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.

[YuxinNg]

Thanks for sharing your work with us. Just like @RuoyunTan, I am also curious if such imbalance exits in academic conferences and in the public media. Looking forward to hearing more about this topic.

[XinSu6]

Thank you so much for sharing your work! My question is whether the effect described in your work will be different between genders?

[zixu12]

Thanks for sharing your work! Like many students have mentioned, I am wondering whether such imbalance differs across disciplines? Also, it is indeed a big problem, do you have any suggestions to solve them? Since the systematic and individual biases seem to be something that are embedded in this society.

[Qlei23]

Thank you for sharing your work with us. I also wonder how such imbalance varies by discipline and across gender. Looking forward to your presentation!

[mintaow]

Thanks for sharing your work with us! I am particularly interested in your motivation and the process of formulating your paper. Have you thought of conducting any qualitative surveys to get more sense of the mechanism behind the racial and ethnic imbalance in neuroscience reference lists?

And also I am curious that whether the fact that the sample comes from the top neuroscience journals has anything to do with the findings? In other words, are we expecting to see this bias fade away from a holistic view across all neuroscience journals?

[JuneZzj]

Thank you for presenting. I noticed that you mentioned the imbalances often depend on people in positions of power. The usefulness of citation as a measure of scientific value is tenuous. Could you give more applicable examples for this? Thank you.

[jinfei1125]

Thanks for coming and sharing your work with us! I think studying the pair of first and last authors is a very creative idea! I have a question, if we, instead of studying the authors in the reference list, can we study the papers published in the top 5 journals in recent years(because usually the older papers are, the more citations they got, so we need to control the time) and their authors' pair?

[hihowme]

Thanks a lot for your presentation, I have a similar question to @hesongrun, what do you think about the opportunity equality and outcome equality? Thanks!

[luckycindyyx]

Thank you so much for sharing such interesting work with us. I am curious about whether gender imbalance is different across different fields/study, and if there is any pattern within. Thanks!

[YileC928]

Thank you for presenting your work with us. Like many of my classmates, I am also interested in hearing your thoughts on the variation of imbalance across different academic fields and possible measures to combat such imbalance.

[NaiyuJ]

Thanks for sharing your fascinating work! I don't have a specific question on these two works. Looking forward to seeing you!

[romanticmonkey]

Thank you so much for your presentation! I wonder if the gender of the first author, and that of the second, third, etc. might have something to do with your topic. For example, more females are present as the latter authors than as the first author.

[weijiexu-charlie]

Thanks for your presentation! I was wondering what do you think that we could do to deal with such imbalance.

[Qiuyu-Li]

Thank you for sharing your work Dr. Bassett. My question is, how do you separate the effects of under-citing from disadvantageous position in accessing education resources, tenure positions, etc. Thank you!

[Yilun0221]

Thanks for the presentation! I wonder whether you can further elaborate on "social and structural systems" in the abstract? Thanks!

[skanthan95]

Thanks for your presentation! I was wondering whether your methodology (looking at citation inequities) could be applied to other gendered domains (like salary).

[bowen-w-zheng]

Thank you for presenting this important work! I am also curious whether we would see this gender imbalance in citing practices in different fields. I am asking this because I understand that in neuroscience (at least in the field that I worked in, visual cognition), we tend to build on existing working models and methodology/technology, which were developed at a time when PIs are predominantly male. So I am wondering if there are certain characteristics of a field that would cause higher gender imbalance?

[LFShan]

Thank you for the presentation. I think your research is extremely interesting. Do you think under-citing can negatively impact one's academic career and reputation and those factors, in turn, worsen the under-citing issue?

[lulululugagaga]

Thanks for bringing the research here. I appreciate your perspective on looking at this issue, but I have the same worry with @Raychanan. How might we balance gender diversity whilst maintain the quality and relevance of such citations? Once the ratio is set, are we keeping the door closed to those who have brilliant works?

[Panyw97]

Thanks for sharing! It's an interesting topic that focuses on the order of citations. I'm wondering whether we could get the same result in other realms of research?

[kthomas14]

Thank you for sharing your very compelling work! I found your paper analyzing racial and ethnic imbalances within citations to be very interesting. Do you believe that the publication process may also cary some implicit biases? Researching the population of teams or individuals that may have had their papers rejected from peer-reviewed journals may also reveal some biases present in academia that do not even allow for people of color to share their work, let alone be cited.

[fyzh-git]

Thank you for presenting these work in our workshop! The gender imbalances in academia, reflected by the citing behavior, truly bring us to the frontier of this area which might have been neglected, where inequality exists and still plays a role.

I have a similar question on the subject heteroskedasticity, especially on the aspect of the gender structures within a subject's community. Do you think that might introduce selection bias into the analysis on the later citing behavior? Thank you.

[YaoYao121]

Thank you so much for sharing such excellent work with us! This is really an interesting research topic. Just like some other students' questions, I am also a little curious about the difference of the imbalance in different discplines. Besides, it comes to me that is this imbalance a social problem that could be dealt with directly. Or is this a social issue need to be dealt with by some indirect ways like eliminating the gap of education levels of people in majority? Thanks!

[FranciscoRMendes]

I wonder if this is an issue with the way academia is structured today? as opposed to say the private sector? Most of the "payment" for academic work is in the form of reputation credit. In corporate research almost all credit goes to the lead researcher, the reason being that while execution of research is important it does not add incremental value to the marginal value of the research (100 hard working RAs add less value than one prestigious author).

In a similar way, the payment of credit is tied to the reputation of the existing authors anyway (100 hard working RAs producing an excellent paper get paid lower reputation credit for a similar project with 100 RAs and one prestigious author), the Marginal Revenue added by the prestigious author justifies a disproportionate distributional share.

