ABSTRACT
Women are particularly underrepresented in journals of the highest scientific impact, with substantial consequences for their careers. While a large body of research has focused on the outcome and the process of peer review, fewer articles have explicitly focused on gendered submission behavior and the explanations for these differences. In our study of nearly five thousand active authors, we find that women are less likely to report having submitted papers and, when they have, to submit fewer manuscripts, on average, than men. Women were more likely to indicate that they did not submit their papers (in general and their subsequently most cited papers) to Science, Nature, or PNAS because they were advised not to. In the aggregate, no statistically significant difference was observed between men and women in how they rated the quality of their work. Nevertheless, regardless of discipline, women were more likely than men to indicate that their "work was not ground-breaking or sufficiently novel" as a rationale for not submitting to one of the listed prestigious journals. Men were more likely than women to indicate that the "work would fit better in a more specialized journal." We discuss the implications of these findings and interventions that can serve to mitigate the disparities caused by gendered differences in submission behavior. SignificancePublishing in high-impact scholarly journals has a significant effect on researchers careers. Our findings identify factors that affect submission to Science, Nature, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) and explore whether there is a relationship between gender and desk rejections or submission rates. We found no relationship between gender and reported desk rejection and a relationship between gender and reported submissions. Women were more likely than men to indicate that their "work was not ground-breaking or sufficiently novel" for the listed prestigious journals and that they were advised against submitting to these venues. Men were more likely to indicate that the "work would fit better in a more specialized journal."
ABSTRACT
COVID-19 has emerged as a significant research hotspot in recent years, leading to a surge in production and citations received by COVID-19 papers. While concerns have been raised about the potential citation boost on journals associated with publishing COVID-19 papers, the extent and mechanisms of such boost remain unclear. This study uses a generalized difference-in-differences approach to examine the impact of publishing COVID-19 papers on journal citations and related metrics in four highly covidized fields. Our results demonstrate that in health sciences fields, journals starting to publish COVID-19 papers in 2020 experienced a significant increase in citations compared with other journals. This trend continued in 2021, although to a lesser extent. However, such citation premiums became insignificant for journals starting to publish COVID-19 papers in 2021. In some fields, we also observed that COVID-19 papers increased the citations of non-COVID-19 papers in the same journals, but only for journals starting to publish COVID-19 papers in 2020. Our heterogeneity test indicates that COVID-19 papers published in prestigious journals brought more significant citation premiums to the journals and non-COVID-19 papers in most fields. We finally show that these citation premiums can affect various citation-based journal metrics. Our findings reveal a "gold rush" pattern in which early entrants are more likely to establish their citation advantage in research hotspots and caution against using such metrics to evaluate journal quality.