Gender Imbalance in Citation Practices in Communication Sciences and Disorders Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Abstract

Purpose: Despite recent advances, gender inequality remains a major concern within the workforce. One manifestation of gender inequality in academia is the undercitation of women-authored compared to men-authored papers that is thought to reflect implicit biases and has important implications for the academic advancement for research-intensive female faculty. These studies largely stem from male-dominant professions. Thus, in this study, we investigated gendered citation practices within communication sciences and disorders (CSD), a female-dominant discipline. We also examined the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic as an exogenous driver of short-term change in publication and citation practices in CSD.

Method: Using methods from Dworkin et al. (2020), we characterized expected versus actual man first/man last-authored (MM), man first/woman last-authored (MW), woman first/man last-authored (WM), and woman first/woman last-authored (WW) articles published within a 24-year time span in the four American Speech-Language-Hearing Association journals. We compared gendered publication and citation practices in the 10 years before (2010-2019) to during (August 2020-November 2022) the COVID-19 pandemic.

Results: Across journals, we found WW publications increased while MM publications decreased from 1998 to 2022. We found a pattern of overcitation of WW papers and undercitation of MM papers, which was driven primarily by the citation practices of WM and WW teams. These citation trends were found for the years before and during the pandemic and remained when controlling for relevant paper characteristics and author and paper network variables.

Conclusions: Consistent with our predictions, we found gender-based citation imbalances that aligned with the gender distributions of CSD, like other fields. The findings align with the notion of homophily (i.e., like attracts like). We review the findings within the context of citation research from other fields as well as discuss the larger implications of these patterns for professional practices in CSD.