Are Physics Papers Authored By Women Cited Less Than Those By Men?

So I'm reading this article in Physics Today of a study done on citation numbers and frequency of citation of papers where the first and/or last author is a woman. They found that papers authored by women tend to get less number of citations than men.

The number of papers authored by women in the eight physics subfields examined in the study almost doubled between 1995 and 2020, from around 17% to roughly 33%, as shown in the graph above. But those manuscripts attracted about 3% fewer citations than expected, whereas those whose first and last authors were men were cited roughly 1% more.

What’s more, the gender gap was largest in papers authored by men. According to the study, manuscripts with male authors cited recent male-authored papers about 2% more than expected and cited recent papers authored by women 6% less. Studies with a female author over-cited recent female-authored papers by 3% and under-cited recent papers by men by 1%.

Hum... But then they also say this:

One limitation of the study is that it couldn’t decipher the gender of about one-fifth of the authors, those who list only their initials instead of their first names, Bassett notes. Although Bassett says she and her team excluded those authors from their sample, McCullough thinks a significant number of them could be women. She says women in science often hide their first names to avoid discrimination.

Another problem, Bassett says, is that the software determines the chance of an author being a certain gender on the basis of his or her name, but it will be wrong at least some of the time, especially for gender-neutral names. It also cannot identify nonbinary individuals.

As someone who has read, and continues to read a lot of physics papers, the LAST thing I pay even any attention to is the gender of the authors. In fact, it is a common practice (and certainly in the groups that I have worked with) that when we publish a paper, we tend to only include first-name initials in the authors list rather than full name. It is also from my personal experiences that many of the papers that I have cited turned out to have women as first authors. No one could tell just by looking at the authors list that "K. A. Moler", "N. Trivedi", and "K. Levin" are women, for example.

Coupled with the fact that they found 3% fewer citation for women and that their study had to exclude about 20% of the authors because they couldn't tell their genders, this observation is not very convincing to me.

Zz.

Far-UVC Light Kills Airborne Viruses, And Safe To Humans Too?

First, let me give you the link to the paper that was published in Nature recently.

I actually have 3 separate topics to discuss here all based on this single paper.

The first is the science. UVC is used to kill viruses and sterilized stuff. We know that already. But it is also unsafe to human and we do not want to be exposed to it. But it turns out that far-UVC, having wavelengths in the range of 207-222 nm, is not totally harmful to human. In fact, ...

a regulatory limit as to the amount of 222 nm light to which the public can be exposed, which is 23 mJ/cm^2 per 8-hour exposure

means that humans can be exposed to this range of UVC for a limited amount of time. This is the basis of that research, i.e. using that wavelength and intensity of far-UVC, and see whether it can greatly "inactivate" the amount of viruses carried in airborne aerosols. They found that an exposure of just 25 minutes, very much below the regulatory limit. So there is a way to kill off viruses in airborne aerosols in the same space that human beings are around!

Certainly the implication of this research can be quite important, considering that airborne transmission of the COVID-19 virus is a strong possibility, which is why we are all wearing masks in public. There is now a way to greatly reduce such mode of transmission if this research is verified. The only thing I'm a bit weary about is the health and safety aspect. I know that they cited several sources that seems to show that the far-UVC is harmless to human, and the regulatory limits that have been imposed. Still, I'd like to have this one to be more well-established before I get really excited about it. For example, although the exposure limit is given in per 8-hour doses, how often can someone be exposed to that limit, say, in a month? Is that 8-hour dose limit per day? And certainly, long-term effect needs to be considered in anything of this sort.

But still, I find this result to be very promising, and it certainly is a new piece of information to me that far-UVC is actually not that harmful to humans.

The second aspect of this paper that I want to highlight is to the general public who often do not quite understand the nature of scientific publication. The main reason for scientists to properly publish their work is so that the rest of the community, especially those experts within the same field of study as the work, can scrutinize the work and evaluate its validity. So having something published does not automatically makes it valid. This is important to remember and understand. It requires scrutiny and verification by other experts in the field, and can sometime takes years. Think of how long of a time period from the moment the Higgs mechanism was proposed till its experimental verification at the LHC.

