Q&A: Psych and Neuro Journals Primarily Edited by American Men

The Scientist spoke with University of California, San Francisco, neuroscientist Eleanor Palser about her study’s finding that women, especially those working outside the US, are underrepresented in some areas of academic publishing.

Written byDan Robitzski

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When it comes time who decide which scientific papers get considered for publication in prestigious brain science journals, most of the people making the call are still men, and most of them live and work in the United States, a new study finds.

The work, published Monday (February 21) in Nature Neuroscience, takes a close look at the editorial boards of the top 50 psychology and neuroscience journals worldwide as ranked by the Science Citation Index Expanded. The study breaks down each publication’s diversity as represented by the makeup of their boards in terms of both gender and geographic location. The study found that only 20 percent of the top psychology journals and 10 percent of the top neuroscience journals have more women than men on their editorial boards. Those numbers drastically differ from the demographics of the fields—a 2020 article in Perspectives on Psychological Science found that 71 percent ...

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Meet the Author

Dan Robitzski
Dan is an award-winning journalist based in Los Angeles who joined The Scientist as a reporter and editor in 2021. Ironically, Dan’s undergraduate degree and brief career in neuroscience inspired him to write about research rather than conduct it, culminating in him earning a master’s degree in science journalism from New York University in 2017. In 2018, an Undark feature Dan and colleagues began at NYU on a questionable drug approval decision at the FDA won first place in the student category of the Association of Health Care Journalists' Awards for Excellence in Health Care Journalism. Now, Dan writes and edits stories on all aspects of the life sciences for the online news desk, and he oversees the “The Literature” and “Modus Operandi” sections of the monthly TS Digest and quarterly print magazine. Read more of his work at danrobitzski.com.
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