RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Gender (im)balance in citation practices in cognitive neuroscience
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 2020.08.19.257402
DO 10.1101/2020.08.19.257402
A1 Jacqueline M. Fulvio
A1 Ileri Akinnola
A1 Bradley R. Postle
YR 2020
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/08/20/2020.08.19.257402.abstract
AB 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 et al., 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 effective. 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 (JoCN). The results indicate that the underrepresentation of women-led publications in reference sections is also characteristic of papers published in JoCN over the past decade. Furthermore, this pattern of citation imbalances is present for all gender classes of authors, 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.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.