Therefore, it is imperative that a paper contains all the relevant information used to arrive at its conclusion or result. In this case, it is an experimental paper that produces a result. For it to be evaluated by other experts, it must contain all the necessary information. If you look closely at the end, the authors included their methodology, the exact equipment that they used, the experimental setup, the nature of the data analysis used, etc... etc. In other words, everything is as transparent as possible. It allows for someone else to repeat the experiment, and that is a crucial aspect of experimental science - REPRODUCIBILITY. It is something pseudoscience cannot do!

The third and final aspect of this paper is educational. I'm excited at the various values that they used in this paper, because I can already see myself using them in my general physics lessons. I'm already planning on using many of these numbers and asking my students to calculate (i) the amount of power per unit area based on the exposure time, (ii) the energy per photon of 222 nm light, (iii) the number of photons that impinges on a unit area during the exposure time, etc... etc. This will be perfect especially for the general physics course that I have taught that is aimed at life-science/pre-med majors. I always like taking something current, and very relevant to our times, to use as a material in our lessons. The students can immediately see first-hand that what they are learning is, in fact, very useful and has a direct effect on them beyond just wanting a good grade at the end of the semester.

So yes, I'll be holding on to this paper for quite some time.

Zz.

What Type of Physicist Are You?

... leader, successor, or toiler?

A new bibliometric study has found that authors can be roughly grouped into three categories: lead scientists who are already prominent in their fields, successors who are early career scientists, and toilers, which are those who do a lot of the dirty work but aren't going anywhere.

When looking at the citation data for mathematicians, psychologists and physicists, the authors identified three broad clusters that are “loosely based” on how the citations per year changes over time. Leaders tend to be experienced scientists who are widely recognized in their fields, which results in an annual citation increase. The successors tend to be early-career scientists who have had a surge in their citations in recent years. Toilers, meanwhile, may have a high citation count, but this stays mostly constant and may even drop slightly.

Not sure of the significance of this study, but hey, it's another criteria to classify people!

Zz.

Physical Review Letters Tightening Its Standards

If you have submitted a manuscript to Phys. Rev. Lett (PRL) lately, or have been asked to referee a paper for the journal, you would have noticed an additional emphasis on the nature of the material that PRL considers to be "publishable":

To be publishable in PRL a paper must do at least one of the following: Substantially advance a particular field; open a significant new area of research; solve a critical outstanding problem and therefore pave the way for notable progress in an existing field; be of singular appeal to all physicists.

While this guideline isn't new (I kinda assumed that this is the standard that PRL had been adhering to all along), it is rather interesting that this is now clearly and explicitly emphasized. And, I must add, enforced, because I think I am an unfortunate recipient of the enforcement of this policy when one of our submission was rejected by the PRL editors.

Now, of course I'm biased since I was a coauthor, but before this, the manuscript would have been strong enough to have made it to the referees. After all, the original theory was published in PRL, and an experimental paper that partially tried to show a proof-of-principal demonstration also made it into PRL. Our paper showed not only a demonstration of a very critical aspect of the theory, but also where it deviated from our measurement. So we thought it was important enough, and certainly, important enough to make  it to the PRL referees.

But nooooooo.....

The rejection from the editors basically said that the content was not up to standard or not suitable. I know they are busy and inundated with tons of these stuff, but these are the times where you wish they could be specific and tell you exactly what they mean and what they were referring to rather than just some standard response. But of course, all of us listed on the paper were surprised that it didn't even make it past the editors. Usually, unless your manuscript is badly written, is clearly out of whack, or it can be seen that it is of a rather obscure topic, it will make it to the referees. But with their new policy, and also trying to lighten the burden on the referees, the editors have become a more significant gatekeepers.

So essentially, PRL is slowly becoming Nature and Science. :)

Now, don't get me wrong. It is not a criticism. I'm all for raising the standards, and the submission rate to PRL is  huge. Keeping things they way they were is simply not sustainable and they will run out of referees who would be willing to perform the review. Still, I wish the editor would briefly provide a reason why, because I'm sure we could easily provide a counter argument; or maybe that is why no reason was provided.

In any case, rather than continuing on to purse this with PRL, we sent it to another publication.

Ironically, a couple of weeks after the PRL rejection, I was contacted by PRL to referee a paper! :)

Zz.

