Authors Lerchenmueller, Sorenson, and Jena analyze a set of over 6 million research articles in PubMed to determine how the promotion of research findings affects the attention the research receives. The article uses a set of techniques, from multivariable regression to natural language processing, to relate the positive framing of otherwise comparable research findings to differences in downstream citations. The work is published in the BMJ. An open education contribution summarizes the findings in the New York Times and additional analyses with a focus on career trajectories appears in the Harvard Business Review:
Research cited in Nature Immunology
We are grateful for Akiko Iwasaki acknowledging our research in outlining steps towards a more diverse science community. Importantly, evidence indicates that the metaphor of the “leaky pipeline” understates precipitous female attrition at decisive career transition points. It seems more a “gushing pipeline”.
Research cited in New York Times
We are proud that our research informs an important discourse on gender gaps in science at the case of the Salk Institute lawsuit, covered in the New York Times 2019.
The Gender Gap in Early Career Transitions in the Life Sciences
Research Policy (2018): A large portion of the gender gap in the life sciences emerges between the post-doctoral and associate professor levels. Women transition to principal investigator at about a 20% lower rate than men. Gender differences in publication records can explain about 60% of this lower rate. The remaining differential stems from women receiving less credit for their citations. Altmetric attention score: Within the top 15 of over 1,600 tracked Research Policy articles.
Long-Term Analysis of Sex Differences in Prestigious Authorships
CIRCULATION (2018): Women remain underrepresented on life science faculties in general, and on cardiovascular research faculties in particular. Whether differences in prestigious authorships contribute to this gender gap remains unclear. We analyzed 63,636 authorships on NIH-R01-supported articles across 107 cardiovascular journals indexed in PubMed to estimate the relative risk (RR) of first and last authorship for women relative to men. We analyzed how the RR varied over 30 years, focusing on studies in cardiovascular research, but we also extended our analysis to 2,699,061 authorships on R01-supported articles across 3,849 journals indexed in PubMed and sub-analyzed the RR for journals of different…