IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/fda/fdaddt/2025-07.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Citation Gender Gaps in Top Economics Journals

Author

Listed:
  • J. Ignacio Conde-Ruiz
  • Juan-José Ganuza
  • Manu García

Abstract

This paper investigates the existence and drivers of gender citation gaps in the five leading journals in economics. Using a comprehensive dataset of 7,214 articles published between 1999 and 2023, we examine whether female-authored papers are cited more frequently than male-authored ones, and whether this pattern persists after controlling for differences in research topics. We apply Structural Topic Modeling (STM) to abstracts to estimate latent research themes and complement this approach with field classifications based on JEL codes. Our results show that female-authored papers initially display a citation premium—receiving up to 15 log points more citations—but this advantage becomes statistically insignificant once we control for research field composition using either STM topics or JEL codes. These findings suggest that horizontal gender differences in thematic specialization, rather than bias in citation behavior, account for most of the observed citation gap. Our analysis highlights the importance of accounting for field heterogeneity when assessing academic recognition and contributes to ongoing discussions about fairness and diversity in economics publishing.

Suggested Citation

  • J. Ignacio Conde-Ruiz & Juan-José Ganuza & Manu García, 2025. "Citation Gender Gaps in Top Economics Journals," Working Papers 2025-07, FEDEA.
    • Handle: RePEc:fda:fdaddt:2025-07
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://documentos.fedea.net/pubs/dt/2025/dt2025-07.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:fda:fdaddt:2025-07. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Carmen Arias (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.fedea.net .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.