New study finds that men are often their own favorite experts on any given subject

By Christopher Ingraham, Reprinted from The Washington Post

A fascinating new working paper finds that men are far more likely than women to back up their arguments with appeals to a higher authority: themselves.

When an academic writes a research paper, it is common practice to give citations for various facts and assertions. It is not enough, for instance, to simply assert that “the global rise of the hyperdiverse ant genus Pheidole is an evolutionary epic with many subplots.” You need to cite biologist Corrie S. Moreau’s 2008 paper on “Unraveling the evolutionary history of the hyperdiverse ant genus Pheidole” to make that argument.

In academia, article citations like these are a marker of authority and influence: If your work gets cited by others hundreds of times, that’s a good indicator that you’re making a mark on your field. Universities often factor in citation counts when making decisions about hiring, tenure and pay.

As it turns out, academics have a handy tool at their disposal for juicing their citation counts: They cite themselves. There’s nothing inherently shady about this practice. If you’re an expert in a relatively obscure field like ant taxonomy, you’re probably going to need to cite your previous work because few people people are doing similar work.

So Molly M. King and her colleagues at Stanford University, the University of Washington and New York University set out to find how often this so-called “self-citation” happens. They did so by examining a massive database of academic work: 1.5 million research papers in JSTOR, a digital library of academic books and papers published between 1779 and 2011.

What they found, first of all, is that self-citation represents a significant chunk of all academic citations. There were 8.2 million citations contained in the 1.5 million papers they studied. Nearly 775,000 of those citations, or about 10 percent of them, were of authors citing their own work.

For some individuals, the share of self-citations was much higher. They give an example of one “prominent scholar” (they don’t name names, because academia is a small world) who has received more than 7,000 citations of his work. More than a fifth of those citations came from himself.

But more strikingly, King and her colleagues found a huge difference in self-citation patterns between men and women. “Over the years between 1779-2011, men cite their own papers 56% more than women do,” they found. And in recent decades, men have stepped up their self-citation game relative to women: “In the last two decades of our data, men self-cite 70 percent more than women.”

Read the rest of Mr. Ingraham’s interesting article HERE.

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Christopher Ingraham writes about politics, drug policy and all things data. He previously worked at the Brookings Institution and the Pew Research Center. Follow him on Twitter – @_cingraham.