Any old Tom, Dick, or Harry: The citation impact of author first name genderedness

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Abstract
This paper examines the relationship between the genderedness of authors' first names and citation distributions in US‐affiliated scholarly production from 2010 to 2019. Merging a first name genderedness table derived from Wikidata with Web of Science publication data, we develop a relative distributional framework that compares first name, article, and citation distributions by both disciplinary group and author role along a continuous genderedness spectrum. The lexical structure of the corpus proves stable across author roles, while productivity diverges substantially by disciplinary group: physical sciences show a consistent masculine lean, social sciences a feminine one, with amplitude remaining stable across groups despite these directional differences. Once productivity is controlled for, citation analyses net of publication volume reveal a pervasive deficit across disciplinary groups and author roles: only unambiguously masculine names accumulate citations in excess of their publication volume, while feminine, neutral, and moderately masculine names all fall short of it. This asymmetry is strongest in the life sciences and weakest in the physical sciences except among middle authors, where the pattern reflects the gender composition of large collaborative teams rather than evaluative bias in citing behavior. Taken together, these results are consistent with the hypothesis that first name genderedness shapes citation recognition through implicit bias operating in low‐deliberation evaluative contexts.
Funding Information
  • Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (1007‐2023‐0001)
  • Société et culture (338828)

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