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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The authors of the study, which was not peer-reviewed, used a computational technique called natural language processing to scan titles and abstracts in MEDLINE for novel one, two, or three-word phrases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 ...
