Gender inequality and self-publication are common among academic editors

Loading...
Thumbnail Image
Access rights
openAccess
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
A1 Alkuperäisartikkeli tieteellisessä aikakauslehdessä
Date
2023-03
Major/Subject
Mcode
Degree programme
Language
en
Pages
12
353-364
Series
Nature Human Behaviour, Volume 7, issue 3
Abstract
Scientific editors shape the content of academic journals and set standards for their fields. Yet, the degree to which the gender makeup of editors reflects that of scientists, and the rate at which editors publish in their own journals, are not entirely understood. Here, we use algorithmic tools to infer the gender of 81,000 editors serving more than 1,000 journals and 15 disciplines over five decades. Only 26% of authors in our dataset are women, and we find even fewer women among editors (14%) and editors-in-chief (8%). Career length explains the gender gap among editors, but not editors-in-chief. Moreover, by analysing the publication records of 20,000 editors, we find that 12% publish at least one-fifth, and 6% publish at least one-third, of their papers in the journal they edit. Editors-in-chief tend to self-publish at a higher rate. Finally, compared with women, men have a higher increase in the rate at which they publish in a journal soon after becoming its editor.
Description
Funding Information: We gratefully acknowledge support and resources from the High Performance Computing Center at New York University Abu Dhabi. We thank A. Kyriazidou and C. Haefke for their feedback and comments, which improved the paper. This work was supported by the New York University Abu Dhabi (Global PhD Student Fellowship to F.L.) and JSPS KAKENHI (grant no. JP21H04595 to P.H.). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript. Publisher Copyright: © 2023, The Author(s).
Keywords
Other note
Citation
Liu, F, Holme, P, Chiesa, M, AlShebli, B & Rahwan, T 2023, ' Gender inequality and self-publication are common among academic editors ', Nature Human Behaviour, vol. 7, no. 3, pp. 353-364 . https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-022-01498-1