Can the presence of author photograph and biography have an impact on article citations? The case of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering

Journal article, 2022

The aim of this study was to investigate whether the presence of author photograph and biography in scientific articles could have an impact on article citations. The impact of photograph and biography, in combination with the author characteristics i.e., gender, affiliation country (measured as whether the author was affiliated to a high-income country or not), and scientific impact (measured as whether the author was a high impact author or not), was also examined, whilst controlling for several covariates. This study focused on a sample of articles published in the time span of 2016–2018 in Chemistry and Chemical Engineering journals by Elsevier. The articles were downloaded from Scopus. The analysis was done using random effects within-between model analyses. Within authors, the results showed no significant impact of author photograph and biography on the geomean of citations. Different patterns were found for visibility of articles, when author photograph and biography was combined with author characteristics. While being affiliated to a high-income country and being a high impact author had a positive impact on citations, gender (female) had a negative impact. For gender, there was a small citation disadvantage of 5% for female authors when they provided a photograph and biography.