Gendered Citation Patterns across Political Science and Social Science Methodology Fields

Abstract

Accumulated evidence identifies discernible gender gaps across many dimensions of professional academic careers including salaries, publication rates, journal placement, career progress, and academic service. Recent work in political science also reveals gender gaps in citations, with articles written by men citing work by other male scholars more often than work by female scholars. This study estimates the gender gap in citations across political science subfields and across methodological subfields within political science, sociology, and economics. The research design captures variance across research areas in terms of the underlying distribution of female scholars. We expect that subfields within political science and social science disciplines with more women will have smaller gender citation gaps, a reduction of the “Matthew effect” where men’s research is viewed as the most central and important in a field. However, gender citation gaps may persist if a “Matilda effect” occurs whereby women’s research is viewed as less important or their ideas are attributed to male scholars, even as a field becomes more diverse. Analysing all articles published from 2007–2016 in several journals, we find that female scholars are significantly more likely than mixed gender or male author teams to cite research by their female peers, but that these citation rates vary depending on the overall distribution of women in their field. More gender diverse subfields and disciplines produce smaller gender citation gaps, consistent with a reduction in the “Matthew effect”. However, we also observe undercitation of work by women, even in journals that publish mostly female authors. While improvements in gender diversity in academia increase the visibility and impact of scholarly work by women, implicit biases in citation practices in the social sciences persist.

Gender differences in peer review outcomes and manuscript impact at six journals of ecology and evolution

“…However, that study found no evidence that citations per paper differed between men and women in ecology, consistent with two earlier studies of the ecology literature that failed to find gender differences in citations (Borsuk et al, ; Leimu & Koricheva, ). These results contrast with numerous studies in other disciplines, most of which show that papers authored by women are less well cited than papers authored by men, for example, across all sciences (Bendels, Müller, Brueggmann, & Groneberg, ; Larivière, Ni, Gingras, Cronin, & Sugimoto, ; Sugimoto, Lariviere, Ni, Gingras, & Cronin, ), in the social sciences (Carter, Smith, & Osteen, ; Dion, Sumner, & Mitchell, ), and in a variety of other disciplines (Tahamtan, Afshar, & Ahamdzadeh, ), though exceptions exist. Thus, as with studies of peer review, studies examining manuscript impact vary substantially in their conclusions.…”

The extent and drivers of gender imbalance in neuroscience reference lists

“…For names that were not included in the SSA dataset, gender was assigned using Gender API (gender-api.com), a paid service that supports roughly 800,000 unique first names across 177 countries. We assigned 'man'('woman') to each author if their name had a probability greater than or equal to 0.70 of belonging to someone labeled as 'man'('woman') according to a given source (25). In the SSA dataset, man/woman labels correspond to the sex assigned to children at birth; in the Gender API dataset, man/woman labels correspond to a combination of sex assigned to children at birth and genders detected in social media profiles.…”

“…Yet this formulation only measures the passive consequences of gendered citation behavior, rather than directly measuring the behavior itself. Instead, building on recent studies conducted in international relations and political science (25,29), we investigate the relationship between authors' gender and the gender make-up of their reference lists. Using this framework, we are able to quantify properties associated with authors serving as both objects and agents of undercitation.…”

Integrating multimodal connectivity improves prediction of individual cognitive abilities

“…Recent work in neuroscience and other fields has identified a bias in citation practices such that papers from women and other minorities are under-cited relative to the number of such papers in the field (Maliniak et al, 2013, Caplar et al, 2017, Chakravartty et al, 2018, Thiem et al, 2018, Dion et al, 2018, Dworkin et al, 2020. Here we sought to proactively consider choosing references that reflect the diversity of the field in thought, form of contribution, gender, and other factors.…”