ABSTRACT What is the gender distribution among authors in top-cited articles? To answer this question, we examined the 20 most-cited articles for each of the 201 most frequently used concepts in political science during the past 10 years. Using a sample of 4,020 articles comprising approximately 8,500 authors, we confirmed the underrepresentation of female authors among top-cited articles. Women account for approximately 38% of authors within this canon of articles. On the one hand, this finding is encouraging considering that women’s proportion of authorship did not decline relative to their overall representation among published authors. On the other hand, it is discouraging considering that most recent influential research continues to be written primarily by men. To explain variation in the proportion of female authors per article, we find that women are more likely to engage in single-authored publications and to use qualitative methods. In contrast, we find no significant difference between male and female scholars in the rankings of the journals in which they publish.
Gagnon et al. (Mon,) studied this question.