Gender and researchers with institutional affiliations in the global south/north in social network science

Abstract

AbstractThe following article aims to understand the prevalence of ascribed social characteristics such as the role of gender and the country of institutional affiliation of the authors in two prominent journals of social network science. Accordingly, we explore the Social Networks journal that has been extensively analysed to understand the evolution of the social network perspective and the development of this area of interest. Also, we explore the REDES journal, which mirrors the same journal but aims to represent the current state of social network science in Iberian America. For the analysis, we explore the network of these two journals, considering 301 papers from the Social Networks journal and 86 papers from REDES journal. For the analysis, we use exponential random graph models to control for simultaneously operating micro-mechanisms to understand the potential effects that allowed the emergence of these scientific networks. Our main results indicate that the country of institutional affiliation creates a centre-periphery tendency in both journals. Furthermore, there is a tendency of women to be an underrepresented group in the papers published in the period analysed.