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Together, these findings paint a stark picture of the citation landscape for women scientists, Bassett says. But they note that the news was not all bad. For example, Teich, Bassett, and their colleagues found that physics journals that publish more papers by women and those that publish longer reference lists tend to contain papers that cite closer to the levels expected if citations were uninfluenced by gender. Bassett finds these correlations striking as they suggest that if researchers cited more papers or if journals published more papers by women, the citation gender imbalance could disappear. “Those are correlative findings, but they are findings we could test for causal relations,” Bassett says.
While those causal tests have yet to be carried out, the team has homed in on possible causes of the current disparities. One of those is what Bassett calls the “1995 effect.” The team’s analysis shows that most physics papers cite as if the diversity of the field has remained static for the past 25 years, which they note is not the case. Since 1995, the percentage of women professors has jumped from 3% to over 13% and women PhD students from under 6% to over 16%. The number of women at other career levels has also risen, but their representation in the most cited works has not. If that trend continues, it means that over time the imbalance will get worse, “which is what we are seeing in the data,” Bassett says.
The 1995 effect suggests that there is a significant lag between a person entering a field and their work being cited, says Christopher Lynn of Princeton University, who worked with Teich and Bassett on the physics study. “We’re still citing papers from the 1970s or 1980s or even before and missing out on the newer papers, which are more likely to be authored by women,” he says. Lynn thinks that this effect may have been exacerbated over recent years by the increased reliance of researchers on search engines, such as Google Scholar, for searching through the relevant literature. That idea is backed up by a 2008 study that found that when journals moved from being available only in print to being predominantly online, fewer unique papers were cited [5]. That finding suggests that the transition caused citation diversity to collapse, Bassett says.
When ranking papers in a list, Google Scholar accounts for factors such as the closeness of the words in a paper’s title to the search terms and the number of citations a paper has received. Older papers are more likely to have more citations, because they have been around longer, and thus get pushed to the top of the first page of the search results. The proliferation of scholarly publications also makes it difficult to keep up with all the work going on in the field, says Erika Andersson, a quantum physicist at Heriot-Watt University, UK, and an editor for Physical Review A. Andersson recently became aware of Bassett’s work at a workshop. “It’s easy to find that you are only following the famous people and missing other work that is often more interesting,” she says.
These citation practices mean that papers authored by men are more likely to get read—and then get more citations—Lynn says. “It’s a snowball effect. Any paper that has a slight edge in the [citation] game will rise to the top.” Knowing that biases can creep in, Lynn says that he has changed how he searches the literature. Lynn no longer picks the first relevant study on the search list to back up some statement in his paper’s introduction. Instead, he clicks through, looking for other studies, perhaps with more specific data. He then also includes those studies in the citations. In doing so, he naturally sees his references cite more diverse researchers. “I hold myself accountable for each and every reference I cite in a paper,” Lynn says. “We are all busy people, but this [action] doesn’t take that much effort.”
Physicist-turned-sociologist Charles Gomez of the University of Arizona thinks that journal editors could also hold researchers accountable for their reference lists, checking to see which papers researchers included. But he acknowledges that “there is no silver bullet to fix citation inequities.” Gomez published a study that came out in May 2022 that found that papers authored by researchers at institutions in core scientific countries—which include the US, Canada, China, Japan, South Korea, Israel, and some countries in western Europe—are significantly overcited compared to those in other places (Latin America, Africa, the rest of Asia, and the Middle East) [3]. “Modern science is thought of as an international enterprise that transcends national boundaries, but citations overwhelmingly go to researchers in just a handful of countries,” he says.
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