Gendered citation patterns among the scientific elite

Abstract

Diversity in science is necessary to improve innovation and increase the capacity of the scientific workforce. Despite decades-long efforts to increase gender diversity, however, women remain a small minority in many fields, especially in senior positions. The dearth of elite women scientists, in turn, leaves fewer women to serve as mentors and role models for young women scientists. To shed light on gender disparities in science, we study prominent scholars who were elected to the National Academy of Sciences. We construct author citation networks that capture the structure of recognition among scholars' peers. We identify gender disparities in the patterns of peer citations and show that these differences are strong enough to accurately predict the scholar's gender. In contrast, we do not observe disparities due to prestige, with few significant differences in the structure of citations of scholars affiliated with high-ranked and low-ranked institutions. These results provide further evidence that a scholar's gender plays a role in the mechanisms of success in science.

Keywords: bibliometrics; gender; gender disparities; science of science.

Fig. 1.

Number of members elected to the NAS split by year and (A) gender or (B) prestige of the member’s institutional affiliation. Only members active in seven fields as of 2021 are considered.

Fig. 2.

Citation ego networks and features. (A–C) Ego networks of three psychologists elected during the specified year. Only edges representing three or more cited papers are included. The nodes are sized by centrality, with the ego shown in red. Comparison of mean ego network features split by ego’s (D) gender and (E) institutional prestige. Statistically significant differences in the means are marked by asterisks: ***P  <  0.001, **P  <  0.01, *P  <  0.05.