Like many disciplines in the social and natural sciences, political science remains male dominated (Kantola Reference Kantola2015; Pflaeger Young et al. Reference Young, Zoe, Bates, McKay, Miller, Billings and Hayton2021). There are more male than female professors in political science departments; men receive more academic awards and grants; and men contribute disproportionally to knowledge production (Brown and Samuels Reference Brown and Samuels2018; Cellini Reference Cellini2022; Schröder, Lutter, and Habicht Reference Schröder, Lutter and Habicht2021). In fact, if we were to open a random political science journal, the article we came across would be approximately twice as likely to be written by a man (Reidy and Stockemer Reference Reidy and Stockemer2024). The literature identifies two primary explanations for the persistent gender gap in publishing. The first is that at the aggregate level, women’s underrepresentation in political science and other disciplines directly translates into their underrepresentation in published content (Ceci et al. Reference Ceci, Ginther, Kahn and Williams2014). The second explanation is that at the individual level, there is growing evidence of an individual gender gap in publications. That is, due to many structural reasons, the average male political scientist publishes more articles and books and receives more citations than their female counterparts (Dion and Mitchell Reference Dion and Mitchell2020; Stockemer, Galassi, and Abou-El-Kheir Reference Stockemer, Galassi and Abou-El-Kheir2025; Teele and Thelen Reference Teele and Thelen2017). Indeed, Stockemer, Galassi, and Abou-El-Kheir (Reference Stockemer, Galassi and Abou-El-Kheir2025) showed that at the top-50 universities worldwide, the top-cited article by the average male scholar receives almost twice as many citations as that of the average female scholar, which highlights a gendered citation bias.
This article focuses on women’s representation among top-cited articles in political science. Recent literature established that patterns of women’s underrepresentation as authors are relatively stable across subfields and journals, with the caveat that female scholars are underrepresented most strongly in political theory journals (Stockemer and Sawyer Reference Stockemer and Sawyer2025). What about top-cited articles? Do women face additional disadvantages regarding authorship in those articles? To answer these questions, we analyzed the authorship of 4,020 top-cited political science articles published during the past 10 years, comprising approximately 8,500 authors. Our results show that women’s representation did not decrease further among top-cited articles. Indeed, we found that women constituted approximately 38% of authors in these top-cited articles, which is only slightly lower than their overall representation in the discipline. For example, the International Political Science Association (2025) reported a female membership of 42% and the American Political Science Association (2025) reported a female membership of 41%. Our study also revealed that the likelihood that a top-cited article being female authored increased when it was single-authored and used qualitative methods.
To our knowledge, this study is the first to investigate the gender gap in top-cited publications. It not only provides a summary of the current situation but also raises awareness about the importance of considering gender representation in academia. Supporting representation across gender—as well as race, class, and other axes of diversity—is essential not only for fostering a fair and equitable academic environment but also for ensuring that various perspectives are included in scholarly conversations, thereby challenging dominant assumptions.
GOAL OF THIS RESEARCH
The literature on the gender gap in academic publishing has advanced significantly in recent years. As a result of a growing number of studies, we now have estimates of the magnitude of the aggregate gender gap in publications: approximately one in three articles is authored by a woman. We know that this gender gap results from both men’s overrepresentation in the discipline and women’s tendency to publish fewer articles—and we know many of the reasons why women tend to publish less than men. These include structural factors such a higher-than-average administrative workload, the challenges of balancing family obligations with professional commitments, and a still-dominant masculine work environment that favors male over female scholars (Misra et al. Reference Misra, Kuvaeva, O’Meara, Culpepper and Jaeger2021; Okeke-Uzodike and Gamede Reference Okeke-Uzodike and Gamede2021). There also is evidence that female scholars are underrepresented in influential working groups and networks and that better-networked scholars are more productive and ambitious in terms of their submissions to academic journals (Barnes and Beaulieu Reference Barnes and Beaulieu2017). Thus, from the literature, it seems that women have fewer individual opportunities to publish compared to men. This article examines whether women’s underrepresentation as authors is more pronounced among top-cited articles. In other words, our goal is to discern whether female scholars face a double disadvantage in that they not only are represented less in the discipline but also especially among top-cited articles.
