JSTOR Authorship Data 1900-2009

This data is from the JSTOR network dataset, with a special focus on philosophy journals. We isolate our analysis to a part of the corpus we call the “network dataset.” This subset includes 1.8 million documents that either cited other JSTOR articles or were cited by other JSTOR articles.

Percent of Women Authorships Over time

Methods

We examine the numbers and proportions of women authorships in philosophy journals for historical data collected from the JSTOR network dataset dating between 1900 and 2009. We define “authorships” as author-paper pairs, where multiple authors may co-author the same paper. We use authorships because our dataset, like most large-scale bibliographic datasets, does not contain a fully disambiguated set of unique authors. Because some examined articles are authored by more than one person, the number of women authors is somewhat greater than the number of unique articles with women authors.

The analysis was further narrowed to 1.5 million documents where author gender was identifiable. In this study we distinguish authors by binary gender based on name. To determine the gender of authors, we used the top 1000 lists of gendered names, produced by the United States Social Security Administration to categorize authors by first name. We recognize that this may not reflect the self-identified gender of the individual. This decision was made due to the historical nature of this work, where getting self-identified gender is not possible, and to allow comparison to other works published on historical data. We are sensitive that this binary proscriptive division does not fully encompass the diversity in the discipline, and we are looking at ways of incorporating self-identified gender in future work.

Authorship data was discarded when the author was listed by initials only, when the first name was common to both genders, and where the name was not on the lists. This may introduce a small bias in terms of undercounting women authors given that they may be more likely to rely on initials, but this accounted for only about 4% of articles, and we estimate that we undercount women authors by roughly 0.64%.

For the current study, we selected journals from the JSTOR network dataset. The initial list of journals was selected by taking the intersection of lists of philosophy journals from the following sources: Thom Brooks (2011); Leiter Journal Ranking Survey (2015); BPA-APA Survey (2014); Andrew Cullison (2015); Brian Weatherson (2015). We identified 56 journals using this method. The data comprises 47,597 article entries for which we have author gender, with a corresponding 52,865 authorships. Out of these 7,304 are women authorships, and the remaining 45,561 authorships are men.

In our set of authorships, the same individual may author multiple articles. By assuming that a unique first name and last name pair define a unique author in our data, our authorship data corresponds to 19,660 unique authors (3,789 women and 15,871 men). Each article may be authored by multiple individuals. In our data 3,899 (8%) of articles have more than one author, out of which 173 have multiple all women authors, 2,683 have all men authors, and 1,043 have mixed gender authors. In our data, unique women authors publish an average of 1.9 papers while men authors publish an average of 2.8 papers.

We grouped journals into three mutually exclusive categories. 'Top-Philosophy' journals comprise 18 of the 21 highly ranked philosophy journals listed in a recent survey of faculty perceptions of journal quality reported by Leiter (2013). We consider 18 of the 21 Leiter ranked journals because only data for these journals were available from JSTOR. The subset comprises 23,204 article entries, with 2,265 total women authorships. Then, we visited individual journal websites and emailed journal editors as needed to establish two additional journal category categories. 'Non-Top Philosophy' journals comprise 22 philosophy journals, which self-identify as philosophy-specific journals. The subset comprises 8,341 article entries, with 1,953 total women authorships. 'Interdiciplinary' journals comprise 16 journals self-identifying as journals with philosophical content. The subset comprises 15,409 article entries, with 2,519 total women authorships. We classified all journals in our dataset by sub-disciplines included and review type.