Of course, men are inclined to think highly of themselves!

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If Men Do It ...
By Scott Jaschik, August 30, 2013

If male professors do something that helps their careers, but is dubious from an ethical and scholarly perspective, should female professors embrace the practice?

That question was raised in a discussion here Friday at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, where several sessions focused on the relatively small number of women rising to the senior ranks in the discipline, even as many more are earning Ph.D.s in the field. Discussions focused on overt and unconscious bias, the way the discipline seems to value some research topics over others, and whether some common male behaviors should be copied or reformed. And there was also debate over how "strategic" women should be about advancing their careers vs. changing the profession.

Many of these issues came up in a study of citations in international relations papers. The authors of the paper found that male and female professors in international relations cite and are cited in different ways. The study -- by Daniel Maliniak and Barbara Walter of the University of California at San Diego and Ryan M. Powers of the University of Wisconsin at Madison -- looked at 3,087 journal articles in 12 international relations journals to track citation trends.

Maliniak explained here that tenure and promotion committees in political science increasingly look at citation records, so any bias in citations is important to understand. Further, he said that past comparisons have been criticized for not controlling for a range of factors that this study included -- tenure status, college or university sector, subject matter and so forth.

So to the extent that men write about some subjects that get cited more than those more women explore, the study controlled for that. And to the extent many women are at top universities, the study controlled for that (and many other issues).

The paper -- a version of which was published this week in the journal International Organization (abstract available here) -- calculated that the greatest gender differences in citations are among professors who have not yet earned tenure (in other words among the professors for whom it matters the most). Of faculty members at research universities, the average paper by an untenured male in international relations is cited 26.7 times, while the average paper by a female colleague would be cited only 2.15 times.

Studying further, the scholars found that male professors generally cite men. But there is a particular man who gets cited who may play a role in boosting male rates: the scholar himself. The average male scholar writing a single-author article cites himself 0.4 times while the average female scholar cites herself 0.25 times. In papers with two male authors, they engage in some self-citation 0.91 times while papers by two female scholars have an average of 0.41 instances of self-citation. These differences are statistically significant. (The authors didn't say all self-citation was inappropriate, but said they questioned its extent by men.)

The idea that men may be inclined to think highly of themselves did not seem to surprise the largely female audience here, where those statistics were greeted by some laughter. The paper presented here doesn't say that this self-citation pattern is solely responsible for the citation gap (the implication is that sexism is in fact at work), but that this is some of the explanation.

In comments of other panelists and from the audience, there was no dispute of the idea that men self-promote themselves more than do women and cite men more than women. The question was what to do about that.

[major snippage]
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