Continuing with this week's theme (see here and here) of research on gender from the 2021 issue of AEA Papers and Proceedings, this article by Marlène Koffi (University of Toronto) looks at the gendered nature of citations. Koffi collected data on all 6431 articles published between 1991 and 2019 at the 'top five' economics journals (American Economic Review, Econometrica, the Journal of Political Economy, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and the Review of Economic Studies), as well as data on over 800,000 articles that cited those top-journal articles. She then categorises the authoring of each article in the top five journals, and notes that:
5,011 articles (77.92 percent) are written by all-male teams, 268 (4.17 percent) by all-female teams, 1,042 (16.20 percent) by mixed-gender teams, and 110 (1.71 percent) are gender undetermined.
Then, looking at citations, Koffi finds:
...an overall positive citation premium (15.5 log points) for articles written by women when controlling for affiliation, number of authors, seniority, and journal-year fixed effects. However, subfield and style controls reduce the coefficient values substantially to insignificant 6.6 log points and 1.6 log points, respectively.
In other words, articles written by all-female research teams get more citations. This isn't a new finding, as I noted in this 2020 post, and may arise either because female researchers are held to a higher standard during the reviewing process (leading them to have to write higher quality articles to get published), or because the types of empirical research that female economists engage in attracts more citations. Given that female economists are more likely to specialise in health (among other fields, as noted in yesterday's post), and health as a field tends to have more citations, that may explain some of the difference. That interpretation is also supported by Koffi's paper, which goes on to find that:
The share of citing papers belonging to economics is, on average, 2 percentage points less for papers written by women.
So, the citation premiums for female economists is not coming from within economics. The most interesting results in Koffi's research, though, are when she looks at the gender composition of citing papers, and finds that:
...women receive a positive citation premium when considering citations from other women, while they tend to receive a negative premium when considering citations made by everyone else...
...the positive female citation premium in economics is almost entirely driven by females citing other females.
Koffi interprets her results as:
On the one hand, they could represent an overcitation of female papers by lesser-ranked journals or other female authors. On the other hand, they could be interpreted as representing an undercitation of females by top-ranked journals or male authors. However, leaning on previous literature emphasizing the higher standards women face in economics, we can interpret those results as additional evidence for women’s lack of recognition by their peers.
However, there is another interpretation, which as I noted above relates to the subfields that female economists work in. If, in the fields outside of economics (such as health), there are more all-female research teams that are citing these papers, then that could also explain these results. In that case, the 'peers' that Koffi refers to are not all within economics. Moreover, even within subfields, differences in the types of research questions and topics that female economists address might also be those that female researchers in other fields are more likely to be interested in (which, again, relates back to yesterday's post). Unfortunately, Koffi doesn't disaggregate her analysis by subfield, which would be a really interesting next step.
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