Gender differences in authorships are not associated with publication bias in an evolutionary journal

PLoS One. 2018 Aug 29;13(8):e0201725. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0201725. eCollection 2018.

Abstract

The loss of talented women from senior academic positions has partly resulted from a lower number of published papers and the accompanying reduced visibility of female compared to male scientists. The reasons for these gender-differences in authorship is unclear. One potential reason is a bias in the editorial and review process of scientific journals. We investigated whether patterns of authorship and editorial outcome were biased according to gender and geographic location in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology. Such potential bias may contribute to inequality in the field. We found patterns of gender differences in authorship, but this was unrelated to the editorial decision of whether to publish the manuscript. Female first-authors (the lead role) were six times less likely to be named as the corresponding author than male first-authors, and female first-authors were more likely to be displaced as corresponding authors by female co-authors than were male first-authors. We found an under-representation of female first- and last-authors compared to baseline populations of members of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology (which publishes the Journal of Evolutionary Biology) and of Evolutionary Biology faculty at the world top-10 universities for the Life Sciences. Also, manuscripts from Asia were five times more likely to be rejected on the final decision, independent of gender. Overall our results suggest that the peer review processes we investigated at the Journal of Evolutionary Biology are predominately gender-neutral, but not neutral to geographic location. Editorial gender-bias is thus unlikely to be a contributing factor to differences in authorship in this journal.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Authorship*
  • Biological Evolution*
  • Editorial Policies
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Male
  • Periodicals as Topic / statistics & numerical data*
  • Publications / statistics & numerical data*
  • Sex Factors
  • Sexism / statistics & numerical data*

Associated data

  • figshare/10.6084/m9.figshare.5821110.v1

Grants and funding

HAE was supported by a €1000 European Society of Evolutionary Biology (ESEB) Equal Opportunities Fund 2017. The editorial office of the Journal of Evolutionary Biology, the society journal for the ESEB, provided data on the reviewing requests and publication decisions of manuscripts submitted to the journal between January 2012 and February 2016.