Lariviere, V. | bioRxiv Science

bioRxiv2018

Gender and international diversity improves equity in peer review

The fairness of scholarly peer review has been challenged by evidence of disparities in publication outcomes based on author demographic characteristics. To assess this, we conducted an exploratory analysis of peer review outcomes of 23,876 initial submissions and 7,192 full submissions that were submitted to the biosciences journal eLife between 2012 and 2017. Women and authors from nations outside of North America and Europe were underrepresented both as gatekeepers (editors and peer reviewers) and authors. We found evidence of a homophilic relationship between the demographics of the gatekeepers and authors and the outcome of peer review; that is, there were higher rates of acceptance in the case of gender and country homophily. The acceptance rate for manuscripts with male last authors was seven percent, or 3.5 percentage points, greater than for female last authors (95% CI = [0.5, 6.4]); this gender inequity was greatest, at nine percent or about 4.8 percentage points (95% CI = [0.3, 9.1]), when the team of reviewers was all male; this difference was smaller and not significantly different for mixed-gender reviewer teams. Homogeny between countries of the gatekeeper and the corresponding author was also associated with higher acceptance rates for many countries. To test for the persistence of these effects after controlling for potentially confounding variables, we conducted a logistic regression including document and author metadata. Disparities in acceptance rates associated with gender and country of affiliation and the homophilic associations remained. We conclude with a discussion of mechanisms that could contribute to this effect, directions for future research, and policy implications. Code and anonymized data have been made available at https://github.com/murrayds/elife-analysis\n\nAuthor summaryPeer review, the primary method by which scientific work is evaluated, is ideally a fair and equitable process in which scientific work is judged solely on its own merit. However, the integrity of peer review has been called into question based on evidence that outcomes often differ between male and female authors, and for authors in different countries. We investigated such disparities at the biosciences journal eLife by analyzing the demographics of authors and gatekeepers (editors and peer reviewers), and peer review outcomes of all submissions between 2012 and 2017. Outcomes were more favorable for male authors and those affiliated with institutions in North America and Europe; these groups were also over-represented among gatekeepers. There was evidence that peer review outcomes were influenced by homophily --a preference of gatekeepers for manuscripts from authors with shared characteristics. We discuss mechanisms that could contribute to this effect, directions for future research, and policy implications.

scientific communication and education↗

bioRxiv2017

The Rise of the Middle Author: Investigating Collaboration and Division of Labor in Biomedical Research using Partial Alphabetical Authorship

Contemporary biomedical research is performed by increasingly large teams. As a consequence, an increasingly large number of individuals are being listed as authors in the byline of biomedical articles, which complicates the proper attribution of credit and responsibility to individual authors for their work. Typically, more importance is given to the first and last authors of biomedical papers, and the others (the middle authors) are considered to have made smaller contributions. However, we argue that this distinction between first, middle and last authors does not properly reflect the actual division of labor and does not allow a fair allocation of credit among the members of the research teams. In this paper, we use partial alphabetical authorship to divide the authors of all biomedical articles in the Web of Science published over the 1980-2015 period in three groups: primary authors, middle authors, and supervisory authors. We show that alphabetical ordering of middle authors is frequent in biomedical research, and that the prevalence of this practice is positively correlated with the number of authors in the bylines. We also find that, for articles with 7 or more authors, the average proportion of team members in each group is independent of the team size, more than half of the authors being middle authors. This suggests that growth in authors lists are not due to an increase in secondary contributions but, rather, in equivalent increases of all types of roles and contributions. Nevertheless, we show that the relative contribution of middle authors to the overall production of knowledge in the biomedical field as increased dramatically over the last 35 years.

scientific communication and education↗