Gender (Im)balance in Citation Practices in Cognitive Neuroscience

Abstract

In the field of neuroscience, despite the fact that the proportion of peer-reviewed publications authored by women has increased in recent decades, the proportion of citations of women-led publications has not seen a commensurate increase: In five broad-scope journals, citations of papers first- and/or last-authored by women have been shown to be fewer than would be expected if gender was not a factor in citation decisions [Dworkin, J. D., Linn, K. A., Teich, E. G., Zurn, P., Shinohara, R. T., & Bassett, D. S. The extent and drivers of gender imbalance in neuroscience reference lists. Nature Neuroscience, 23, 918-926, 2020]. Given the important implications that such underrepresentation may have on the careers of women researchers, it is important to determine whether this same trend is true in subdisciplines of the field, where interventions might be more targeted. Here, we report the results of an extension of the analyses carried out by Dworkin et al. (2020) to citation patterns in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. The results indicate that the underrepresentation of women-led publications in reference sections is also characteristic of papers published in Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience over the past decade. Furthermore, this pattern of citation imbalances is present regardless of author gender, implicating systemic factors. These results contribute to the growing body of evidence that intentional action is needed to address inequities in the way that we carry out and communicate our science.

Figure 1.

Gender breakdown in JoCN authorship from 2009 to 2020. Proportion of JoCN papers assigned to four categories: men as the first and last author (MM; purple), women as the first author and men as the last author (WM; darker green), men as the first author and women as the last author (MW; lighter green), and women as both the first and last author (WW; salmon). For ease of comparison across time, the proportions of each category are indicated for 2009 (left) and 2020 (right).

Figure 2.

Gender Citation Balance Indices for the four gender categories of peer-reviewed papers published in JoCN. Error bars correspond to bootstrapped 95% confidence intervals.

Figure 3.

Gender Citation Balance Indices for peer-reviewed papers published in JoCN, broken down by citing papers’ gender category. Error bars correspond to bootstrapped 95% confidence intervals.