Researchers are more likely to write scientific papers with co-authors of the same gender, a pattern that can鈥檛 be explained by varying gender representations across scientific disciplines and time.

A new study from the 91探花 and Cornell University, recently published in , finds consistent gender homophily 鈥� the tendency of authors to collaborate with others who share their gender 鈥� in a digital collection of 560,000 published research articles over a 50-year period. While this observation is not new, researchers also used novel methods to rule out seemingly logical explanations for the pattern, such as a field鈥檚 gender balance or authorship norms for writing research papers.

The findings suggest a behavioral component is in play when scientists seek out collaborators.

鈥淩esearchers use social discretion when choosing their collaborators,鈥� said , co-author and associate professor of philosophy at the UW.听鈥淒o they express this by choosing same-gender co-authorship teams? How can we study this at a scale that includes multiple fields while also respecting听the diversity of authorship demographics and practices at finer-grained levels?”

The research team, comprised of scholars in statistics, information science, biology and philosophy, mined articles published between 1960 and 2011 from the online repository JSTOR. To help link genders to more than 800,000 author names, the team relied on social security records and crowdsourced data. Because of limitations in the data, this research was restricted to those who identify as men and women and didn鈥檛 include nonbinary and intersex identities.

The team then grouped authors from the same fields and eras, creating 50,000 hypothetical reconfigurations of authors.

鈥淲e re-simulated hypothetical datasets. Our thinking was: How different is what we actually observed versus these hypothetical scenarios that we constructed,鈥� said听, co-author and assistant professor at Cornell who was a doctoral student in statistics at the 91探花when he started this research. 鈥淰ery different, it turns out. This suggests that some other source of homophily is occurring in the data we observed.鈥�

The team can鈥檛 say definitively why researchers tend to collaborate with those of the same gender. Data science methods can鈥檛 measure intent, but Wang said the findings suggest consideration of gender may be a factor.

Other co-authors from the 91探花were , associate professor in the 91探花Information School; , professor of biology; and , professor of statistics and of social work. This research was supported by the National Science Foundation and the 91探花Royalty Research Fund.听

Adapted from a Cornell University press release.

For more information, contact Lee at c3@uw.edu and Erosheva at erosheva@uw.edu.

In a published July 20 in the journal Science, lead author and co-author identify incentives that could encourage journals to “open the black box of peer review” for the sake of improving transparency, reproducibility, and trust in published research. Lee is an associate professor of philosophy at the 91探花; Moher is a senior scientist at The Ottawa Hospital and associate professor of epidemiology at the University of Ottawa.

Lee and Moher see this as a collective action problem requiring leadership and investment by publishers.

“Science would be better off if journals allowed for and participated in the empirical study and quality assurance of their peer review processes,” they write. “However, doing so is resource-intensive and comes at considerable risk for individual journals in the form of unfavorable evidence and bad press.”

To help journals manage the reputational risk associated with auditing their own peer review processes, Lee and Moher suggest revising the , a set of voluntary reporting standards to which 2,900 journals and organizations are now signatories. These guidelines were in Science in 2015 by a committee of researchers and representatives from nonprofit scientific organizations, grant agencies, philanthropic organizations and elite journals.

Lee and Moher suggest adding a new category to the TOP guidelines “indicating a journal’s willingness to facilitate meta-research on the effectiveness of its own peer review practices.” With these, journals can choose which tier or level they take on. Higher levels of transparency would involve higher risk.

• For the lowest tier, journals would publicly disclose whether they are conducting internal evaluations of peer review, in which they are able to retain the study results for internal use.
• At the middle tier, journals would disclose the results of their internal evaluations of peer review, but could maintain flexibility in how they report their results for external use. For example, results could be aggregated across several journals to reduce risk to any single journal.
• At the upper tier, journals could agree to relinquish data and analyses to researchers outside their institution for third-party verification. This is an option, Lee and Moher write, “that might appeal especially to publishers with fewer resources, as it places the financial burden on those conducting the meta-research.” Journals conducting their own analyses could preregister their study designs then deposit their data publicly online.

By agreeing to these more stringent guidelines, the authors write, publishers and journals would have the chance to legitimize and advertise the relative quality of their peer review process in an age when journals, which falsely claim to use peer review, continue to proliferate.

“Illegitimate journals are becoming a big problem for science,” said Moher. “True scientific journals can distinguish themselves with transparence about their peer review processes.”

Investing in research on journal peer review will be costly, they agree. Lee and Moher suggest that large experimental studies are needed to judge the effectiveness of different web-based peer review templates to enforce reporting standards, and of ways one might train authors, reviewers and editors to use such tools and evaluate research.

Also needed, they say, are ways to detect shortcomings in statistical and methodological reporting on a research paper, and to understand how the number and relative expertise of peer reviewers can improve assessment.

The largest publishers, whose compete with those of pharmaceutical and tech giants, can afford to invest in the requisite technology and resources needed to carry out these audits, the researchers say.

“Publishers should invest in their own brands and reputations by investing in the quality of their peer review processes,” said Lee. “Ultimately, this would improve the quality of the published scientific literature.”

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For more information, contact Lee at 206-543-9888 or c3@uw.edu, or Moher at dmoher@ohri.ca, or through Jennifer Ganton, The Ottawa Hospital’s public relations officer, at 613-614-5253 or jganton@ohri.ca.