YSM Issue 93.2

FEATURE
Research Culture
SHOW AND TELL
SELF-PROMOTION INFLUENCES THE REACH OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERIES
BY EVA SYTH
ILLUSTRATION COURTESY OF ANMEI LITTLE
Gender gaps in society continue to persist in everything
from wages to doctoral appointments. Indeed, recent
research from Harvard Medical School and Yale School
of Management suggests a new addition to the chasm: men and
women may differ in how positively they present their research.
University of Mannheim assistant professor and Yale School
of Management (SOM) research fellow Marc J. Lerchenmueller,
Yale SOM professor Olav Sorenson, and Harvard Medical School
professor Anupam B. Jena explored this topic more in-depth by
looking at a number of clinical research and life science articles
published between 2002 and 2017. They then used an algorithm
called “Genderize” to determine the genders of the articles’ first
and last authors, positions which often hold special significance in
life science papers. Lerchenmueller explained that the Genderize
algorithm, which assigns gender to first names based on a database,
was chosen for its accuracy in gender assignment against a US
government-data control sample. The researchers then analyzed
the frequency of 25 words often used in life science articles, which
prior research identified as “distinctly positive,” such as “novel” or
“remarkable”, in the selected articles. The data showed that papers
with both female first and last authors presented their research
positively 12% less than articles with at least one male first or last
author. Additionally, the study found that downstream citations,
which is when a research article is cited in a future article, are
linked with positive terms (9.4% greater citations).
This begs the question: what are the implications of this
research on the greater scientific community? According to
Lerchenmueller, there are two main ones. First, if we observe this
gender difference, there could be multiple reasons. For example,
this study examined published products, not the work originally
submitted to the journals. “Women [may] originally submit
with positive language, but it gets edited out,” Lerchenmueller
explains. Another possibility he proposes is that women may
innately self-screen their writing and not include these terms.
Erin Hengel, a lecturer at the University of Liverpool explored
the question of whether the peer-review editorial process
opined women specifically in the economics field. Hengel found
that in economics, female researchers write 7% more “clearly”
(referring to simple sentence structure and overall readability)
due to higher writing standards for women during peer review.
Lerchenmueller hopes similar work gets done in the life sciences,
pointing out that nowadays, people more often put their papers
up online before they are published in a journal. According to
Lerchenmueller, this could be a good place for mining papers
before the editorial process begins.
The second implication applies more broadly to papers authored
by all genders. According to Lerchenmueller, in science today
versus past years and decades, “We generally observe an increase
in [positive] adjectives to describe research regardless of gender.”
In the most influential journals, the use of positive adjectives
was up by over 80% comparing 2017 to 2002. This represents
a different kind of potential danger. If more and more authors
are promoting their research findings as “novel” and “unique”
without actually supporting these claims in the body of the article,
a new issue develops that calls the scientific community itself into
question. “Science is depicted as a voice of reason in the world
of fake news,” Lerchenmuller explains. If science is beginning to
tread a similar path with these exaggerated claims, it may lose
some of its credibility as an objective source. This increase in
positive research promotion could be happening for a number
of reasons. In science today, there is an exploding amount of
papers being published, and authors are thus motivated to draw
attention to their work in order to have it stand out in the sea
of new research. It is also reasonable to imagine that scientific
journals don’t discourage this type of promotion. After all, editors
need to include high-profile articles to be high-profile journals.
In order to combat this trend, the scientific community may need
to make a concerted effort towards encouraging reasonable claims
surrounding research findings. In the meantime, the gender gap
with regard to scientific publications continues to persist. ■
Hengel, E. (2017). Publishing while Female. Are women held to higher
standards? Evidence from peer review. Cambridge Working Papers in
Economics CWPE1753. https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.17547
Lerchenmueller, M. J., Sorenson, O., & Jena, A. P. (2019). Gender differences
in how scientists present the importance of their research: observational
study. BMJ, 2019(367). https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.l6573
20 Yale Scientific Magazine September 2020 www.yalescientific.org