First Author Citation Research Articles

Greater female first author citation advantages do not associate with reduced or reducing gender disparities in academia

Ongoing problems attracting women into many Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) subjects have many potential explanations. This article investigates whether the possible undercitation of women associates with lower proportions of, or increases in, women in a subject. It uses six million articles published in 1996–2012 across up to 331 fields in six mainly English-speaking countries: Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. The proportion of female first- and last-authored articles in each year was calculated and 4,968 regressions were run to detect first-author gender advantages in field normalized article citations. The proportion of female first authors in each field correlated highly between countries and the female first-author citation advantages derived from the regressions correlated moderately to strongly between countries, so both are relatively field specific. There was a weak tendency in the United States and New Zealand for female citation advantages to be stronger in fields with fewer women, after excluding small fields, but there was no other association evidence. There was no evidence of female citation advantages or disadvantages to be a cause or effect of changes in the proportions of women in a field for any country. Inappropriate uses of career-level citations are a likelier source of gender inequities.

Identifying and Mapping the Intellectual Structure of Decision Analysis Studies: An Author Co-Citation Analysis (1966-2007)

This paper aims to explore the theoretical essentials of knowledge production in decision analysis studies, from a dataset of 702 journal articles. A computer-aided co-citation net- work analysis of 12,853 citations that have been meticulously voted by over ten thousand authors traces the historical timeline of the development paths and paradigms shift of decision analysis studies. Based on the analysis, we divided the development of research on decision analysis studies into three stages: initializing stage (1966-1983), developing stage (1984-1996), and declining stage (1997-2007). We ranked overall first author citations, article citations and journal citations for each stage. Using network analysis, we mapped the co-citation network for each stage and analyzed the centrality of top 27, 31 and 25 articles in three different stages. This study not only draws a clearer picture of decision analysis development, but also offers some useful information for researchers in planning their future research in this area.

Detailed Devotion

Detailed Devotion

Citations and Individuals: First Authorship across the Alphabet

The presence of a bias in citation counts drawn from sources with first-author citations only are investigated. The study finds systematic bias against authors whose last names begin with letters that occur later in the alphabet, with authors receiving approximately one-half percent less first author citations of the total pieces per letter the later their names are in the alphabet. Given these biases, counts should certainly be used with care. Perhaps there are ways of improving them by either maintaining professionally-based citation counts or by lobbying sources, such as the Social Science Citation Index, to include all authors in their counts.