Women seem to retract fewer papers than men — but why?

Women are under-represented in medical research generally, but they are even more under-represented when it comes to retracted articles. A new study finds that women’s names filled just 23% of author slots in a sample of nearly 900 retracted articles published in medical journals between 2008 and 2017.

“This is a really interesting, creative and robust study,” says Curt Rice, who promotes publishing literacy at the Publishing Unlocked project in Oslo, Norway. “The article invites us to dig into issues like negotiations about authorship and the likelihood of scrutiny.” The findings were reported on 19 November in PLoS ONE¹.

Why retractions data could be a powerful tool for cleaning up science

Study author Paul Sebo, an internal medicine specialist and researcher at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, used an artificial intelligence tool that infers whether authors are male or female based on their first names.

He found women’s names in 16.5% of first-author slots and 12.7% of last-author slots for the retracted papers. By contrast, an earlier study that used a similar tool for predicting author gender found that women accounted for 41–45% of first authors and 26–33% of last authors in all articles from the same selection of journals across the same time frame².

Risk and reward

Interpreting the results is fraught. The gender-prediction tools used are imperfect. They do not capture non-binary identities, for example, and can be less accurate with non-Western names than Western ones. But in a manual check of 200 names, Sebo found no mismatches.

And the findings themselves don’t come with a clear explanation. In an e-mail to Nature, Sebo wrote that his suspicion is that the disparity stems from how “women are still underrepresented in senior academic roles, lead fewer projects, and therefore may be less exposed to the kinds of responsibilities (and risks) that are more commonly associated with retractions”.

“My speculation”, Rice says, ”would be that because men are more visible in science in general, their work is getting more scrutiny.”

Another explanation might be that “men are socialized to be risk-takers” — to ”have these big, bold ideas that are often valued in research”, says Sapna Cheryan, a social psychologist at the University of Washington in Seattle. “On the flipside, women are socialized to be more detail-oriented.”

Answers could also lie in the dynamics of research teams, says Cassidy Sugimoto, a science and technology policy researcher at the Carter School at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. Whereas female scientists work with the same co-authors more often, male scientists are more likely to rotate team members³. Sugimoto says that such rapid rotation could lead to work that ultimately gets retracted. “When you have a high turnover of team members, there’s going to be a higher probability that you work with someone whose work you don’t know or trust as much.”

In the future, Sebo would like to interview authors involved in retractions to pin down how gender experiences shape retraction rates. For now, he wants research-integrity initiatives to keep this gender gap in mind. “I hope our study encourages the research community to view retractions not only as corrections to the literature, but also as windows into how responsibility, power and opportunity are distributed across genders in science,” he says.