Empirically, there is indirect evidence that female scholars are particularly underrepresented among influential and top-cited articles. For example, when they examined more than 900 syllabi and doctoral reading lists, Hardt et al. (Reference Hardt, Smith, Kim and Meister2019) found that only 19% of the assigned readings had a female first author. Looking at international relations curricula, Phull, Ciflikli, and Meibauer (Reference Phull, Ciflikli and Meibauer2019) came to a similar conclusion. In their analysis, more than 79% of texts on these syllabi were authored exclusively by men. Analyses of top journals in the discipline likewise indicated that the proportion of female authors is lower than the discipline-wide average. For example, König and Ropers (Reference König and Ropers2018) reported that women represent less than 30% of authors in the discipline’s flagship journal, American Political Science Review, and Grossman (Reference Grossman2020) reported a comparable proportion for the leading European journal, European Journal for Political Research.
Research also provides explanations for these trends. Most notably, Breuning and Sanders (Reference Breuning and Sanders2007) found that women constituted approximately 20% of authors in a sample of eight prestigious political science journals. They showed that these women were more likely to be assistant professors or PhD candidates and more likely to use case studies than statistics or rational-choice and formal models. As a result, women tend to publish in journals that are more likely to publish the work of junior scholars and case-study research. Breuning and Sanders’s (Reference Breuning and Sanders2007) findings suggest that a journal’s aims, scope, and methodological preferences influence the likelihood that women will publish in it. In addition, there is evidence that women are more likely than men to research topics perceived as “niche.” This reflects a bias in political science journals in which certain topics (e.g., research on gender and LGBTQIA+ politics) are viewed as less-serious lines of academic inquiry or as insufficiently empirical (Key and Sumner Reference Key and Sumner2019; Piscopo Reference Piscopo2025). In support of this point, Zhu and Cheng (Reference Zhu and Cheng2025, 686) found in their bibliometric analysis that “the least cited research specialities are largely studied by women and ethnic/racial minority scholars.”
Teele and Thelen (Reference Teele and Thelen2017) also provided a useful analysis for understanding the lower proportion of women authors in top political science journals. In their exploration of publication patterns across 10 prominent political science journals, they documented a significant gender gap in prestigious outlets. They identified two factors that could contribute to this gap. First, they demonstrated that women are underrepresented in coauthorship, suggesting that they do not benefit equally from research and publication networks. Second, Teele and Thelen (Reference Teele and Thelen2017) revealed a disconnect between the methodological leanings of top journals, which tend to favor quantitative work over the qualitative research that women are more likely to pursue. Even when Piscopo (Reference Piscopo2025) focused specifically on publication trends in gender and LGBTQIA+ research in five top political science journals, she found that this research was predominantly quantitative and frequently conducted by male scholars. Buttressing this same point, Shames and Wise (Reference Shames and Wise2017, 811) argued that “one of the most obvious areas of gender disproportionality is in the methodology subfield,” where male political scientists are more likely than female political scientists to use highly complex statistical methodology and where such methodology is highly valued in the field—and even perceived as superior to qualitative approaches. Extrapolating from these findings, we hypothesized that female scholars face a disproportionate underrepresentation in top-cited articles.
To assess the extent to which this hypothesis holds, we engaged in the following research process. The first step was identifying important concepts. To do so, we consulted the 100 most highly ranked journals according to the 2024 Clarivate Ranking and constructed a database of all articles published in these journals during the past 10 years (i.e., 2014–2023). Although we acknowledged that citation counts increase over time, we focused on the past decade to capture contemporary scholarship. For all of the articles in this dataset, we scraped the keywords listed beneath the abstract. We then ranked these keywords by their frequency of occurrence and retained the 201 most frequently used because the 200th and 201st keywords on our list (i.e., “peacekeeping” and “developing countries”) appeared with the same frequency (Gagnon, Stockemer, and Dubuc Reference Gagnon, Stockemer and Dubuc2026).
