Gender differences in citation sentiment: A case study in life sciences and biomedicine

Abstract

In this study, we investigated whether female and male authors in the field of life sciences and biomedicine differed in their tendency for citation and citation sentiment. The data comprised two sets, cited set and citing set. Cited set comprised 17,237 articles whereas citing set comprised 115,935 articles. The cited set which is from the area Life Sciences & Biomedicine and published during 2012–2016 was retrieved from the Web of Science Medline. The citing set and its citation contexts were retrieved using the Colil database. The analysis was done using a combination of homophily analysis, regression analysis and a chi-square test. The covariates in the regression analyses were features related to authors, journal, institution, country and abstract readability. The homophily analysis showed a significant tendency for female (8%) and male (14%) authorship teams to cite papers by the same gender composition teams. In addition, the results of regression analysis (Model 1) and pairwise comparisons showed that male-authored papers received a significant higher positive sentiment compared with female-authored papers. The results of regression analysis (Model 2) showed a small significant positive association between gender similarity of cited and citing authorship teams and the sentiment score. However, further analysis using the chi-square test showed a significant lower tendency for women to use positive terms when citing the research findings of papers with the same gender composition. Men, in contrast, used significantly more positive terms when citing papers with the same gender composition. Finally, lay summary for a cited paper, country similarity and the venue of cited publication when it was a mega journal had a positive significant association with the sentiment score received.