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This paper is about differences between the academic community discussing open science and reproducibility. One main takeaway is perhaps unsurprising: the open
by groceryheist 6y ago
This paper is about differences between the academic community discussing open science and reproducibility. One main takeaway is perhaps unsurprising: the open science community is apparently more collaborative, with a more connected co-authorship network and more use of "prosocial" language in paper abstracts.
The more interesting finding is that there are more women in high status (first or last) author positions in the open science community (when the number of authors is smaller) and there is an increasing trend in this community of women occupying such positions. This would be predicted by theories that STEM is an individualistic enterprise less likely to attract people with communal values. Women are more likely to have communal values and this is often provided as a cultural explanation for gender gaps in STEM. But the open science community is a part of STEM that sees communal practices (specifically, the publication of data and code along with information about findings) as key to improving science. This is in contrast to the reproducibility community which has legitimate criticisms of established scientific practices but does not emphasize pro-social practices in the same way as the open science community.
In sum I think the paper is useful by
1. Showing that while "open science" and "reproducibility" have some superficial similarities they are distinct communities with interesting differences.
2. Showing ways that the open science community seems more collaborative and communal and thus it seems attractive to women (and likely may be this way because women are helping to drive it).
The paper also has some shortcomings. Names are not gender and gender isn't binary. There's a lot of discussion about diversity and team science which honestly doesn't seem to have much to do with the empirical contributions of the paper.
- dependenttypes 6y ago> there are more women in high status (first or last) author positions in the open science community Is this true even when excluding fields and papers where names go in alphabetic order?
- devaboone 6y agoWhich fields put names in alphabetical order? In medicine, at least, deciding who goes in the first and last name spots is a really big deal, and fights over this sometimes ruin professional relationships.
- alephnil 6y agoMy impression is that the order of the authors is extremly important in medical research, very important in releated fields like biochemistry and molecular biology and still quite important in bioinformatics, while in fields like mathematics and computer science the autors can decide to list the authors alphabetically. This correlates quite nicely with the level of competetiveness in the respecive fields.
- joppy 6y agoAuthor names in alphabetical order is pretty ubiquitous in pure mathematics. There are also usually few (1-5) authors on a paper, and some people who contribute a small amount to a paper (say, a nicer proof of a lemma) are not listed as an author, but thanked elsewhere in the paper. I think the reason this works for pure maths and not some other fields is that pure maths is quite “slow”, in that people don’t release papers nearly as frequently as other fields, and the papers tend to be longer.
- dependenttypes 6y agoIt seems somewhat common in cryptography.
- groceryheist 6y agoThey statistically controlled for field so the answer is probably yes.