[yongfeilu]

Thank you so much for your presentation! I am very curious about whether your methodology could be applied to other situations. Also, to which degree would your conclusion holds for other scenarios? Is there any more internal heterogeneity that could be explored?

[Rui-echo-Pan]

Thank you for sharing! I'm also curious about the social and structural systems. Could you explain more?

[Yutong0828]

Professor Bassett, thanks very much for sharing your work with us!

As a psychology student, I can really imagine how's day-to-tay academic work is like in neuroscience, as well as how researchers are like while they are writing/citing papers. My question is a rather general one, that is, compared with some more fundamental subjects like math, physics etc, neuroscience is a discipline which has attracted more female researchers these days. But just as your paper mentioned, even if there are more and more female researchers or professors in neuroscience now, the women's underrepresentation in neuroscience may still be a problem due to reasons like social-network or homophile. I believe such problems exist in our society broadly, but I still hope that men and women researchers can cooperate more and benefit from both of their strengths. So, do you think there are any potential methods to promote cooperation and communication across researchers of different genders? If yes, what would it be?

Thank you very much!

[ydeng117]

Thank you for your presentation in advance. I wonder what causes the imbalance of citation. When doing research myself, I did not realize that I am choosing literatures based on authors' gender or race. Could the imbalance be caused by the number of scholars from the marginalized groups?

[MegicLF]

Thank you for the presentation! I am curious if such an imbalance varies across different fields, and if there exists a selection bias caused by the journals picked in your study.

[caibengbu]

Thanks for sharing! It's an interesting topic that focuses on the order of citations. I'm wondering whether we could get the same result in other realms of research?

[ziwnchen]

Thanks for presenting this interesting work! The gender and race imbalance in citation practice is quite worrisome. Given the fact that a great number of science studies (e.g., on patterns about knowledge production, academic collaboration, etc.) are based on citation data, how do this kind of bias could implicitly bias our understanding of knowledge production? Is the current way of doing research/form collaborations more suitable for white males, compared to other minorities?

[chun-hu]

Thank you for sharing! I look forward to your presentation.

[Yaweili19]

Thank you so much for sharing your interesting research. I am wondering how social structure plays its role in your work. Looking forward to your presentation!

[cytwill]

Thank you for this interesting work. I share some similar thoughts with @nwrim in terms of why you choose and the last author as the data source in your analysis? Also, as you have found some evidence of gender imbalance in these neuroscience journals. Have you ever thought of possible reasons to explain the bias? For example, does this mean that female-led papers are less likely to be accepted to those top journals in your field? Or does that indicate females are usually excluded from the contributors of top journals? As you mentioned in the paper that it is unlikely that people deliberately avoided citing female-led papers, so I am thinking about if you have any further steps, like what you mentioned in the discussion part of the paper, which help to identify the root of the imbalance? I understand this question is not easy to answer but is quite important not only for neural science but also the whole academic industry.

I think the documentary film: Picture a Scientist is a good reference for gender imbalance issues in the scientific world.

[chentian418]

Thank you for your presentation! I'm also interested in research on the citation for specific domain and have conducted a research on the relationship between a specific effect and its citation after publication. While you have provided an innovative perspective in terms of gender imbalance in the in neuroscience domain. I was wondering how would you consider some potential downstream effects of this inequitable engagement and how you could extend the topic to other academic domains?

[timqzhang]

Thank you for your paper ! I basically have similar questions to other classmates in the estimation step. Look forward to your presentation tomorrow.

[heathercchen]

Thank you for your presentation! I am wondering how do you deal with the endogeneity issues in this topic. What I mean is, the papers by minority groups are cited less because they are less in number. And how do you deal with the problem of quantifying the quality of the paper? Thank you!

[a-bosko]

Hi Dr. Bassett,

Thank you so much for sharing your papers! I am very interested in the topic of gender and racial equality.

I look forward to listening to your presentation tomorrow. Thank you!

[j2401]

Hi Dr. Bassett,

I was wondering whether the reader of papers are aware of the gender imbalance in the reference list? I personally pay no attention to the gender of the sources and will not spend time distinguishing the gender of the author when I don't know him/her at all. Will the effort and awareness of readers also promote the gender equity in academia? Thanks!

[luyingjiang]

Thank you for your presentation! My question is: are there any further implications that can be brought by the unbalanced citation to a broader context?

[FrederickZhengHe]

Thank you very much for this interesting paper! I look forward to tomorrow's session and your explanations.

[tianyueniu]

Thank you so much for the inspiring work! I look forward to learning more from your presentation.

[harryx113]

Thank you so much for your paper and I look forward to learning more from your presentation.

[Yiqing-Zh]

Thank you for your presentation. I am wondering whether you could explain the social structures more. Thanks.

[anqi-hu]

Thank you for sharing your work with us! My question echoes that of many others: how does this imbalance vary by discipline? What are some fields that your conclusions can be immediately applicable to?

[yierrr]

Thanks for the presentation! I'm also interested in how the phenomenon may change across disciplines. Thanks!

[Leahjl]

Thanks for coming to our workshop Dr. Bassett!What is the reason that you choose and the last author as the data source in your analysis?

[ChivLiu]

Thank you for your presentation! I wonder how we justify the author's self gender identification. Does that matter to the research?

[sabinahartnett]

Thank you for presenting Dr. Bassett! I am hoping you can elaborate a bit more on nuances between disciplines (i.e. are the more 'traditional' disciplines (those driven by early works) especially biased?

[Anqi-Zhou]

Thanks for sharing! My question is, does the imbalance really result from inequity? Can it just come from the composition of minorities?