Any Old Tom, Dick or Harry: The Citation Impact of First Name Genderedness

Abstract

This paper examines the relationship between the genderedness of authors' first names and citation distributions in scholarly production. Merging a first name genderedness table derived from Wikidata with bibliometric data from articles by US-affiliated authors published between 2010 and 2019 and indexed in the Web of Science, we develop a relative distributional framework that compares name, article, and citation counts along a continuous genderedness spectrum. Results show that the lexical structure of the corpus, as captured by the relationship between unique first names (types) and the number of their occurrences (tokens), proves highly stable across author roles. Productivity analyses reveal that disciplinary groups diverge substantially in the direction of the imbalance between femininely- and masculinely-gendered names, with physical sciences showing a consistent masculine skew and social sciences a tendency toward the feminine end of the spectrum. Strikingly, however, the amplitude of distributional divergence remains relatively stable across disciplinary groups, in contrast to its substantial variations in direction. Citation analyses reveal a pervasive citation deficit for femininely- and neutrally-gendered names across all disciplinary groups and author roles. This asymmetry is most consistent across author roles in the life sciences, and absent in the physical sciences except among middle authors, whose unparalleled share plausibly reflects the citation dynamics of large collaborative structures. Overall, although the data and research design support associative rather than causal claims, the trends they reveal are nonetheless consistent with the hypothesis that first name genderedness influences citation recognition through implicit bias operating in low-deliberation evaluative contexts.