02/25: Danielle Bassett

[smiklin]

Comment below with questions or thoughts about the reading for this week's workshop.

Please make your comments by Wednesday 11:59 PM, and upvote at least five of your peers' comments on Thursday prior to the workshop. You need to use 'thumbs-up' for your reactions to count towards 'top comments,' but you can use other emojis on top of the thumbs up.

[nwrim]

Thanks for coming to our workshop! I think I speak for everybody in the program that has an interest in neuroscience when I say I am very, very excited to have you here. I do confess that I have not read the papers in full detail but I saw the mentioning of this essential line of works a lot on Twitter, etc.

That being said, I have some really minor details of the paper that I found interesting and wanted to ask the reason behind your decision. I part I thought was a very interesting choice in both the paper was that you focused on the first and the last author. This decision totally makes sense, because I think in a typical paper, the most senior author (or the corresponding author) is listed last and the author that contributed most and "own" the paper is listed first (I heard the famous term "publish or perish" is a bit out of fashion and "publish impactful papers as first author or perish" is closer to the truth). I definitely agree that they are the people who likely "led" the paper.

However, I do think as the Science we deal with gets more complicated, there are multiple complications in the story - for example, I have seen quite a lot of papers with "these authors contributed equally" as the first author and/or papers with multiple senior authors (I guess this is because nowadays lots of papers are collaborations of works on more than one lab). I think the latter example is very interesting in terms of citing behavior since I have read (skimmed through must be more accurate, I again confess) a paper because I saw a famous scholar being co-authored a paper (not necessarily the senior author) multiple times.

I would love to hear why you decided to focus on first-last author pairs!

Another thing I also wanted to ask was the definition of similar papers - I just was curious why the semantic content of the paper or the field paper belongs to (I feel like neuroscience does have an insane variation in sub-categories) was not considered in defining similar papers. Although I think this is really minor, I think there could be some heteroskedasticity within Neuroscience between fields (e.g., a field can have a "star" researcher that is female or POC that is almost always cited, making the pattern a little different). Did you take this into consideration when pursuing the study?

[bakerwho]

Thank you for joining us at the workshop! I really enjoyed reading your fascinating and important work on citation imbalances.

I have a meta-question about the response to your work. I noticed that the discussion sections of your work included a call to action, as well as pointers to references and tools that could help folks who are interested in mindfully dismantling these imbalances. I really appreciated seeing these resources (many of which I didn't know about before).

I noticed that you demonstrate your results not just with the the top 5 neuroscience journals, but also the more general Web of Science data. I was wondering which fields you found to have the least or most citation imbalances. Have you been able to address different communities of researchers about your findings? What has been the response to your demonstration of citation imbalances (that presumably many researchers actively perpetuate, even if unintentionally)? Has it varied by discipline?

[xzmerry]

Thanks for sharing your research which reveals the inequality in academia! As @bakerwho has mentioned, I am also wondering that how this imbalance varies by discipline (such as researchers in different disciplines are demographically different). Besides, even though there is a citation imbalance, is it solvable? What do you think is the right way to cope with such imbalance? Though sometimes it is called "injustice in science", as we sometimes ascribe it to unevenly distributed education resources, we could cause new injustice if we cater for the less capable. So what is the right way to solve it besides discovering the phenomena? Looking forward to your presentation!

[SoyBison]

Thanks for coming to our workshop Dr. Bassett, I, like Nak Won, am extremely excited to have you here, and to meet you tomorrow.

It is my understanding that I have been extremely lucky to be able to work in a collaboratively-structured lab that values giving academic credit where it's due. I also understand this is may put us in the minority in the cognitive science space. (I have a story for another time where one of the lab members chose not to ask for help from another lab because they demanded a higher co-authorship status than would be deserved.) This is all to say that I'm going to ask about a different, but not unrelated subject.

While there are general guidelines about citations and credit that are similar across the sciences, the exact definition of what any given position or equal-credit mark, or etc. means can vary across fields, across universities, and even across labs. We can imagine situations where a famous PI would get last authorship on a student's paper as a way to boost visibility for the student, (or the inverse, where a PI may bury their name in the list of authors to avoid consequences for a paper that they expect will be "spicy" on Twitter.) There are many scenarios like this that we can come up with, and I'm sure that a lot of us have stories about similar phenomena happening to us or our colleagues. How can we reconcile all these forces in analyzing academic culture in the future?

[AlexPrizzy]

Thank you very much for coming to our workshop to discuss this matter because this is a very important issue in the rapidly expanding field of neuroscience and cognitive science. It's common for the field to be dominated by prestigious authors with little to no recognition of the hard working teams behind them, whose members face difficulties with entering the field of neuroscience themselves. Current neuroscience programs tend to be highly competitive with entry being near impossible for students of marginalized groups especially those coming from a life of public inner city schools. I myself am currently working on a community based cognitive "citizen science" project in order to allow underrepresented people, non-top tier college students, and high schoolers to explore the field of cognitive science. Do you think such a project could help expand representation within the field of neuroscience or are institutionalized barriers still going to send such folk into the same category of not receiving recognition for their work in the field?

