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Acknowledging female voices

Nature Neuroscience volume 23, pages 904–905 (2020)Cite this article

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Citation count has become one of the most important methods to evaluate a scientist’s contributions. In an extensive analysis of citations from a number of leading neuroscience journals, Dworkin and colleagues find evidence of gender bias in citation practices that can have an adverse impact on women’s careers.

We would hazard a guess that most, if not all, working scientists have felt disappointment and/or anger when seeing that a recently published paper failed to cite one of their own. Most of us view this as an inescapable consequence of the way science is published; however, a paper by Dworkin et al.1 in this issue of Nature Neuroscience shows that current citation practices in neuroscience particularly disadvantage female scientists, with potentially unfortunate career repercussions.

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References

  1. Dworkin, J. D. et al. Nat. Neurosci. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-020-0658-y (2020).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physiology and Biophysics and Computational Neuroscience Center, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

    Adrienne L. Fairhall

  2. Volen Center and Biology Department, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, USA

    Eve Marder

Authors
  1. Adrienne L. Fairhall
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  2. Eve Marder
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Correspondence to Adrienne L. Fairhall.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Fairhall, A.L., Marder, E. Acknowledging female voices. Nat Neurosci 23, 904–905 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-020-0667-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-020-0667-x

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