Who benefits from altmetrics? The effect of team gender composition on the link between online visibility and citation impact

TL;DR

This study investigates how online visibility influences citation impact differently for male and female research teams across various scientific fields, revealing gendered patterns and potential avenues to reduce citation disparities.

Contribution

It introduces a quasi-experimental approach to analyze the interaction between team gender composition, online visibility, and citation impact across multiple research areas.

Findings

Online visibility increases citation counts across fields.

Gender composition interacts with visibility differently in each research area.

Results highlight gendered citation patterns and inform strategies to reduce disparities.

Abstract

Online science dissemination has quickly become crucial in promoting scholars' work. Recent literature has demonstrated a lack of visibility for women's research, where women's articles receive fewer academic citations than men's. The informetric and scientometric community has briefly examined gender-based inequalities in online visibility. However, the link between online sharing of scientific work and citation impact for teams with different gender compositions remains understudied. Here we explore whether online visibility is helping women overcome the gender-based citation penalty. Our analyses cover the three broad research areas of Computer Science, Engineering, and Social Sciences, which have different gender representation, adoption of online science dissemination practices, and citation culture. We create a quasi-experimental setting by applying Coarsened Exact Matching, which enables us to isolate the effects of team gender composition and online visibility on the number of citations. We find that online visibility positively affects citations across research areas, while team gender composition interacts differently with visibility in these research areas. Our results provide essential insights into gendered citation patterns and online visibility, inviting informed discussions about decreasing the citation gap.