Second, we were interested in identifying the top-cited articles using these concepts. To do so, we searched for each of our 201 keywords in Web of Science to identify the most-cited articles published in the past 10 years in English, in which the concept appears in both the abstract and the keyword section. We used the Web of Science categories “Political Science” and “International Relations” to ensure that our search identified journals relevant to the political science discipline. For each keyword, we then sorted the articles by citation count and selected the 20 most-cited articles, resulting in a sample of 4,020 articles.
Third, we collected the following information for each article in our database: (1) the gender of the authors; (2) the article type (i.e., qualitative, quantitative, employing mixed-method, or review article); (3) the journal in which the article was published and its ranking; and (4) whether the article was single-authored, coauthored, or authored by more than two scholars.
Our dependent variable was the percentage of female authors per article. For example, we coded an article as 100% female if it was single authored by a woman or authored by an all-women team. For articles authored in mixed teams, we reviewed the ratio of female to male authors; for example, we coded an article with one female author in a three-author team as having 33.33% female authors. We classified the gender of every author in the sample of 4,020 articles by first checking their biography for pronouns; if pronouns were not mentioned or biographical information was not included in the article, we consulted their university and personal webpages. Only one author identified as nonbinary, which highlights the lack of gender diversity in top-cited articles and academia in general. Consequently, our analysis used the binary distinction between men and women.
We manually coded our three independent variables. For our first variable, article type, we collected information by reading the abstract and scanning the article to determine whether it was qualitative, quantitative, mixed-method, or a review article. More specifically, we coded articles as qualitative if they adopted an approach such as qualitative discourse or content analysis, they were theoretical, or they adopted other approaches that presented their information in a non-numerical form. We coded articles as quantitative if they conducted statistical analyses, surveys with numerical data, or other research designs that emphasized numerical measurement. We coded articles as mixed methods if authors explicitly identified this in their abstract. If they did not, we then analyzed whether they equally integrated both qualitative and quantitative approaches—for example, by combining interviews with survey data, explicitly describing both methods in the methods section, and/or having a separate analysis of each data type in the results section. For articles that primarily were qualitative or quantitative and used other types of data only to supplement their argument, we followed Piscopo’s (Reference Piscopo2025) approach and coded them as single method. We coded articles as review or meta-analysis when authors explicitly labeled an article as such. We then assigned a numerical value to each of the four types (0–4). For the variable of journal rankings, we used the 2024 Clarivate Journal Citation Index to identify whether journals were categorized as Q1, Q2, or Q3/Q4. Finally, for the variable of authorship, we created a three-value nominal variable coded as 1 for single-authored, 2 for coauthored, and 3 for multi-authored articles (see online appendix table A1 for descriptive statistics).
One limitation of our dataset is that it did not include several characteristics that may have had an important role in influencing representation in top-cited articles, such as the professional rank of scholars at the time of their publication, their race or ethnicity, and their access to certain resources that facilitate the publishing process (e.g., grants and research assistants). Future studies should include these variables for a better understanding of all of the factors that influence representation in academia (Reid and Curry Reference Reid and Curry2019).
To analyze our data, we used three types of analyses. First, we conducted univariate analyses of our variable of interest: the percentage of female authors in the 4,020 articles included in our sample. Second, we reviewed bivariate statistics that examine the relationship among our independent variables—single-authored, coauthored, or multi-authored; type of article; and journal ranking—and determined our dependent variable, the percentage of female authors. Third, we performed a multiple-regression analysis, with this dependent variable on the left-hand side of the equation and the independent variables on the right-hand side.
RESULTS
In our sample of top-cited articles, women comprised 37.74% of all authors. Although this percentage is far from gender parity, it does not support the double-disadvantage hypotheses. In top-cited articles, women scholars were cited relatively proportionally to their overall presence in political science publications—at least when we used the literature on gender gaps in political science publishing as a benchmark. Recent case or comparative studies that investigate gender gaps in publishing reported that female authors account for approximatively 25% to 40% of authors (Bettecken et al. Reference Bettecken, Klöckner, Kurch and Schneider2022; Closa et al. Reference Closa, Moury, Novakova, Qvortrup and Ribeiro2020; Reidy and Stockemer Reference Reidy and Stockemer2024). Compared to these percentages, the proportion of female authors in our sample of top-cited articles is apparently on the higher end, which is encouraging.