[MkramerPsych]

Dr. Bassett,

I would like to echo the sentiments of my classmates in sharing my excitement to hear your talk and to discuss these issues with you. As a cognitive neuroscience researcher (and a computational researcher), I have no doubt my reference lists are dominated by male authors and could stand to promote diversity in the neuroscience field.

In reading the 2021 paper, I found myself in strong agreement about the need for proactive measures to be taken to promote diversity in citation, but I was curious as to the recommendations made for how to go about it in our own research practices. Your example includes the caveat that a paper is already complete, and it is at that point that we should analyze our reference list and potentially make changes based on the results of our gender bias analysis. Would you agree that this seems more reactive than proactive? The main reason I wonder as to the efficacy of this practice is that the gender/race disparity in scientific research is a deep systemic issue starting in education and leading into academia and industry. For example, the disparity in tenure positions held by men and women and stereotype threat in STEM education seem to be important components of this problem. Wouldn't it make more sense to allocate resources to combating bias in these spaces than trying to implement a new reactive policy for neuroscience research?

[k-partha]

Thank you for presenting at our workshop! I think your work touches on some critical structural aspects of institutional science and is highly relevant to many important threads of discourse.

The sociological structure within which science survives today heavily influences (and always has) the attentional priorities of institutional science, by incentivizing science with motivations closer to contemporarily acceptable social themes. Some of this influence may align with the motivations of science - such as bringing a diversity of critical opinion to the table and ensuring better access to marginalized knowledge creators. Some of this influence, however, is not conducive to scientific inquiry - it may detract scientific attention to areas that are socially taboo but critical for the advancements of certain fields.

Do you see the role of an ideal scientist in this context as one who must necessarily take a meta-analytical stance regarding the social context of institutional science?

[rkcatipon]

Thank you Dr. Bassett for sharing your work! I'm a complete layperson in the field of neuroscience so it's a pleasure to get a sneak peek into another discipline. I'd like to echo @SoyBison's question and also ask if maybe a standard practice of "how to share credit" would help with such ambiguity? Excited to hear more!

[Raychanan]

I was surprised by the fact that imbalances within the social networks of authors account for roughly one-third of the observed overcitation of men. And this number represents the behavior of intellectuals in our society.

When I'm thinking of the drivers of the phenomenon, I was considering if the imbalance is also a result of the number of male researchers in that field. If the field is dominated by males, it's easy for people to produce such implicit prejudice.

Addressing the identified imbalances requires many efforts and you offered the "citation gender diversity statement" as a possible measure, near the end of this paper. However, I'm worried that this kind of statement may be evolved into another kind of "political correctness" in the future and many researchers may make efforts to approach the number 50%, regardless of the actual proportion of researchers' sexuality in that field.

[egemenpamukcu]

Thank you for sharing your work Dr. Bassett. What do you think would be the less tangible second order effects of these imbalances in citation networks? As you mention several times, citation counts seem to be one of the key metrics used in the measurement of 'performance' in academia, which ends up determining career advancements, access to research grants and many other things that can directly or indirectly influence the capability of a scientist to produce novel research, disrupt a scientific field, or more generally make an impact on the world. Do you think it would be possible (or meaningful) to concretize the long-term negative effects of these imbalances?

[chuqingzhao]

Thank you Dr.Bassett for your inspiring sharing! I am wondering under the pandemic, whether the imbalances in citation networks will be exacerbated or not? For example, in the setting of working at home, female researchers might need to spend more time taking care of children than male researchers. I am thinking could you please elaborate on the mechanism behind the citation imbalances in science field? What are the possible factors might influence scholars' scientific outputs and how does the gender/race play a role? Thank you!

[chiayunc]

Thank you for coming to our workshop. I really enjoyed your paper. I don't particularly have a question, just some thoughts that I had when reading the paper. We see under-representativeness on many occasions, be it in academic fields, in our governmental institution, in our college acceptance process... etc. The list goes on. Many actions have been taken to 'correct' this imbalance, some more subtle, some more technical or operational. The latter tends to see some setbacks if not adverse impacts. For example, the gender ratio regulation in governmental committees in Taiwan had been used as a glass ceiling to legitimize the gender ratio of committees, i.e., if I at least meet the standard of some ratio, then there shouldn't be the need to admit more women, disregarding the fact that there could naturally be more qualified women. I am quite pessimistic about this in that I think operational and technical 'engineering' as such would not effectively alleviate the imbalance, and change can only happen slowly and innately. I wonder what would be your thoughts on this?

