IT SOUNDS like playground stuff, but male academics don’t like citing the work produced by their female colleagues.
Despite a significant and growing presence in universities, female academics are not being cited as frequently as their male colleagues, The Times Higher Education Supplement (Aug 11) reports.
An analysis of three international journals of library and information sciences between 1980 and 2000 reveals that just 30 per cent of citations in papers by male academics were written by female authors. By contrast, half of the citations in the work of female academics were by women.
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“This indicates a gender bias and means that men are not quoting women as much as they deserve,” says the Swedish researcher responsible for the study. She does concede, however, that because female academics tend to be more junior than their male colleagues, they are less likely to be cited in research.