Projects
Does the hidden college contribute to a gender gap in academic success?
Across disciplines, a gender gap in academic success—measured as the number of publications, journal placement, and citation counts—has long been documented. A parallel Scientometrics literature has documented the substantial importance of embeddedness in informal professional networks for academic success, using acknowledgments in publications as novel measures of such embeddedness. Combining these hitherto disjoint strands of research, we investigate 1) the effect of embeddedness in informal collaboration networks on academic success; 2) whether gender differences in network embeddedness exist; and ultimately 3) the extent to which informal collaboration network embeddedness can account for gender gaps in academic success. To explore these questions, we collected detailed information on 95,662 unique scholars (including both authors and commentors) from 152,580 peer-reviewed articles published in 185 political science journals from 2003 to 2023. We construct network measures at both the ego-centric and meso-scale levels to capture scholars’ positions in political science’s informal collaboration network. With this project, we improve our understanding of academic gender disparities as well as of the gendered nature of network embeddedness as a correlate of academic success.
