Academic publishing is the principal medium of documenting and disseminating scientific discoveries. At the heart of its daily operations are the editorial boards. Despite their activities and recruitment often being opaque to outside observers, they play a crucial role in promoting fair evaluations and gender parity. Literature on gender inequality lacks the connection between women as editors and as research-active scientists, thereby missing the comparison between the gender balances in these two academic roles. Literature on editorial fairness similarly lacks longitudinal studies on the conflicts of interest arising from editors being research active, which motivates them to expedite the publication of their papers. We fill these gaps using a dataset of 103,000 editors, 240 million authors, and 220 million publications spanning five decades and 15 disciplines. This unique dataset allows us to compare the proportion of female editors to that of female scientists in any given year or discipline. Although women are already underrepresented in science (26%), they are even more so among editors (14%) and editors-in-chief (8%); the lack of women with long-enough publishing careers explains the gender gap among editors, but not editors-in-chief, suggesting that other factors may be at play. Our dataset also allows us to study the self-publication patterns of editors, revealing that 8% of them double the rate at which they publish in their own journal soon after the editorship starts, and this behavior is accentuated in journals where the editors-in-chief self-publish excessively. Finally, men are more likely to engage in this behaviour than women.
翻译:学术出版是记录和传播科学发现的主要媒介。在其日常业务的核心是编辑委员会。尽管它们的活动和招聘往往对外部观察者不透明,但它们在促进公平评价和两性均等方面发挥着关键作用。关于性别不平等的文献缺乏编辑和研究活跃的科学家之间的关联,因此缺乏这两个学术角色中两性平衡的比较。关于编辑公平的文献同样缺乏关于编辑积极从事的研究所产生的利益冲突的纵向研究,这促使编辑们加快出版论文。我们利用103,000名编辑、2.4亿作者和超过50年和15个学科的2.2亿出版物的数据集来填补这些差距。这个独特的数据集使我们能够将女性编辑的比例与任何一年或学科中女性科学家的比例进行比较。虽然妇女在科学领域的人数已经不足(26%),但在编辑和主编(8%)中,妇女的比例甚至更高;缺乏长期从事出版职业的妇女解释了编辑中的性别差距,而不是编辑中的性别差距,表明还有其他因素可能发挥作用。我们的数据设置也允许我们在任何一年或学科中将女性编辑的比例与女编辑的比例进行比较。在最后的期刊中,在出版中,女性的自我出版中,其自我出版的比例是更高。