how is the tendency of the average man different from that of the scientist?
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Answer:
The number of citations a scientist’s work receives plays an important role in determining her or his standing in the academic world. Unpublished research presented on 24 August at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in Chicago, Illinois, suggests that men are substantially more likely than women to cite their own prior work in their writings. This greater propensity to blow one’s own horn may have a consequential impact on scholarly careers, the study’s authors argue.
“[T]he average man self-cites 56% more often than … the average woman,” write Molly King, a sociology Ph.D. student at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, and co-authors in Men set their own cites high: Gender and self-citation across fields and over time, the draft paper presented at the meeting. The observed difference is likely to have a snowball effect, as self-citation “both directly and indirectly increas[es] an author’s citation counts,” the authors continue. Indeed, according to previous work by other researchers, “[e]ach additional self-citation yields an additional three citations (though not necessarily to the same [self-cited] paper) from other scholars over” the next 5 years, they note.