Vincent Larivière

As scholarly publishing becomes increasingly commodified, market-oriented definitions of excellence are reshaping the organization and hierarchization of scientific knowledge. Using a sociology of elites framework, this article examines how the social conditions under which knowledge is produced, evaluated, and circulated shape epistemic inequalities. It focuses on journal editors—who play a central role in defining legitimate knowledge—but remain understudied as holders of scientific and editorial authority. Through the prosopographic and bibliometric analysis of 229 editors from 97 leading biology journals, we investigate whether editorial authority is structured primarily by scientific authority, market-oriented authority, or a combination of both. We examine how editors’ sociodemographic characteristics and scientific, institutional, international, and extra-academic capital relate to journal characteristics and research topics. The findings reveal a dual structure of editorial authority: editors with strong scientific and institutional capital are associated with historically less valued specialties, such as marine biology and animal science. By contrast, younger, often women, professional editors are more frequently associated with commercial journals publishing research on highly marketable topics, such as cancer biology and immunology. The article contributes to the sociology of scientific knowledge by showing that epistemic inequalities are not produced solely through unequal distribution of scientific resources. They also arise through the interaction between scientific and market-oriented forms of authority within the editorial field. The increasing commodification of scholarly publishing therefore reconfigures the principles governing the legitimation and hierarchization of knowledge, while introducing market-based definitions of relevance and excellence alongside—and sometimes in tension with—established scientific ones.

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.

The intersection of doctoral training and parenthood poses unique challenges for early-career researchers, with lasting consequences for gender equality in academic careers. Drawing on a global survey of 8,097 academic parents, we reconstruct life-course trajectories of academic parents to investigate gender differences in the timing and sequencing of PhD completion and parenthood, and their implications for long-term career development. We identify five distinct trajectories. Women were more likely to complete the PhD before age 30 and delay parenthood after 35, whereas men tended to become parents during doctoral studies and often had three or more children by age 40. Early parenthood was associated with the largest gender disparities in scientific citations, favoring men, while these disparities diminished among those who became parents after age 35. Across all trajectories, men were consistently more likely to secure and remain in academic positions. These findings underscore the structural challenges faced by early-career mothers and highlight the importance of institutional policies, such as parental leave, childcare provision, and flexible doctoral and tenure timelines, to better support the reconciliation of parenting and academic careers.

The multidisciplinary and socially grounded nature of Women's/Gender/Feminist Studies poses unique challenges for bibliometric analysis, as it extends beyond conventional disciplinary boundaries. This paper makes three key contributions: (1) We propose a novel retrieval method for constructing a corpus of scholarly documents in research areas that cannot be accurately identified through traditional field classifications. This method employs a core–periphery structure that integrates journals and keywords, leveraging bibliometric techniques, topic modeling, and manual curation. This methodology can be adapted to delineate other academic conversations. (2) We apply this approach to gender/sex‐related research using the Dimensions database, obtaining a corpus of 1.9 million scientific documents across four languages and openly sharing the DOIs to facilitate reuse by the research community. This dataset allows for a comprehensive characterization of Gender Studies in terms of research topics, citation and collaboration dynamics, and institutional and regional participation. (3) Finally, the results indicate that the core of Gender Studies emerged and institutionalized from the mid‐1970s across different disciplines, and the usage of key terms such as ‘gender’ or ‘sex’ varies across communities and time periods.

Calls to reform research assessment are gaining momentum.

Calls to reform research assessment are gaining momentum.

Women are particularly underrepresented as leading authors of papers in journals of the highest impact factor, with substantial consequences for their careers. While a large body of research has focused on the outcome and the process of peer review, fewer articles have explicitly focused on gendered submission behavior and the explanations for these differences. In our study of nearly 5000 active authors, we find that women are less likely to report having submitted papers to journals of the highest impact (e.g., Science , Nature , or PNAS ) and to submit fewer manuscripts, on average, than men when they do submit. Women were more likely to indicate that they did not submit their papers (in general and their subsequently most cited papers) to high-impact journals because they were advised not to. In the aggregate, no statistically significant difference was observed between men and women in how they rated the quality of their work. Nevertheless, regardless of discipline, women were more likely than men to indicate that their ‘ work was not ground-breaking or sufficiently novel ’ as a rationale for not submitting to one of the listed prestigious journals. Men were more likely than women to indicate that the ‘ work would fit better in a more specialized journal ’ . We discuss the implications of these findings and interventions that can serve to mitigate the disparities caused by gendered differences in submission behavior.

Performance-based funding systems (PBFSs) are widely used to steer national research, but their effects vary significantly, particularly in countries with emerging research ecosystems. Relatively little attention has been paid to PBFSs and their concomitant policy dynamics in these countries, where the pressure to internationalise creates unique challenges. This paper presents a detailed study of the development of the Lithuanian PBFS from 2005 to 2022. Using a multi-level, multi-actor, and multi-issue framework, we combine policy analysis, semi-structured interviews, and bibliometric data to analyse the system’s evolution. Our findings reveal a dynamic of ‘insular policy feedback,’ where a concentrated scientific elite, operating across all levels of governance, shapes policy to its advantage. This results in predictable cycles of strategic gaming, such as the proliferation of domestic journals, by reactive and often inconsistent state countermeasures. The Lithuanian case serves as a model for understanding how concentrated power structures can undermine reform, offering a crucial insight for policymakers: meaningful reform must address the governance structures that empower performance metrics, not just the metrics themselves.

Clinical trials shape medical evidence and determine who gains access to experimental therapies. Whether participation in these trials reflects the global burden of disease remains unclear. Here we analyze participation inequality across more than 62,000 randomized controlled trials spanning 16 major disease categories from 2000 to 2024. Linking 36.8 million trial participants to country-level disease burden, we show that global inequality in clinical trials participation is overwhelmingly shaped by country rather than disease burden. Country-level factors explain over 90% of variation in participation, whereas disease-specific effects contribute only marginally. Removing entire disease categories-including those traditionally considered underfunded-has little effect on overall inequality. Instead, participation is highly concentrated geographically, with a small group of countries enrolling a disproportionate share of participants across nearly all diseases. These patterns have persisted despite decades of disease-targeted funding and increasing alignment between research attention and disease burden within diseases. Our findings indicate that disease-vertical strategies alone cannot correct participation inequality. Reducing global inequities in clinical research requires horizontal investments in research capacity, health infrastructure, and governance that operate across disease domains.

Large-scale bibliometric databases generally provide a selective and geographically-biased representation of scientific output. Given that these indexing biases reduce the likelihood of retrieving certain types of scientific production, it has been historically hard to assess the extent and characteristics of those excluded scholarly communications. Based on the Lattes platform, a unique data source with comprehensive coverage of Brazilian scholarly output, this paper assesses the coverage of two large-scale bibliometric databases: OpenAlex and Web of Science. Our findings identify the specific research areas underrepresented in both databases and assess the relation between publication language and indexing. Additionally, we examine gender-based differences in topic coverage, language, and indexing rates. Our results suggest that indexing biases disproportionately affect researchers focusing on topics of national relevance for Brazil through articles written in Portuguese. Given women’s overrepresentation in this group, our findings illustrate how indexing biases contribute to gender inequalities in science.