Score: 2

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

Published: December 9, 2025 | arXiv ID: 2512.08219v1

By: Maxime Holmberg Sainte-Marie, Vincent Larivière

Potential Business Impact:

Authors with masculine names get more attention.

Business Areas:
Publishing Content and Publishing, Media and Entertainment

This paper attempts a first analysis of citation distributions based on the genderedness of authors' first name. Following the extraction of first name and sex data from all human entity triplets contained in Wikidata, a first name genderedness table is first created based on compiled sex frequencies, then merged with bibliometric data from eponymous, US-affiliated authors. Comparisons of various cumulative distributions show that citation concentrations fluctuations are highest at the opposite ends of the genderedness spectrum, as authors with very feminine and masculine first names respectively get a lower and higher share of citations for every article published, irrespective of their contribution role.

Country of Origin
🇩🇰 🇨🇦 Canada, Denmark

Repos / Data Links

Page Count
10 pages

Category
Computer Science:
Digital Libraries