The extent and drivers of gender imbalance in neuroscience reference lists

By Jordan D Dworkin, Kristin A. Linn, Erin G. Teich, Perry Zurn, Russell T. Shinohara, D. Bassett. Nature Neuroscience, 2020

527 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Similarly to many scientific disciplines, neuroscience has increasingly attempted to confront pervasive gender imbalances. Although publishing and conference participation are often highlighted, recent research has called attention to the prevalence of gender imbalance in citations. Because of the downstream effects of citations on visibility and career advancement, understanding the role of gender in citation practices is vital for addressing scientific inequity. Here, we investigate whether gendered patterns are present in neuroscience citations. Using data from five top neuroscience journals, we find that reference lists tend to include more papers with men as first and last author than would be expected if gender were unrelated to referencing. Importantly, we show that this imbalance is driven largely by the citation practices of men and is increasing over time as the field diversifies. We assess and discuss possible mechanisms and consider how researchers might approach these issues in their own work. Using data from top neuroscience journals, this study finds that women-led work tends to be undercited relative to expectations. This imbalance is driven largely by the citation practices of men and is increasing over time as the field diversifies.

Subfields: Gender Studies, Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4967efbbb27256750f20ff99c8b5c89b8c2870ce

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Gender Studies

1. Steve Stewart-Williams
2. L. Halsey

In Statistics and Probability

1. Steve Stewart-Williams
2. Daphna Shohamy
3. D. Bassett
4. Jordan D Dworkin
5. L. Halsey
6. Perry Zurn

Citations in the corpus

• Men, women and STEM: Why the differences and what should be done? (2020, background): “• Neuroscience papers with a male first author and male last author are more likely to be cited than those with first and last authors of different sexes, or those with a female first author and female last author (Dworkin et al., 2020).”
• Racial and ethnic imbalance in neuroscience reference lists and intersections with gender (2020, methodology): “In prior work, we examined the extent and drivers of gender imbalance in the reference lists of articles from these same five journals (33).”
• Fluctuations in functional connectivity associated with interictal epileptiform discharges (IEDs) in intracranial EEG (2021, methodology): “First, we obtained the predicted gender of the first and last author of each reference by using databases that store the probability of a first name being carried by a woman [82, 83].”
• Learning in brain-computer interface control evidenced by joint decomposition of brain and behavior (2019, methodology): “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 [18, 20, 31, 33, 73, 104].”