[vinsonyz]

Thank you so much for your presentation, Professor Bassett. Will things become different for those papers with both male and female authors?

[mikepackard415]

Thank you for sharing your work! I found these papers interesting and a bit disturbing, if I'm being honest. Sometimes I tend to idealize the scientific community, and it becomes easy to forget (from my privileged position) that gender and racial biases exist in this arena as much as in any other. My question has to do with the notion of citations as a currency in academia, and to what extent we think that is how we want the scientific community to operate. The analogy to a market paints science as a very cutthroat, harsh, competitive place to operate. Just wondering about your thoughts on this.

[linghui-wu]

Thank you for sharing this exciting work! I am particularly interested in the inequality in STEM disciplines. As already pointed out by @bakerwho and @xzmerry, the imbalance might differ across fields. I would like to know more about why you focus on neuroscience and what do you think about the external validity of the conclusions? Do we expect to see robust results when choosing other journals as the sample of interest?

[YanjieZhou]

Thanks very much for your presentation! I find that unbalanced citation is really an interesting topic, but how much is this imbalance dervied from the published journals? Really appreciate your elaboration.

[Lynx-jr]

Thank you for sharing your work! Besides the compelling analysis, I also enjoy looking at your visualizations, the bowl picture and the authorship network are all stunningly drawn! Maybe it's because I missed some part in the text, but I think it would be good to check the gender ratio in neuroscience Ph.D. holders since I suspect that this discipline is still dominated by male researchers. And like what my peers have already mentioned, citations are only one part of the chain of gender inequality. My question would be that how will the results be when we turn to the submitted drafts? I mean, when we investigate all papers submitted for the five journals, including the ones being rejected, will we see a difference compared to what we have for the citations?

[JadeBenson]

Thank you so much for this incredibly important research. My question is very similar to @xzmerry. I was inspired by the call to action at the end of your paper and wondering about other practical solutions to this problem. How can we learn to catch our own biases when reading? Often times I feel like I don't even realize the authors' names but obviously it is on some level and influencing practice. What are some ways that we can intentionally recognize our own unconscious biases and use this to change these inequities?

[yiq029]

Thank you so much for your presentation! I am wondering any further implication can be brought by the unbalanced citation to a broader context, such as gender equality in the society. Thank you.

[afchao]

Thank you for presenting to our group! These papers reminded me of a recent class discussion that I would like to ask you about: in general, do you think the Academy (capital "a") would be better or worse off if there was some way for scholars and their ideas to be judged completely separately? On one hand I imagine it would allow good ideas proposed by people who belong to marginalized groups better odds of reaching the mainstream, but on the other we do benefit from knowing the potential biases that a researcher might inject (deliberately or otherwise!) into their work - is there a clear answer in your view?

[minminfly68]

Thanks in advance for your presentation. I am also wondering the influence of citation imbalance and how it would relate to our general society? Is there any way that we can do to change that? Thanks!

[wanitchayap]

Thank you for your presentation! I am wondering what do you think about the practice of setting a baseline for diversity in citings before writing the paper, like how Data Feminism did (see). Do you think this could work? Or would it actually backfire? Maybe it works in some disciplines only?

[hhx2207061197]

Thank you very much for your presentation! I find that citation imbalance is indeed an interesting topic, but is this imbalance derived from published journals?

[WMhYang]

Thanks for sharing your work. I am trying to associate the unbalanced citation with economic interpretation for discrimination. From the origin perspective, do you tend to believe the unbalance is due to scholars personally dislike interacting with females, or due to scholars' (correct of incorrect) beliefs on the quality of the work by female authors?

[ZhouXing19]

Thanks for your presentation. I'm also super curious about the question that @chiayunc posted: Do participant restriction policies designed to eliminate discrimination really work? Or does it have a ceiling effect in the short term, but is actually beneficial in the long term for eliminating bias? Thanks!

[yutianlai]

Thank you so much! I wonder how the research could be applied to other fields.

[chrismaurice0]

Thank you for sharing your work with us! You mention in your 2020 paper, you were basing your research off previous work done in International relations and political science. I am curious how your methods and results differed from those two papers. Did you make any changes from how they gathered their data? Or different hypotheses?

[william-wei-zhu]

Thank you very much for your paper. Looking forward to the presentation.

[siruizhou]

Thank you for sharing this work. I look forward to learning more about the imbalance across fields.

[goldengua]

Thanks for your presentation! I was wondering how the method could inform the underlying reason for the imbalance? When I am writing papers, I seldom notice anything other than the name of the authors and the content of the paper. Do you think it is because that female scholars get less opportunities to promote their work?

[ttsujikawa]

Thank you very much for this significantly important research. The point you made is very unique and interesting.