Record Number of Authors In Physics Paper - Follow Up

Remember just barely a couple of months ago, I mentioned about the brouhaha regarding the record number of authors in a combined CMS/ATLAS paper out of the LHC/CERN? In a Physics Today article, there's a bit more on this, especially on the possibly "light-hearted" nature of the Wall Street Journal article that first mentioned this.

As I've mentioned in the earlier entry, I don't quite know why this is such a freaking big deal. The experiments are getting to be more and more difficult, it requires a more complex instrument, and thus, require a lot more people. The fact that this paper actually combined the results from two HUGE collaboration should, as expected, results in a lengthy authors list. What is the big issue here?

Unfortunately, it gives the wrong impression to the rest of the public. The fact that areas such as condensed matter physics, which produces way, WAY more papers than high energy physics and usually tend to have a significantly small number of authors, somehow has been ignored (Phys. Rev. B, for example, which publishes papers in condensed matter/material  science, is produced TWICE a month, and each edition contains TWO volumes!). And yet, the exception here has been used as a rule for the entire field of physics! Where is the logic in that?

And for the record, I had published a paper in PRL, on an experimental work, no less, and the paper only had THREE authors. Count em'!

Zz.

ATLAS Higgs Manuscript Online

The ATLAS group's manuscript on the discovery of the Higgs is now available online. The manuscript indicated that it has been submitted to Physics Letters B.

I expect the CMS version to be online soon, and I would expect that Physics Letters B to publish both of them at the same time.

Zz.

IoP Author Guide

In Part XIII of my So You Want To Be A Physicist essay, I gave a brief description on the process of publishing one's work in a peer-reviewed journal. Now, IoP has published a handy guide to authors in doing the same thing.

I read it quickly, and both my essay and the guide certainly overlap a lot, although I made specific references to Nature, Science, and PRL. In any case, I'd say that this is another handy guide to have as a guideline for those who are just starting out and trying to publish their work.

Zz.

20th Anniversary of e-print ArXiv

If you've been in this field since the early 90s, you would be extremely familiar with the e-print ArXiv. This repository has undergone quite an evolution, and has transformed how physics works. It turns 20 this year. Its founder, Paul Ginsparg, wrote a fascinating article in Nature on how this simple website has revolutionized communications between physicists.

Within a few years it had evolved into a web resource at http://arXiv.org that now contains close to 700,000 full texts, receives 75,000 new texts each year, and serves roughly 1 million full-text downloads to about 400,000 distinct users every week (see graphs). It has broadened, first to cover most active research fields of physics, then to mathematics, nonlinear sciences, computer science, statistics and, more recently, to host parts of biology and finance infiltrated by physicists.

However, what is interesting here is that, while physicists don't really have that big of an issue with sharing work that has not yet been published, researchers in other fields are not as enthusiastic.

Physicists were quick to adopt widespread sharing of electronic preprints, but other researchers remain reluctant to do so. Fields vary widely in their attitudes to data and ideas before formal review, and in choosing to share electronic preprints, each community will have to develop policies and protocols best suited to their users. A talk I gave in 1997 to a group of biologists helped catalyse the resource now known as PubMedCentral — run by the US National Institutes of Health. I served on the initial advisory board, which soon decided not to host any unrefereed materials, even carefully quarantined, in part for fear of losing essential publisher participation. There remain many legitimate reasons for individual researchers to prefer to delay dissemination, from uncertainty over correctness, to retaining extra time for follow-ups, to sociological differences in the way publication is regarded — in certain fields, the research somehow doesn't count until peer reviewed.

 ArXiv is an amazing resource, and in some areas of physics, such as high energy/particle physics, it is almost as important as peer-reviewed journals.

Zz.

Publishing A Turd Is Still A Turd

OK, I've made wholesale judgement of something that I haven't read, and something I don't have a very good knowledge of. In other words, I'm doing exactly what I've criticized crackpots for doing. I fully admit it, and I'm fully owning it! So there!

But really, as I've mentioned earlier, you can only counter crackpottery with another crackpottery. And I'm going to judge this with the same level of superficial knowledge as this person is doing by invoking his superficial level of knowledge of quantum mechanics. I think that is a fair deal, no?

