Structural inequalities persist in society, conferring systematic advantages to one group of people, for example, by giving them substantially more influence and opportunities than others. Using bibliometric data about authors of scientific publications from six different disciplines, we first present evidence for the existence of two types of citation inequalities. First, female authors, who represent a minority in each discipline, receive less recognition for their work relative to male authors; second, authors affiliated with top-ranked institutions, who are also a minority in each discipline, receive substantially more recognition compared to other authors. We then present a dynamic model of the growth of directed citation networks and show that such systematic disparities in citations can arise from individual preferences to cite authors in the same group (homophily) or the other group (heterophily), highly cited or active authors (preferential attachment), as well as the size of the group and how frequently new authors join. We analyze the model theoretically and show that its predictions align well with real-world observations. Our theoretical and empirical analysis sheds light on potential strategies to mitigate structural inequalities in science. In particular, we find that merely making group sizes equal does little to narrow the disparities. Instead, reducing the homophily of each group, frequently adding new authors to a research field while providing them an accessible platform among existing, established authors, together with balanced group sizes can have the largest impact on reducing inequality. Our work highlights additional complexities of mitigating structural disparities stemming from asymmetric relations (e.g., directed citations) compared to symmetric relations (e.g., collaborations).
翻译:社会上持续存在结构性不平等,给一组人带来系统优势,例如,给予他们比其他人更多的影响力和机会。我们首先利用六个不同学科科学出版物作者的数学数据,提出存在两类引用不平等的证据。首先,女性作者在每一学科中代表少数,但相对于男性作者而言,她们的工作得到的承认较少;其次,属于最高层机构的作者,在每一学科中也是少数,与其他作者相比,得到更多的承认。然后,我们展示了定向引用网络增长的动态模型,并表明在引用方面出现这种系统性差异可能来自个人偏好,指指同一组(homophyly)或其他组(hoophily)作者或其他组(hoophily)的作者,高度引用或活跃的作者(偏重),以及群体的规模和新作者的加入频率。我们从理论上分析了模型,并表明其预测与现实世界的观察相吻合。我们理论和经验分析为减少科学结构不平等的潜在战略提供了启发性。我们发现,仅仅使群体规模与结构不平等相比,相对的相对而言,其规模与结构关系几乎无法缩小。相反的作者们在缩小了各自的研究领域,因此缩小了。缩小了现有的研究领域。