I was just wondering why you decided to focus on the neuroscience field among countless academic fields? Also, It would be curious to think about the external validity of your conclusion that could be applied to other fields. Could you please elaborate on this?

Thank you!

[Dxu1]

Thank you for sharing two interesting papers. My question is a follow-up one on the gender and racial imbalances in reference list. You have made it convincing that such discrimination definitely is prevalent. In fact, it seems not to be exclusive in neuroscience field but also in other fields. What are your conjecture as to the mechanisms that create these discrimination? Would you expect to see some channels that are specific to neuroscience, or would be general in academia? Thank you very much!

[NikkiTing]

Thank you for sharing your work! I find the final part of your discussion on the paper on gender imbalances in neuroscience to indeed be though-provoking. I would like to ask what your own personal opinion on what the ideal gender balance in citations should be like.

[RuoyunTan]

Thanks for sharing your work with us. This is really interesting. I wonder if such imbalances exist not only in journal citations but also in how scholars' views are presented in academic conferences and in the public media. Could you also talk a little bit about your motivation to conduct this project?

[YijingZhang-98]

Thank you for your excellent work. It just comes up to me that does the conclusion could be generalized to other field? Like sociology, economics. Thanks!

[TwoCentimetre]

In the paper you mentioned "Gender was assigned to authors’ first names using a combination of two publicly available probabilistic databases (Methods). The label ‘woman’ was assigned to authors whose name had a probability ≥0.70 of belonging to someone identifying as a woman; likewise, the label ‘man’ was assigned to authors whose name had a probability ≥0.70 of belonging to someone identifying as a man.". I wonder if we need to use the probability conditioned on the paper writers' cultural background. Because I can hardly tell the gender of some foreign name.

[alevi98]

Thank you for attending our workshop! I'm so thrilled to hear your presentation :)

[qishenfu1]

Hi Prof. Bassett, thank you for your sharing! I think your discoveries are very meaningful. I am curious that do you think such discrimination happened within gender/race groups? Will a minority researcher himself/herself also discriminate against minority groups? Thanks!

[97seshu]

Thank you for presenting. When citing papers, I sometimes have trouble distinguishing authors' genders solely based on their names especially when the names are foreign, so I find your research findings very interesting. Looking forward to learning more about it.

[MengChenC]

Thank you sharing your research. The underlying inequity in academic environment, including the revealing of citation bias really blew my mind. I keep thinking that how would you see this phenomenon from a systematic perspective? To be more specific, the citation bias in the research practices seems to form a close and vicious circle, especially in the group of white citers. It may be crucial to solve this issue from the approaches you mentioned in the papers, while we may also need to consider more rooted reasons, such as the imbalance education resources for female/minority groups. I am curious about your thoughts on this direction. Thank you.

[shenyc16]

Thank you for sharing these interesting researches with us. Can you tell us more about the mechanism or reasons behind these imbalances in journal citation? Does this kind of discrimination and inequality occur in other academic settings? Thank you.

[ghost]

Are you considering imbalance as an example of taste-based discrimination?

[ginxzheng]

Thank you Dr. Bassett for presenting! I am very fascinated by the charts about gender comparison in your paper. I was wondering about any possible neuroscience theories to explain the imbalance and bias. It would be great if you can touch more on that!

[ddlee19]

Thank you for the presentation this week. Looking forward to learning more about the gender imbalances in journal citation.

[xxicheng]

Thank you for sharing your work with us. It is fascinating. I am curious about your gender-identifying method. I have done a similar process on Twitter usernames before, and I built a multilingual first name corpus on my own by parsing a baby name website. I found that the accuracy of predicting genders for foreign names (like Chinese names) is always low since translating to English may lose some information. I wonder how did your team deal with this problem with your database.

Looking forward to your talk tomorrow!

[jsoll1]

I'm excited for your presentation upcoming!! Do you think this trend can be counterbalanced through journal policy or other methods?

[Bin-ary-Li]

I agree that crediting and citation on intellectual outputs have been a major catalyst in the power game of academia, oftentimes for the worse. In light of this, don't you think that there should be a major revamp in citation practice or even convention? What kind of new measure do you have in mind for revolutionizing the power imbalance in the academic community?

[hesongrun]

Thank you so much for sharing this wonderful work! What do you envision to be the best approach to realize equitable future? How do you think we should balance between the opportunity equality and the outcome equality? Thanks!

[Jasmine97Huang]

Thank you for sharing your work with us. Really appreciate your focus on how each researcher's individual efforts can help push for a more equitable future. However, I am interested in hearing your opinions on how higher education institutions can facilitate the change? Looking forward to your presentation!

[luxin-tian]

Thank you for sharing your research. I wondered how such imbalance would bring impacts farther than the field of science but on the general public?