[seminar] Astro Journal Club on November 16th

[Lana Ceraj]

Dear all,

this Wednesday on Astro Jorunal Club Jacinta is going to present a study
of the role that the gender of first author plays on the number of
citations.

Journal Club starts at 3 p.m. (sharp) in the seminar room F-201 of the
Physics Department.

Presenter: Jacinta Delhaize

Title: Quantitative Evaluation of Gender Bias in Astronomical Publications
from Citation Counts

Authors: Neven Caplar, Sandro Tacchella, Simon Birrer

Abstract:
We analyse the role of first (leading) author gender on the number of
citations that a paper receives, on the publishing frequency and on the
self-citing tendency. We consider a complete sample of over 200,000
publications from 1950 to 2015 from five major astronomy journals. We
determine the gender of the first author for over 70% of all publications.
The fraction of papers which have a female first author has increased from
less than 5% in the 1960s to about 25% today. We find that the increase of
the fraction of papers authored by females is slowest in the most
prestigious journals such as Science and Nature. Furthermore, female
authors write 19+-7% fewer papers in seven years following their first
paper than their male colleagues. At all times papers with male first
authors receive more citations than papers with female first authors. This
difference has been decreasing with time and amounts to ~6% measured
over the last 30 years. To account for the fact that the properties of
female and male first author papers differ intrinsically, we use a random
forest algorithm to control for the non-gender specific properties of
these papers which include seniority of the first author, number of
references, total number of authors, year of publication, publication
journal, field of study and region of the first author's institution. We
show that papers authored by females receive 10.4+-0.9% fewer citations
than what would be expected if the papers with the same non-gender
specific properties were written by the male authors. Finally, we also
find that female authors in our sample tend to self-cite more, but that
this effect disappears when controlled for non-gender specific variables.

Link to the paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.08984

If you’ve recently read interesting astrophysics paper you would
like to present, please contact me via e-mail: lceraj at phy.hr

The only currently filled slot is November 30th.

See you on Wednesday.

Cheers,
Lana