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Is there a differentiated gender effect of collaboration with super-cited authors? Evidence from junior researchers in economics

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Abstract

In recent decades, economists have analyzed different types of gender inequality. Female researchers tend to have lower pay, write fewer articles, and receive fewer citations than their male counterparts. In this paper, we investigate whether there is a medium-term effect of gender on the career of junior researchers who collaborated with a super-cited (SC) author within 5 years of their first publication. We employ a matching model using co-authorship network measurements to compare similar junior collaborators and non-collaborators. We find a positive effect on the impact of all junior collaborators, but there is no statistically significant difference between men and women. Female and male junior collaborators have similar increases in SC co-authorship events and unique SC co-authors relative to non-collaborators, which might help explain this non-differentiated medium-term advantage.

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Notes

  1. The usual practice in economics papers is to list authors’ names alphabetically. Kuld and O’Hagan (2018) find no evidence that the ordering of names in multi-author papers signals differences in contributions.

  2. https://www.aeaweb.org/resources/member-docs/final-climate-survey-results-sept-2019.

  3. In RePEc, only the journal publisher can index material. See https://ideas.repec.org/t/articletemplate.html.

  4. Articles published prior to 1990 account for less than 1% of the total (Fig. S1).

  5. Number of citations greater than \(\mu + 1.5 \times (Q3{-}Q1)\), where \(\mu\) is the mean of the distribution and Qi is the ith quartile.

  6. Following Barabási et al. (2020) and Ebadi and Schiffauerova (2015), career length is calculated as the time between the first and last publication.

  7. We exclude one author who meets these criteria because we do not have subfield information.

  8. The exclusion of SC authors is dictated by the need to find a reasonable balance in covariates between junior collaborators and non-collaborators. Also, we are interested in finding the effect on junior researchers who can benefit the most from co-authorship with an SC author.

  9. In all our analysis, we exclude self-citations.

  10. Following Baser (2007), sample sizes are considered significantly different if one group is \(< 5\%\) the size of the other group.

  11. See Baser (2007) for a detailed explanation.

  12. The explanation of these matching estimators closely follows Smith and Todd (2005), Becker and Ichino (2002), Heckman et al. (1998) and Heckman et al. (1997).

  13. An author’s country is defined as the country of institutional affiliation.

  14. The propensity score is estimated using the Stata program pscore, developed by Becker and Ichino (2002).

  15. We exclude 19 non-collaborators who fall outside the common support region.

  16. We use a log transformation of the dependent variable given the highly skewed distributions. Although the propensity score matching algorithm does not require normality of the errors, the OLS and weighting approach does. Also, following Criscuolo et al. (2019) and Macurdy and Pencavel (1986), we add one to the values of the variables before taking logs to avoid excluding observations with a value of zero, which make up about half of our observations.

  17. Indicator function with a value of one if the junior researcher was an SC author in any of the years 6–10 of their career.

  18. Since the dependent variable is in logs, for every one-unit increase in the independent variable, our dependent variable increases by about \((exp^\beta -1) \times 100\).

  19. We determine the subject areas of each journal using the Scopus All Science Journal Classification Codes (ASJC).

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  1. Rodrigo Dorantes-Gilardi

    Present address: Network Science Institute and Department of Physics, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, 02115, USA

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  1. El Colegio de México, Carretera Picacho Ajusco 20, Ampliación Fuentes del Pedregal, Tlalpan, 14110, Mexico, Mexico

    Rodrigo Dorantes-Gilardi, Aurora A. Ramírez-Álvarez & Diana Terrazas-Santamaría

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A previous version of this paper, “Is There a Differentiated Gender Effect of Collaboration with Super-Cited authors? Evidence from Early-Career Economists” (Dorantes-Gilardi et al., 2021), is available at https://cee.colmex.mx/dts/2021/DT-2021-5.pdf.

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Dorantes-Gilardi, R., Ramírez-Álvarez, A.A. & Terrazas-Santamaría, D. Is there a differentiated gender effect of collaboration with super-cited authors? Evidence from junior researchers in economics. Scientometrics 128, 2317–2336 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-023-04656-y

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