This article out of Cornell highlights a series of publication on ESP and other paranormal phenomena. Oh yes, that again! Supposedly, this series of publication is based on new research that somehow shows "convincing" evidence for it. But just in reading this article, are you truly convinced?

In one experiment, Bem asked students to pick one of two curtains as the one they thought contained a picture behind it. Although the students correctly chose the correct curtain 53.1 percent of the time, which appears to not be too different from the expected 50 percent, Bem believes this value is, in fact, statistically significant and unlikely to appear by chance.

A paper published by researchers at the University of Amsterdam suggests that Bem uses incorrect statistical methodology by using one-tailed tests instead of two-tailed tests, which would be more difficult to prove significance for. By re-analyzing Bem’s data using a different set of statistical analysis tools, however, the researchs show that Bem’s data is not statistically significant. Bem believes this claim is “an absolutely ridiculous argument to be making” and that the assumptions used by the University of Amsterdam researchers are “unrealistic.”

Er... yeah! Of course!

But it gets better when physics is invoked.

It is Bem’s belief that there is “nothing in physics that is contradicted” because although ESP might not be in line with Newtonian physics, it is in line with quantum physics.

He added, “The fact that we do not have a mechanism to explain it is a major deterrent. But almost every theory first started out as an unexplainable phenomenon.”

Er... what is it with "quantum physics" that is consistent with this cra... er ... study? Let me guess. He's invoking quantum entanglement? Superposition? The Cat? If he is, he is barking up the wrong tree, very much like Deepak Chopra. And thus, my point about superficial understanding of something. But what is funny is the gall he had to say that " ... almost every theory first started out as an unexplainable phenomenon.. " Since when is this something new to be "first started out"? Claims of ESP and such have been made for decades, even longer! In all of those years, they still can't get out of first base, out of the "discovery" mode. Other legitimate phenomena have gone beyond the discovery/confirmation phase and now have proper theoretical descriptions.

This thing cannot get beyond the fact that they can't differentiate their signal from random noise. The statistical analysis of such a thing is suspect. It is why the effect is not convincing.

Zz.

US No Longer A "Collosus of Science"

I think most of us who work in science (especially physics) and have seen the slow erosion of  funding in the physical science would not be surprised by this development. A Thomson Reuters survey of scientific output has shown a decline in scientific publication from the US when compared to Europe and Asia-Pacific countries.

The report, released yesterday, notes that the Asia-Pacific region has now overtaken the US in terms of published papers and spending on research. In 2008 the US invested $384bn while Asian countries invested $387bn in total, and while researchers in the US published around 310,000 papers in 2009, over 330,000 were published by scientists in the Asia-Pacific region.

In the physical sciences, the report notes that investment in physics and engineering in the US has "taken a back seat" compared to the biological science at a time when countries in Asia are increasing their spending on research in the physical sciences. "In physics, the trend for the US in terms of world share is distinctly downward," says the report. 

I have no idea if US politicians actually know about this, or even care! The incoming Republican congress does not even mention anything about the important of science, science funding, and education. And science certainly was dismissed by many of the Tea Party candidate, some of which blatantly proclaimed that Evolution is wrong. So would I be blamed if I see the Dark Ages of Science coming to the US?

Zz.

The e-Print ArXiv To Undergo Major Changes

Looks like the venerable ArXiv will be undergoing a major upgrade.

New tools will link papers by concepts, not just by the citations they contain, and this will help users without advanced expertise -- including some outside the scientific community -- understand the significance of new research, said Ginsparg.

I wonder if they'll put in new efforts to weed out some of the "strange" papers (I'll refrain from calling them crackpottery) that appear periodically.

Zz.

Einstein Versus The Physical Review

I did a search on this article because I remember reading it quite a while back. Luckily, it is available for free for everyone who does not have a Physics Today subscription.

I was searching for it because someone was criticizing the peer-reviewed process, and arguing that Einstein would not have been accepted for publication had he tried to publish his papers.

Neglecting the fact that Einstein did published his papers, and that all this person can offer is only mere speculation of whether or not Einstein's work could have been published (if he had lived today, he would have been quite familiar with the system and would have accepted how physics is practiced today), the paper above showed that the great Einstein himself could have learned a thing or two had he paid attention to the referee of the manuscript he submitted to the Physical Review.

