Do neutral names have an influence on scientists' research impact

Abstract

The underrepresentation of women in academia and industries is a hot topic in many research fields. Studies of some occupations showed that neutral names help change the inferior positions of women. Using the publication data of the Web of Science from 2009 to 2015, this paper analyzed citations within 3 years after publication, to investigate whether a neutral name has an impact on the research impact of a scientist. The findings show that: (a) a paper is cited significantly more when the author's name sounds more neutral; (b) the effect of single author's name neutralization degree on citations shows no significant difference in different fields except “Engineering & Technology”; (c) for both men and women, first and last authors with relatively gender‐neutral names have higher scientific impact, in the fields of “Clinical, Pre‐Clinical & Health”, “Engineering & Technology”, “Life Sciences” and “Physical Sciences”. Implications of these findings are provided at the end of the manuscript.