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  • RESEARCH HIGHLIGHT

Women physicists miss out on ‘first-mover advantage’

A study of more than a century’s worth of papers helps to explain why women physicists get fewer citations.
A black chalkboard showing a physics formula in white chalk

Women in physics often have lower citation rates than their male counterparts, which can be explained in part by the ‘first-mover advantage’ phenomenon. Credit: Olena Holubova/Alamy

Men in physics benefit more from a phenomenon called the first-mover advantage than women do, helping to explain the gender gap in citations of physics papers1.

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Nature 610, 608 (2022)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-03239-w

References

  1. Kong, H., Martin-Gutierrez, S. & Karimi, F. Commun. Phys. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42005-022-00997-x (2022).

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