Big Missing Data: are scientific memes inherited differently from gendered authorship?

TL;DR

This study investigates whether scientific memes are inherited differently based on the gender of authors, using a novel approach that combines meme inheritance analysis with gender disambiguation in citation networks.

Contribution

It introduces a methodology integrating meme inheritance with gender disambiguation to analyze gendered patterns in scientific knowledge propagation.

Findings

No significant difference in meme spread from male or female cited authors.

Memes analyzed do not propagate more easily via male or female inheritance.

Methodology effectively handles big missing data on author gender.

Abstract

This paper seeks to build upon the previous literature on gender aspects in research collaboration and knowledge diffusion. Our approach adds the meme inheritance notion to traditional citation analysis, as we investigate if scientific memes are inherited differently from gendered authorship. Since authors of scientific papers inherit knowledge from their cited authors, once authorship is gendered we are able to characterize the inheritance process with respect to the frequencies of memes and their propagation scores depending on the gender of the authors. By applying methodologies that enable the gender disambiguation of authors, big missing data on the gender of citing and cited authors is dealt with. Our empirically based approach allows for investigating the combined effect of meme inheritance and gendered transmission. Results show that scientific memes do not spread differently from either male or female cited authors. Likewise, the memes that we analyse were not found to propagate more easily via male or female inheritance.