A Study Has Shown That Men Are Often Their Own Favorite Expert At Any Given Subject

A fascinating new working paper finds that men are far more likely to back up their arguments with appeals to a higher authority.The males best expert is often them self’s.

Are man better warriors than women?

In academia, article citations are a marker of authority and influence. If your work gets cited by others hundreds of times, that’s a good indicator that you’re making a mark in your field. Academics have a tool at their disposal for juicing their citations. There’s nothing inherently shady about this practice. If you’re an expert in a relatively obscure field like ant taxonomy, you’re probably going to need to cite your previous work because few people are doing similar work.

How can you become a male expert?

So Molly M. King and her colleagues at Stanford University set out to find how often this so-called “self-citation” happens. They examined a database of academic work: 1.5 million papers in JSTOR, a digital library of papers published between 1779 and 2011. They found out that self-citation represents a significant chunk of all the citations. There were 8.2 million citations contained in the 1.5 million papers they studied. 775,000 of citations, or 10 percent of them, were of authors citing their own work.

Can self-citations make you a male expert?

The share of self-citations was much higher. They give an example of one “prominent scholar” (they don’t name names because academia is a small world) who has received more than 7,000 citations of his work. But more strikingly, King and her colleagues found a huge difference in self-citation patterns between expert men and expert women. “Over the years between 1779-2011, expert men cite their own papers 56% more than expert women do.”

Are citations going to make you a business expert?

King and her colleagues offer a number of hypotheses for why men experts may be more likely to cite themselves. Studies have shown that men have a higher opinion than women do. And they face fewer social penalties for self-promotion. “Gendered perceptions of self-promotion likely influence perceptions of self-citation, which could be viewed as a form of self-promotion in the academic workplace,” King and her colleagues write. There’s also the simple fact that men expert tend to publish more, particularly early on in their careers. If you’ve published more papers, you have more chances for citing your own work.