Gender variations in citation distributions in medicine are very small and due to self-citation and journal prestige

Aarhus University, Denmark
University of Michigan, United States

Jul 15, 2019

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Jens Peter Andersen

Jesper Wiborg Schneider

Reshma Jagsi

Mathias W Nielsen

(2019)
Gender variations in citation distributions in medicine are very small and due to self-citation and journal prestige

eLife 8:e45374.

https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.45374
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Abstract

A number of studies suggest that scientific papers with women in leading-author positions attract fewer citations than those with men in leading-author positions. We report the results of a matched case-control study of 1,269,542 papers in selected areas of medicine published between 2008 and 2014. We find that papers with female authors are, on average, cited between 6.5% and 12.6% less than papers with male authors. However, the standardized mean differences are very small, and the percentage overlaps between the distributions for male and female authors are extensive. Adjusting for self-citations, number of authors, international collaboration and journal prestige, we find near-identical per-paper citation impact for women and men in first and last author positions, with self-citations and journal prestige accounting for most of the small average differences. Our study demonstrates the importance of focusing greater attention to within-group variability and between-group overlap of distributions when interpreting and reporting results of gender-based comparisons of citation impact.

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All final data and analytical scripts are available on GitHub: https://github.com/ipoga/gendcit.

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Jens Peter Andersen

Danish Centre for Studies on Research and Research Policy, Aarhus University, Aarhus C, Denmark

For correspondence
jpa@ps.au.dk

Competing interests
No competing interests declared.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0003-2444-6210
Jesper Wiborg Schneider

Danish Centre for Studies on Research and Research Policy, Aarhus University, Aarhus C, Denmark

Competing interests
No competing interests declared.
Reshma Jagsi

Department of Radiation Oncology and Center for Bioethics and Social Sciences in Medicine, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, United States

Competing interests
Reshma Jagsi, stock options in Equity Quotient; advisory role and personal fees from Amgen and consulting for Vizient.
Mathias W Nielsen

Danish Centre for Studies on Research and Research Policy, Aarhus University, Aarhus C, Denmark

Competing interests
No competing interests declared.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0001-8759-7150

Funding

Danish Ministry of Higher Education and Science (6183-00001B)

Jesper Wiborg Schneider

Aarhus University Research Foundation (AUFF-2018-7-5)

Mathias W Nielsen

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Copyright

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.