Regarding the factors that may influence the percentage of cited female authors, we found that women were overrepresented in single-authored publications. In our sample of 4,020 articles, single-authored publications accounted for 1,490 articles compared to 1,511 articles that were coauthored and 1,024 articles that had multiple authors. The proportion of female authors in single-authored articles was 41.07% compared to only 36.64% and 34.55% for coauthored and multi-authored articles, respectively. A multiple-comparison test showed that the difference between single-authored and coauthored, as well as multi-authored articles, was statistically different from zero (p<0.01). There did not seem to be any difference in women’s representation between coauthored and multi-authored articles. Women’s lower representation in coauthored articles may lend credence to the theory that influential networks in the discipline remain male dominated and potentially less accessible to women (Berman, Bertino, and Vallejo Reference Berman, Bertino and Vallejo2024; Bunker Whittington, King, and Cingolani Reference Bunker Whittington, King and Cingolani2023; Teele and Thelen Reference Teele and Thelen2017). This may be a particularly strong feature for international networks, which—at least in the field of economics—exhibit even greater male dominance than domestic networks (Kwiek and Roszka Reference Kwiek and Roszka2021). In addition, women’s limited access to these networks may be a particularly serious issue during the early stages of their career (Gërxhani, Kulic, and Liechti Reference Gërxhani, Kulic and Liechti2023).
Moreover, our findings aligned with the literature that suggests that women are more likely to author qualitative rather than quantitative articles (Cellini Reference Cellini2022; also see Ceci et al. Reference Ceci, Ginther, Kahn and Williams2014). In our sample, we identified 1,836 quantitative articles, 1,936 qualitative articles, 95 mixed-methods articles, and 162 review articles. Women comprised 40.51% of authors in qualitative articles but only 34.67% in quantitative articles. In the two remaining categories, women accounted for 41.51% and 36.51% of authors in mixed-methods and review articles, respectively. A multiple-comparison test confirmed that the difference in female authorship was statistically significant between qualitative and quantitative articles but not between the other categories.
For journal rankings, we found no differences in authorship patterns between men and women. Approximately 66% of the articles in our sample were published in Q1 journals and between 15% and 20% appeared in Q2 and Q3/Q4 journals, respectively. Across these journal rankings, the proportion of female authors for articles published in Q1 journals was 36.90%, 39.46% for Q2 journals, and 44.32% for Q3/Q4 journals. According to a multiple-comparison test, these differences were not statistically significant (i.e., p<=0.05).Footnote 1
Our multiple-regression model in table 1 showing the percentage of female authors as the dependent variable confirms the results of the bivariate analysis. We found that two variables were significantly associated with a higher likelihood of female authorship among top-cited articles: single-author authorship and the use of qualitative methods. The model predicts a 3.2-percentage-point decrease in the representation of female authorship if it was coauthored and a 4.8-percentage-point decrease if it had multiple authors. Conversely, the model predicted a 4.4-percentage-point increase if the article used qualitative methods. As in the bivariate analysis, journal ranking did not appear to influence the percentage of female authors.Footnote 2 Footnote 3
Multiple Regression Analysis Measuring the Effect of Authorship Type, Article Type, and Journal Ranking on the Percentage of Female Authorship Per Article
Standard errors are in parentheses. Significance: *p<0.1; **p<0.05; ***p<0.01 (two-tailed).
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION
Compared to the political science discipline, female scholars did not appear to be underrepresented among top-cited articles. In fact, when we used the recent literature on the gender gap in publishing as a benchmark, the almost 38% representation level of women in our sample appears proportional—and even on the higher end of the reported range (i.e., 25%–40%). It seems that female academics were submitting their high-quality articles to Q1 journals and that those articles were receiving citations. To illustrate, when we compared only male (co)authored articles with only female (co)authored articles, we found a similar percentage of publications in Q1 journals. The percentages were 64.78% for men and 67.43% for women.
