Gender differences in the use of positive and negative terms by authorship teams: a study of citation contexts

Other conference contribution, 2022

The way in which women present their research accomplishments, in comparison to men, has been regarded as one of the factors causing gender gaps in academic life sciences (Lerchenmueller, Sorenson and Jena, 2019). As the notion of 'excellence' within audit cultures in academia implicitly reflects images of masculinity, the promotion of research findings for women might be considered counter stereotypical behaviour. Women might be criticised for this behaviour, even sometimes by other women (Rudman, 1998; McKinnon and O’Connell, 2020).The aim of this study was to investigate whether there is a difference between authorship teams, in terms of the use of positive/negative terms, when citing papers of the same gender composition teams.