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CSSS Interdisciplinary study shows researchers prefer same-gender co-authors

CSSS Director and professor of Statistics and Social Work, Elena Erosheva, and CSSS affiliates Carole Lee (Philosophy) and Jevin West (Information School) co-authored a new study from the University of Washington and Cornell University. The study, published in PLOS One, finds consistent gender homophily - the tendency of authors to collaborate with others who share their gender - among 560,000 research articles published between 1960 and 2011 in the online repository JSTOR. It can't be said definitively why researchers are more likely to write scientific papers with co-authors of the same gender, but the findings suggest a behavioral component is in play when scientists seek out collaborators.

 

Other co-authors were Y. Samuel Wang (Cornell, Statistics and Data Science) and Carl Bergstrom (UW, Biology).

 

Adapted from a University of Washington Press Release.

 

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0283106