Abstract
The position of an author on the byline of a paper affects the inferences readers make about their contributions to the research. We examine gender differences in authorship in the ecology literature using two datasets: submissions to six journals between 2010 and 2015 (regardless of whether they were accepted), and manuscripts published by 151 journals between 2009 and 2015. Women were less likely to be last (i.e., “senior”) authors (averaging ~23% across journals, years, and datasets) and sole authors (~24%), but more likely to be first author (~38%), relative to their overall frequency of authorship (~31%). However, the proportion of women in all authorship roles, except sole authorship, has increased year‐on‐year. Women were less likely to be authors on papers with male last authors, and all‐male papers were more abundant than expected given the overall gender ratio. Women were equally well represented on papers published in higher versus lower impact factor journals at all authorship positions. Female first authors were less likely to serve as corresponding author of their papers; this difference increased with the degree of gender inequality in the author's home country, but did not depend on the gender of the last author. First authors from non‐English‐speaking countries were less likely to serve as corresponding author of their papers, especially if the last author was from an English‐speaking country. That women more often delegate corresponding authorship to one of their coauthors may increase the likelihood that readers undervalue their role in the research by shifting credit for their contributions to coauthors. We suggest that author contribution statements be more universally adopted and that these statements declare how and/or why the corresponding author was selected for this role.
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
12-2018
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.4584
Funding Information
The British Ecological Society and the Society for the Study of Evolution provided permission to access their databases for this analysis and provided funding for this project.
Related Content
An anonymized version of the submitted papers dataset, removing personal identifying information (manuscript titles, author names, and author countries), is available on Dryad, https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.k0h70b0.
Repository Citation
Fox, Charles W.; Ritchey, Josiah P.; and Paine, C. E. Timothy, "Patterns of Authorship in Ecology and Evolution: First, Last, and Corresponding Authorship Vary with Gender and Geography" (2018). Entomology Faculty Publications. 171.
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/entomology_facpub/171
Included in
Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Commons, Entomology Commons, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, Scholarly Communication Commons, Scholarly Publishing Commons
Notes/Citation Information
Published in Ecology and Evolution, v. 8, issue 23, p. 11492-11507.
© 2018 The Authors. Ecology and Evolution published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.