Men more likely to describe their research as ‘excellent’
Study shows papers with male lead authors are up to 21% more likely to use positive framing
Male researchers are more likely than their female counterparts to use superlatives like ‘first’ or ‘novel’ to describe their work, a new study suggests.
The team analysed the language used in more than six million papers in peer-reviewed medical and scientific journals to see how often the findings were described with any of 25 words that have positive connotations such as ‘excellent’, ‘unique’, ‘promising’ and ‘remarkable’.
Papers with male lead authors were up to 21% more likely than those with female lead authors to use this kind of positive framing in titles and abstracts, the analysis found.
Papers that used positive framing also had up to 13% more citations by other scientists than papers without this language.
