The impact of information about authors and paper research topic on citation disparities: a gender perspective

Abstract

Gender disparity in terms of citation performance has been widely documented in the scientific literature. Some research suggests that women’s publications are cited at lower rates than men’s publications, whilst others have found the opposite results or no differences. The process of scientific citations seems to be subject to considerable biases. As an example, it is believed that information about authors with regard to country or university might have a negative effect on the number of received citations. The research topic of an article is also believed to have an effect on received citations. Thus, biases may also be due to the research topic of an article. Females and male researchers differ in their research interests. This study aims to investigate whether there is a gender bias in citing scholars, when controlling for the availability of information about authors (i.e. affiliation, biography, and photographs) and the topic of their papers. There are three objectives. First, to compare the number of citations received by female and male authors. Second, to compare female and male authors’ citations received based on the availability of authors’ information. Third, to compare female and male authors’ number of citations received in papers with similar topics. The dataset of this study is composed of a sample of articles and reviews published by the top 5 % of highly productive authors in the field of chemistry, retrieved from the WOS database between 2012 and 2014. In order to control for the impact of author byline order, we only focused on those records where the productive author was the corresponding author.