Association Between Author Diversity and Acceptance Rates and Citations in Peer-Reviewed Earth Science Manuscripts

Abstract

The scientific community is becoming more demographically diverse, and team science is becoming more common. Here, we compare metrics of success in academic research, acceptance rates, and citations, among/across differing team compositions regarding demographic diversity. We collected the final decisions and citations as of 2019 of 91,427 manuscripts submitted from 2012–2018 to journals published by the American Geophysical Union. We matched the authors by email on each manuscript to self-provided demographic information within the American Geophysical Union's membership database. This resulted in 20,940 manuscripts matched to nation, gender, and career stage, and 6,015 manuscripts matched to race/ethnicity for manuscripts in which the entire authorship team was affiliated with the United States. Among similar sized authorship teams (teams of two to four), acceptance rates were 2.7, 4.5, and 0.9% higher (pnation < 0.01, pgender < 0.05, pcareer stage = 0.51) with more than one nation, gender, and career stage, respectively, than nondiverse authorship teams. Diverse papers had 1.2 more citations for international teams than single-nation teams (pnation < 0.01). There were 0.4 and 1.0 fewer citations for authorship teams with more than one gender or career stage than manuscripts with one gender or career stage (pgender = 0.21, pcareer stage = 0.36). Racially/ethnically diverse teams were associated with 5.5% lower acceptance rates (p < 0.01) and 0.8 fewer citations (p = 0.15) than racially/ethnically homogenous teams. Although not every difference is statistically significant, the overall results are consistent with the notion that diversity can benefit science, but equitable practices and inclusive cultures must also be fostered.