Any Old Tom, Dick or Harry: The Citation Impact of First Name Genderedness

TL;DR

This study investigates how the genderedness of authors' first names influences citation distribution, revealing that authors with highly gendered names tend to receive more or fewer citations regardless of their contribution role.

Contribution

It introduces a novel analysis linking first name genderedness to citation impact using Wikidata and bibliometric data, highlighting genderedness as a factor in citation disparities.

Findings

Authors with very feminine names receive fewer citations.

Authors with very masculine names receive more citations.

Citation concentration varies significantly at the genderedness spectrum ends.

Abstract

This paper attempts a first analysis of citation distributions based on the genderedness of authors' first name. Following the extraction of first name and sex data from all human entity triplets contained in Wikidata, a first name genderedness table is first created based on compiled sex frequencies, then merged with bibliometric data from eponymous, US-affiliated authors. Comparisons of various cumulative distributions show that citation concentrations fluctuations are highest at the opposite ends of the genderedness spectrum, as authors with very feminine and masculine first names respectively get a lower and higher share of citations for every article published, irrespective of their contribution role.