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Researchers who are accused of sexual misconduct start to receive fewer citations after the media covers the allegations. But the same cannot be said about scientists publicly accused of scientific fraud, whose citations remain unchanged, according to an analysis published this week in PLoS ONE1.
In the wake of the #MeToo movement that uncovered perpetrators of sexual harassment in Hollywood and other industries, including science, Giulia Maimone, a behavioural scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, wanted to know whether researchers in STEM — science, technology, engineering and mathematics — and the social sciences were avoiding the work of those accused of sexual harassment.
She and her colleagues compared citations for 15 researchers in the three years after they were publicly accused of sexual misconduct, with those of 15 researchers accused of data fabrication and other scientific misconduct and of 142 researchers who had not received any of such allegation. Their prediction: that scholars accused of scientific fraud would incur a greater penalty because the misconduct calls into question the merit of that person’s scientific work. “That’s not at all what we found,” says Maimone. “We were very surprised.”
Citations of alleged sexual harassers fell in the aftermath of an allegation going public. But those of scientists accused of scientific misconduct held steady, even though publication rates fell for both categories.
“It’s really valuable to have a study like this that looks at citational practices,” says Anna Bull, a sociologist at the University of York, UK, who studies sexual harassment in higher education. She says that the results could be a sign that attitudes towards sexual misconduct in science are changing.
But she says that the cases analysed — selected because the allegations had appeared in media reports and the accused had accrued at least 200 citations over the study period — probably represent only the severest forms of sexual misconduct. “In order for things to come out [in the media], they must be pretty egregious,” she says, noting that in many places, including the United Kingdom and European Union, few sexual-misconduct allegations reach the media owing to defamation laws.
Elisabeth Bik, a research-integrity consultant based in California, says that although it is good that peoples’ aversion to sexual misconduct is being reflected in the scientific community, it is concerning that there was no drop in citations for research misconduct. But she says that in cases of scientific misconduct, “it is often not clear who is responsible”, and papers might also be cited as examples of misconduct.
Behavioural blind-spot
The reasons why researchers are choosing not to cite colleagues accused of sexual misconduct are unclear. They could be deliberately punishing sexual harassers by withholding citations, or they might want to preserve their own reputation, says Bull, or “maybe even both”.
Maimone also says that researchers might not realize that they are punishing alleged sexual harassers more than they are scientific fraudsters.
As part of their study, she and her colleagues also surveyed 240 STEM and social-science researchers, and 231 non-academics about their attitudes towards sexual harassment and scientific misconduct.
At least 90% of non-academics said that sexual misconduct was more disgusting than scientific fraud, and three-quarters said it was more deserving of punishment. But 85% of academics surveyed said that if forced to choose, they would rather cite the article published by the sexual harasser than the fraudster. But given that the study shows that citations of scientists accused of harassment drop more than those of researchers accused of fraud, Maimone says that scientists might be overestimating their ability to judge the merit of scientific findings without considering who produced those findings.
