Helen MacDonald

This is a study where they looked at about 100,000 abstracts in PubMed journals and they compare the use of 25 positive words.

So these are words like novel, favourable, promising, unique, excellent, supportive, spectacular, remarkable, encouraging.

All of these words, as an editor, I try and delete out irrespective of what your gender is.

But somehow it seems that they creep in more often in papers which are

first and last authored by male authors compared to females.

And the absolute difference is small, but it is linked to reduced citations down the line.

And what it builds as, in a sense, in my mind, is that there are these multiple small things that happen over your life as a female that add to this general culture of

that it's slightly harder for you than men.

But obviously Carl can't let me have that rant to myself.

Yes.

I'm not saying this research study is perfect.

No, I don't think it does suggest that.

But those people, the first and the last author, I would say, are more influential.

They have a stronger steer on where things end up than sometimes the people in the middle.

Well, that's true, but over 100,000 papers.

What do you mean by precision over accuracy?

Carl, you just said that you haven't published a Christmas research paper, so I think you've found your job for 2020.

Yeah, and it can't be big data.

We can look into gender.

I think that's sometimes one of the things that makes it difficult to analyse these papers, that there's a kind of legacy effect to some extent.