Citation inequity and gendered citation practices in contemporary physics

Understand

The historical and contemporary under-attribution of women's contributions to scientific scholarship is well-known and well-studied, with effects that are felt today in myriad ways by women scientists.

• One measure of this under-attribution is the so-called citation gap between men and women: the under-citation of papers authored by women relative to expected rates coupled with a corresponding over-citation of papers authored by men relative to expected rates.
• We explore the citation gap in contemporary physics, analyzing over one million articles published over the last 25 years in 35 physics journals that span a wide range of subfields.
• Using a model that predicts papers' expected citation rates according to a set of characteristics separate from author gender, we find a global bias wherein papers authored by women are significantly under-cited, and papers authored by men are significantly over-cited.