Biomedical Innovations from Women Less Likely to be Adopted: Study

An analysis of scientists’ networks finds discrepancies in the diffusion of novel ideas through communities.

Written byAnnie Melchor

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A study published Monday (August 30) by the National Bureau of Economic Research finds that new ideas in biomedical research are less likely to spread when they are generated by women and minorities than when generated by men.

The authors of the study, which was not peer-reviewed, used a computational technique called natural language processing to scan titles and abstracts in MEDLINE for novel one, two, or three-word phrases originating in biomedical research papers published between 1980 and 2008. The researchers ranked these phrases by the total number of mentions they received in the year when they first appeared and analyzed the top 0.1 percent of phrases for each year to assess whether each represented an actual new idea or scientific innovation.

“We tracked specific ideas by using the information in the title and abstract in the biomedical literature, so that we know which specific ...

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Meet the Author

Annie Melchor
Stephanie "Annie" Melchor got her PhD from the University of Virginia in 2020, studying how the immune response to the parasite Toxoplasma gondii leads to muscle wasting and tissue scarring in mice. While she is still an ardent immunology fangirl, she left the bench to become a science writer and received her master’s degree in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 2021. You can check out more of her work here.
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