Publication Bias in the Social Sciences: Unlocking the File Drawer

We study publication bias in the social sciences by analyzing a known population of conducted studies–221 in total–where there is a full accounting of what is published and unpublished. We leverage TESS, an NSF-sponsored program where researchers propose survey-based experiments to be run on representative samples of American adults. Because TESS proposals undergo rigorous peer review, the studies in the sample all exceed a substantial quality threshold. Strong results are 40 percentage points more likely to be published than null results, and 60 percentage points more likely to be written up. We provide not only direct evidence of publication bias, but also identify the stage of research production at which publication bias occurs—authors do not write up and submit null findings.

Source: Stanford University | Author Neil Malhotra's Faculty Research Page

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Gender and self citation across fields and over time

From the introduction:

Papers authored by women receive fewer citations than do papers by men, even controlling for tenure status, institution, and journal. Fewer citations to female- authored papers could be due to gender differences in self- citations (when an author cites his or her own previously published work). Research analyzing approximately 3000 publications in the international relations literature from 1986-2000 shows men cite their own papers more than one and a half times as often as women.

Source: Eigenfactor.org is an academic research project co-founded by Jevin West and Carl Bergstrom and sponsored by the Bergstrom Lab in the Department of Biology at the University of Washington.

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Interactive tool: The Gender Browser 
The gender browser provides a multiscale view of gender representation across multiple domains of scholarly publishing.

Find the Best Journal for Your Research with a New Tool: JournalGuide

About JournalGuide:

JournalGuide is a free tool that helps researchers to evaluate scholarly journals. In addition to searching by journal name, category or publisher, authors can use the title and abstract of a paper to discover journals that have already published articles on similar topics. By matching journals to a paper’s content, researchers can see which journals would be most likely to have interest in their story.

The people/company behind JournalGuide:

JournalGuide is a division of Research Square, which makes it a sister company to Rubriq (independent peer review) and AJE (manuscript preparation services). As an independent company, we are not a publisher or journal and have no plans to become one. Our team is made up of published researchers and software developers — combining a deep understanding of the publication process with cutting-edge technology tools.

Link to JournalGuide (beta)