The irony, of course, is that Einstein could have found that escape route months earlier, simply by reading the referee's report that he had dismissed so hastily. The referee had also observed that casting the Einstein–Rosen metric (as we now call this solution of the Einstein equations) in cylindrical coordinates removes the apparent difficulty.

The peer-review system isn't perfect, because it is done by humans. But it is the best we have now until a better system comes along. And there ARE valuable feedback done by referees who take their responsibility very seriously. I know that *I* try to be very fair when I referee any papers, and often when there's doubt, will err on the side of the authors. This particular incident with Einstein is one such example where Einstein would have done well to pay attention to the referee report, and where the system really worked the way it should.

Zz.

Embedded Video Advertisement in Print Magazine

Yes, you read it right. We now have embedded video in the print version of magazines sold on newsstands!

Supposedly (since I haven't seen the print ad) CBS bought this embedded video ad in Entertainment Weekly to advertise their show "The Big Bang Theory". And interestingly enough, the ad mentioned "Physics Today".

The video, which is activated when the magazine page is opened for more than 5 seconds, opens with Jim Parsons, the actor who plays Sheldon Cooper, a theoretical physicist on the television sitcom The Big Bang Theory, welcoming readers to "the current edition of Physics Today" before finding out he has been duped into supporting a different product.

You can find the video at the link above. Still, is this a preview of what's to come with print ads?

Zz.

Another "Hoax Paper" Accepted For Publication

As much as we whine about peer-reviewed process and the prestige of certain journals that try to uphold a very rigorous acceptance process, when we read something like this, it drives home the fact that, more often than not, quality beats quantity on any given day.

A hoax paper was accepted to be published in an open access journal that I've never heard about until now {link available for free only for a limited time}.

The fake, computer-generated manuscript was submitted to The Open Information Science Journal by Philip Davis, a graduate student in communication sciences at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and Kent Anderson, executive director of international business and product development at The New England Journal of Medicine. They produced the paper using software that generates grammatically correct but nonsensical text, and submitted the manuscript under pseudonyms in late January.

Davis says he decided to submit the fake manuscript after receiving several unsolicited invitations by e-mail to submit papers to open-access journals published by Bentham under the author-pays-for-publication model. He wanted to test if the publisher would "accept a completely nonsensical manuscript if the authors were willing to pay".

Davis was informed by Bentham on 3 June that his manuscript was accepted for publication. The publisher requested that Davis pay US$800 to its subscriptions department, based in the United Arab Emirates, before the article was published. At this point, Davis retracted the article.

The editor of the journal is resigning from the journal in dispute with the publisher. I find it entirely VERY strange that the journal publisher is claiming that the paper has been reviewed by more than one referee, and yet, the editor in chief is not able to access or verify that such a review has taken place. Typically, the editor, of all people, are the ones assigning the referring process and has full access to all the reviews. So something is definitely fishy here.

This is reminiscent of the Alan Sokal hoax in "Social Text", even though the aim of that hoax is on an entirely different matter than this one. Still, the review process failed, and that something that is essentially garbage made it through the process and got through. This is one clear example of what would happen without proper scrutiny and review.

Of course, someone might ask "But ZapperZ, even those prestigious journals like Nature and Science are not immune to publishing such "hoaxes", as illustrate by the Hendrik Schon debacle".

Ah, but there's a difference here. When you either forge data or being unethical, it is very difficult to spot something like that, as opposed to the nonsensical paper written by Sokal and in this latest case. Any reviewer who knows the subject matter can immediately spot such "word salad" that are contained in these cases. In Schon's case, it isn't easy to spot because the deception is in THE DATA itself. It requires others to try and reproduce that experiment as a means to verify what was obtained, i.e. it requires the wheel of scientific independent verification to kick in. You'll never see such word salad manuscript getting published in Nature, Science, PRL, etc.

Zz.

Is Physics Better Than Biology?

Well, not really. But some people from Sapienza University of Rome think that they have a way to evaluate the citation statistics across various disciplines, department, and even between academicians of different subject areas and make a meaningful comparison (link available for free only for a limited time).

