Researching Researchers
Assistant Professor Molly M. King flew to London at the end of September to present at a symposium commemorating the launch of the Wellcome Foundation's Research on Research Institute (RoRI). King was invited by the consortium to present her research at a session on diversity and inequality in academic careers. Her presentation focused on her past collaborative research on gender inequalities in academic publishing.
Specifically, she discussed results from two studies using a data set of 1.5 million research papers that reveal a number of understated and persistent ways in which gender inequities remain in academia. For instance, even where raw publication counts seem to be equal between genders, further analysis reveals that, in certain fields, men predominate in the prestigious last-author and sole-author positions. She also discussed her work on the practice of self-citation in scholarly publication and her team's finding that men cite their own previous papers 70 percent more than women (between the years 1990 and 2011). Women are also more than 10 percentage points more likely than men to not cite their own previous work at all.
As a result of the conference, her research was featured in a Times Higher Education article on the challenges faced by women scientists.