Abstract
The under-attribution of women’s contributions to scientific scholarship is well known and well studied. One measure of this under-attribution is the citation gap between men and women: the under-citation of papers authored by women relative to expected rates coupled with an over-citation of papers authored by men relative to expected rates. Here we explore this citation gap in contemporary physics. 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 behaviour varies along several dimensions, such that imbalances differ according to who is citing, where they are citing and what they are citing. Specifically, citation imbalance in favour of man-authored papers is highest for papers authored by men, papers published in general physics journals and papers for which citing authors probably have less domain or author familiarity. 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 behavioural changes at the individual, journal and community levels.
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Data availability
The data generated and analysed for this study are available in an Open Science Framework repository and can be accessed at https://osf.io/p5cb7/.
Code availability
The code used to generate Figs. 1–5 can be accessed at https://osf.io/p5cb7/, and the code used for the data processing and analyses presented in this study can be accessed at https://github.com/jdwor/gendercitation.
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Acknowledgements
We thank S. Loman for helpful discussions. E.G.T, L.C.B. and D.S.B. are supported by the National Science Foundation Materials Research Science and Engineering Center at University of Pennsylvania (NSF grant number DMR-1120901). J.Z.K. is supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. C.W.L. is supported by a James S. McDonnell Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship. S.C.S. acknowledges support from the University Scholars programme at the University of Pennsylvania. P.S. is supported by the Swartz Foundation. P.Z. and D.S.B also acknowledge support from the Center for Curiosity.
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Teich, E.G., Kim, J.Z., Lynn, C.W. et al. Citation inequity and gendered citation practices in contemporary physics. Nat. Phys. 18, 1161–1170 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-022-01770-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-022-01770-1
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