Biology subjects

Lariviere, V.

Publications and source records attributed to Lariviere, V..

5 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2023

Gender differences in submission behavior exacerbate publication disparities in elite journals

Women are particularly underrepresented as leading authors of papers in journals of the highest impact factor, with substantial consequences for their careers. While a large body of research has focused on the outcome and the process of peer review, fewer articles have explicitly focused on gendered submission behavior and the explanations for these differences. In our study of nearly five thousand active authors, we find that women are less likely to report having submitted papers to journals of the highest impact (e.g., Science, Nature, or PNAS) andto submit fewer manuscripts, on average, than men when they do submit. Women were more likely to indicate that they did not submit their papers (in general and their subsequently most cited papers) to high-impact journals because they were advised not to. In the aggregate, no statistically significant difference was observed between men and women in how they rated the quality of their work. Nevertheless, regardless of discipline, women were more likely than men to indicate that their "work was not ground-breaking or sufficiently novel" as a rationale for not submitting to one of the listed prestigious journals. Men were more likely than women to indicate that the "work would fit better in a more specialized journal." We discuss the implications of these findings and interventions that can serve to mitigate the disparities caused by gendered differences in submission behavior. SignificancePublishing in high-impact scholarly journals has a significant effect on researchers careers. Our findings identify factors that affect submission to Science, Nature, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) and explore whether there is a relationship between gender and desk rejections or submission rates. We found no relationship between gender and reported desk rejection and a relationship between gender and reported submissions, with men having a greater number of submissions. Women were more likely than men to indicate that their "work was not ground-breaking or sufficiently novel" for the listed prestigious journals and that they were advised against submitting to these venues. Men were more likely to indicate that the "work would fit better in a more specialized journal."

scientific communication and education↗

bioRxiv2023

Contrasting the open access dissemination of COVID-19 and SDG research

This paper examines the extent to which research has been published open access in response to two global threats: COVID-19 and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including climate change. We compare the accessibility of COVID-19 content versus SDG literature using the Dimensions database between 2000 and 2021, classifying each publication as gold open access, green, bronze, hybrid, or closed. We found that 79.9% of COVID-19 research papers published between January 2020 and December 2021 was open access, with 39.0% published with gold open access licenses. In contrast, just 55.7% of SDG papers were open access in the same time period, with only 36.0% published with gold open access licenses. Papers related to the climate emergency overall had the second-lowest level of open access at just 55.5%. Papers published by the largest for-profit publishers that committed to both the SDG Publishers Compact and climate actions were not predominantly published open access. The paper highlights the need for continued efforts to promote open access publishing to facilitate scientific research and technological development to address global challenges. One-Sentence SummaryIn contrast to COVID-19 papers, research on UN Sustainable Development Goals including the climate emergency have not been made open access by leading global science publishers despite their corporate commitments to sustainability and climate action.

scientific communication and education↗

bioRxiv2020

Task specialization and its effects on research careers

Scientific careers are conceived as one unique pathway which scientists must follow to succeed. We report the diversity of profiles scientists exhibit based on their contributorship and look into biases in their career trajectory. We use Bayesian networks to train a prediction model based on a dataset of 70,694 publications from PLoS journals representing 347,136 distinct authors and their associated contribution statements. This model is used to predict the contributions of 222,925 authors in 6,236,239 publications, and apply a robust archetypal analysis to profile scientists by career stage. We divide scientific careers into four stages: junior, early-career, mid-career and late-career. Three scientific archetypes are found throughout the four career stages: leader, specialized, and supporting. All three archetypes are encountered for the early- and mid-career stages, whereas for junior and late-career stages only two archetypes are found. Scientists assigned to the leader and specialized archetypes tend to have longer careers than researchers who belong to the supporting archetype. There is consistent gender bias at all stages: the majority of male scientists belong to the leader archetype, while the larger proportion of women belong to the specialized archetype, especially for early and mid-career researchers.

scientific communication and education↗

bioRxiv2018

Gender and international diversity improves equity in peer review

The fairness of scholarly peer review has been challenged by evidence of disparities in publication outcomes based on author demographic characteristics. To assess this, we conducted an exploratory analysis of peer review outcomes of 23,876 initial submissions and 7,192 full submissions that were submitted to the biosciences journal eLife between 2012 and 2017. Women and authors from nations outside of North America and Europe were underrepresented both as gatekeepers (editors and peer reviewers) and authors. We found evidence of a homophilic relationship between the demographics of the gatekeepers and authors and the outcome of peer review; that is, there were higher rates of acceptance in the case of gender and country homophily. The acceptance rate for manuscripts with male last authors was seven percent, or 3.5 percentage points, greater than for female last authors (95% CI = [0.5, 6.4]); this gender inequity was greatest, at nine percent or about 4.8 percentage points (95% CI = [0.3, 9.1]), when the team of reviewers was all male; this difference was smaller and not significantly different for mixed-gender reviewer teams. Homogeny between countries of the gatekeeper and the corresponding author was also associated with higher acceptance rates for many countries. To test for the persistence of these effects after controlling for potentially confounding variables, we conducted a logistic regression including document and author metadata. Disparities in acceptance rates associated with gender and country of affiliation and the homophilic associations remained. We conclude with a discussion of mechanisms that could contribute to this effect, directions for future research, and policy implications. Code and anonymized data have been made available at https://github.com/murrayds/elife-analysis\n\nAuthor summaryPeer review, the primary method by which scientific work is evaluated, is ideally a fair and equitable process in which scientific work is judged solely on its own merit. However, the integrity of peer review has been called into question based on evidence that outcomes often differ between male and female authors, and for authors in different countries. We investigated such disparities at the biosciences journal eLife by analyzing the demographics of authors and gatekeepers (editors and peer reviewers), and peer review outcomes of all submissions between 2012 and 2017. Outcomes were more favorable for male authors and those affiliated with institutions in North America and Europe; these groups were also over-represented among gatekeepers. There was evidence that peer review outcomes were influenced by homophily --a preference of gatekeepers for manuscripts from authors with shared characteristics. We discuss mechanisms that could contribute to this effect, directions for future research, and policy implications.

scientific communication and education↗

bioRxiv2017

The Rise of the Middle Author: Investigating Collaboration and Division of Labor in Biomedical Research using Partial Alphabetical Authorship

Contemporary biomedical research is performed by increasingly large teams. As a consequence, an increasingly large number of individuals are being listed as authors in the byline of biomedical articles, which complicates the proper attribution of credit and responsibility to individual authors for their work. Typically, more importance is given to the first and last authors of biomedical papers, and the others (the middle authors) are considered to have made smaller contributions. However, we argue that this distinction between first, middle and last authors does not properly reflect the actual division of labor and does not allow a fair allocation of credit among the members of the research teams. In this paper, we use partial alphabetical authorship to divide the authors of all biomedical articles in the Web of Science published over the 1980-2015 period in three groups: primary authors, middle authors, and supervisory authors. We show that alphabetical ordering of middle authors is frequent in biomedical research, and that the prevalence of this practice is positively correlated with the number of authors in the bylines. We also find that, for articles with 7 or more authors, the average proportion of team members in each group is independent of the team size, more than half of the authors being middle authors. This suggests that growth in authors lists are not due to an increase in secondary contributions but, rather, in equivalent increases of all types of roles and contributions. Nevertheless, we show that the relative contribution of middle authors to the overall production of knowledge in the biomedical field as increased dramatically over the last 35 years.

scientific communication and education↗