Therefore, the good news from our study is that we can reject the double-disadvantage thesis. As noted previously, Ceci et al. (Reference Ceci, Kahn and Williams2023) showed that women’s underrepresentation in the field translates into underrepresentation in publishing, and Teele and Thelen (Reference Teele and Thelen2017) documented a substantial gender gap in peer-reviewed publication rates. Although our findings suggest that women remain disadvantaged in overall authorship, they appear to be overcoming numerical and structural barriers to having their research published in high-impact journals and cited, at least during the past decade. Looking ahead, we hope that the percentage of female (and gender-diverse) authors will increase over time and that there will be changes in syllabi and reading lists in the near future. If women are represented in high-impact articles and receive recognition for the quality of their research through citations, the next step is to fully engage with their work in the classroom and in the allocation of academic awards, funding, and opportunities.
Although our findings suggest that women remain disadvantaged in overall authorship, they appear to be overcoming numerical and structural barriers to having their research published in high-impact journals and cited, at least during the past decade.
However, the bad news is that an authorship proportion of 38% is still far from parity. Our article suggests two key pathways toward a more equal representation of female scholars in top-tier journals. First, and most important, women appear to be underrepresented in coauthored and multi-authored articles—an issue that points to ongoing challenges in accessing influential and often male-dominated academic networks. Thus, our article gives credence to an emerging literature in political science and the social sciences more broadly that indicates that these gendered networks remain persistent (Catignani and Basham Reference Catignani and Basham2021; Khalikova, Jin, and Chopra Reference Khalikova, Jin and Chopra2021). Ensuring that women have equitable access to these networks should be considered a minimum requirement for advancing gender equality.
Ensuring that women have equitable access to these networks should be considered a minimum requirement for advancing gender equality.
Second, our article demonstrates that female scholars continue to be underrepresented in quantitative research—a gap that is based in the long history of male domination in political science that has shaped the preference for quantitative methodology and continues to advantage men in the discipline (Shames and Wise Reference Shames and Wise2017). This gap may reflect gendered preferences in research methods or the internalization of gendered stereotypes, in which men are perceived as having stronger statistical abilities and women as being better suited to qualitative skills (e.g., listening and observation) (Shames and Wise Reference Shames and Wise2017). If this gap stems from a lack of mentorship and training, then it highlights the need to expand methodological training opportunities for female scholars and to support early-career women in acquiring the expertise to become proficient in both qualitative and quantitative research, if they choose to do so. At the same time, the discipline must become more inclusive by recognizing the value of diverse approaches and methodologies, thereby challenging the dominance of political science by men and the disproportionate status of quantitative methodology.
At the same time, the discipline must become more inclusive by recognizing the value of diverse approaches and methodologies, thereby challenging the dominance of political science by men and the disproportionate status of quantitative methodology.
Given the importance of enhancing gender equality in academia, it is crucial to deepen our understanding of the various forms that underrepresentation can take. By investigating women’s authorship in top-cited articles, this study contributes to the literature on the gender gap in academia and calls for further research into how inequalities can be reduced—not only between men and women but also for gender-diverse scholars and those who are marginalized along other axes of diversity (e.g., race and class). More specifically, future research should engage in intersectional analysis of the representation of women and nonbinary scholars in academia, including within political science departments, publications, awards, grants, and so on. An important area of inquiry is how nonwhite women and other intersectional groups are represented in the field. Investigating this will provide a more nuanced understanding of the barriers faced by diverse scholars and will contribute to addressing inequalities within academia.
SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL
To view supplementary material for this article, please visit http://doi.org/10.1017/S1049096526102042.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors acknowledge the financial support from the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, Canada Office.
DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT
Research documentation and data that support the findings of this study are openly available at the PS: Political Science & Politics Harvard Dataverse at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi%3A10.7910%2FDVN%2FCDWLEV&version=DRAFT.
CONFLICTS OF INTEREST
The authors declare that there are no ethical issues or conflicts of interest in this research.
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