Survey shows that women are more likely to experience technical paper authorship disagreements

A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions has found via survey that women are more likely to experience technical paper authorship disagreements than men. In their paper published in the journal Science Advances, the group describes how they conducted a survey of thousands of researchers around the globe regarding technical paper authorship issues and what was learned from it.

Prior research has shown that women are less likely to be listed as the lead authors on technical papers and because of this are more likely to leave science fields than men. In this new effort, the researchers wondered about the prevalence of authorship disagreements experienced by both men and women in the technical fields. To find out, they sent out a survey to several thousand people who had been listed in the Clarivate Analytics' Web of Science database as having had their name appear on at least one published technical research paper. They received replies back from 2,389 male researchers, 1,432 female researchers and 1,754 people who preferred to not reveal their gender. Questions on the survey asked about the respondent's experience in author disagreements on technical papers.

In looking at their data, the researchers found that women were 1.38 times more likely to have experienced disputes regarding whether a given individual's name should appear on a research paper than men—and they were 1.25 times more likely to have been part of disputes involving the ordering of names on a paper. Also, 23% of the women who responded claimed that they had received less credit than they deserved on a paper, whereas just 18% of men felt that way. They also found that more men than women (11% compared to 8%) thought that they had received more credit than they deserved. The researchers also found that women were more likely to have discussed authorships with their colleagues prior to working on a project. However, when discussions took place after a paper was written, men were more likely to have participated in discussions about it.

The researchers also found that both men and women believed that writing and analyzing were the most important parts of paper authorship—technical work was deemed least important.

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