significantly under-cited, and papers authored by men are significantly over-cited. Moreover, we find that citation behavior varies along several dimensions, such that imbalances differ according to who is citing, where they are citing, and how they are citing. Specifically, citation imbalance in favor of man-authored papers is highest for papers authored by men, papers published in general physics journals, and papers likely to be less familiar to citing authors. Our results suggest that, although deciding which papers to cite is an individual choice, the cumulative effects of these choices needlessly harm a subset of scholars. We discuss several strategies for the mitigation of these effects, including conscious behavioral changes at the individual, journal, and community levels.

The Cultural Evolution of Science

“…This model can be taken to possibly support empirical findings about gender and racial citation gaps in academia (e.g. Ferber (1986) and Teich et al (2021)). Similarly Rubin and Schneider (2021) investigate how the "priority rule" can disadvantage minority groups.…”

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“…Gender Representation in Cited Works. Recent work in several fields of science has identified gender bias in citation practices-papers by women and other gender-minoritized scientists are systematically under-cited in their fields [22,15,42,25,63,24,68,40].…”

Exposure theory for learning complex networks with random walks

“…Recent work in several fields of science has identified a bias in citation practices such that papers from women and other minority scholars are under-cited relative to the number of such papers in the field [51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58][59][60]. Here we sought to proactively consider choosing references that reflect the diversity of the field in thought, form of contribution, gender, race, ethnicity, and other factors.…”