Abstract
The article analyses publication patterns according to gender in three Political Science and International Relations journals based in Britain (Political Studies, British Journal of Political Science, and Review of International Studies). Examining publications from 1991 to 2011 in terms of authorship, seniority of author, and number of citations and responses, our findings suggest that women are less likely to be published as sole or lead author than their male counterparts are but that they are just as likely to be cited. Furthermore, since 2000, women are now over-represented in comparison with their presence within the discipline in publications that have at least one female author.
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Notes
See sub-sections below for more details on coding.
Of course, this only gives an indication of the numbers of UK female political scientists.
For all articles, a male/female ratio was calculated on a scale from 0 to 1. All-female authorship was 0, all-male was 1.
Given the extremely high rate of covariance between the year and the size of the female population, population estimates were used for the intervening years to enable correlation and regression.
In 2014, the Higher Education Funding Council for England issued an independent review of the role of metrics in research assessment (see http://www.hefce.ac.uk/whatwedo/rsrch/howfundr/metrics/).
This is certainly a possibility as recent research suggests that men overestimate their skills and women underestimate their skills, although this research related to careers in Maths and Science (Reuben et al, 2014).
It would be interesting to compare results for BJPS – the only journal covered by both pieces of research.
However, a recent study of citation practices (Smith and Lee, 2014) argues that work on gender, sexuality and the body is neglected and excluded in Political Science scholarship.
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We would like to thank the University of Birmingham who funded Kelly Roger’s contribution to this article through their Undergraduate Research Experience scheme.
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williams, h., bates, s., jenkins, l. et al. gender and journal authorship: an assessment of articles published by women in three top british political science and international relations journals. Eur Polit Sci 14, 116–130 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/eps.2015.8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/eps.2015.8