Is There a Differentiated Gender Effect of Collaboration with Super-Cited Authors? Evidence from Junior Researchers in Economics

In recent decades, economists have analyzed different types of gender inequality. Female researchers tend to have lower pay, write fewer articles, and receive fewer citations than their male counterparts. In this paper, we investigate whether there is a medium-term effect of gender on the career of junior researchers who collaborated with a super-cited (SC) author within 5 years of their first publication. We employ a matching model using co-authorship network measurements to compare similar junior collaborators and non-collaborators. We find a positive effect on the impact of all junior collaborators, but there is no statistically significant difference between men and women. Female and male junior collaborators have similar increases in SC co-authorship events and unique SC co-authors relative to non-collaborators, which might help explain this non-differentiated medium-term advantage.