The researchers collected data on how many papers were cited a certain numbers of times in a range of scientific fields, and found that the raw numbers varied widely from one discipline to another. For example, for papers published in 1999, articles with 100 citations are 50 times more common in developmental biology than in aerospace engineering.

But if the citation counts are divided by the average number of citations per paper for the discipline in that year, the resulting statistical distributions are remarkably similar. All fit very precisely on a single curve, corresponding to what statisticians call a 'log-normal' distribution. This relationship is "amazingly clean", says Fortunato. The method allows direct comparison between disciplines — for example, an article published in aerospace engineering in 1999 that gained 20 citations had more impact in its field than an article with 100 citations in developmental biology.

I suppose with this, the citation index, and the h-index, we have a lot of tools at our disposal to evaluate the impact of not just an individual, but also whole fields and whole departments.

Zz.

arXiv Hits The Half-Million Mark

I don't know how large of a file system they have, but congratulations to those managing the e-print arXiv. They have surpassed the half-million article submission.

Edit: SciAm coverage.

Zz.

What Makes A Successful "Letters"?

The "Letters" in this case is the Physical Review Letters (PRL), one of the top 3 most prestigious publication for physics papers. The Physical Review website has an editorial on what makes a suitable and successful PRL paper. With the criteria for acceptance being more tight, and with the editors at PRL now having a larger role in weeding out submission, it is more important to pay attention to these guidelines on what they are looking for.

A successful Letter of course begins with a valid result, one that is important and interesting. This is glib, however, because it lacks explanations of “important” and “interesting.” So, here are attempts to define each, in single sentences: An important result provides insight that changes the way others view and understand the topic, allows them to improve their own approaches, and thus leads to substantial progress. An interesting result will make readers glad to learn of it, because it is important to their own work or the work of others, or because it is science of uncommon beauty, aesthetically. In the context of a manuscript there is a third element: accessibility. Regardless of its content, a manuscript will be of lesser interest if it is impenetrable, and a manuscript that attracts fewer readers will be less important.

Present PRL policy incorporates these three concepts by seeking to publish work that should not be missed by researchers in the given field and also those in at least some related fields. Broader interest, in general, is better, as is greater importance, but the two are not independent. Work that is extremely important to a few might be as worthy as work that is moderately important to many, which again leads directly to presentation. A manuscript that can be understood only by a narrow audience will be less likely to be suitable for PRL, because it will lose its chance to be moderately important to a wide audience.

Zz.

Journal Club For Condensed Matter Physics

This is such a terrific idea.

The Division of Condensed Matter Physics of the American Physical Society (APS) has sent out e-mail highlighting the existence of a "Journal Club for Condensed Matter Physics". This is where prominent physicists recommend papers and preprints that they find important, fascinating, or have a passion for. You get a more in-depth review of the paper/preprint, especially a discussion on the salient point being made.

I will include this link in the Blog's Physics Links collection.

Zz.

50 Years of The Physical Review Letters

Anyone working in physics knows that Physical Review Letters (PRL) is one of the most prestigious journals to get published in. In fact, in high energy physics, it is THE most prestigious journal to published in (since I it appears that high energy physicists, especially experimentalists, seem to have an unofficial "boycott" of Nature and Science).

In any case, PRL will turn 50 this year (2008). So you can expect them doing a few special things to mark this occasion. One of the things they are doing already is to highlight some of the important, milestone papers from the past. "Letters from the Past - A PRL Retrospective" lists papers that have made significant impacts, even some time winning the author a Nobel Prize. The best part about this is that you can access these papers for free. More papers will be added to the list, so check back regularly.

So while the actual date is still a ways away, let me send out my early wish and say "Happy Birthday, PRL!"

Zz.

Free For All For Particle Physics Journals?

There's a movement to make all journals publishing particle/high energy physics papers to be open accessed.

The issue surrounding this isn't as trivial as it might appear, as one can read in the article itself. While such an aim might be feasible for high energy physics, it is still an open question if it can be done with other fields, such as condensed matter which produces probably the largest percentage of published papers. There aren't a lot of "large groups" in condensed matter, and most research work are done by small groups with small budgets.

Zz.