Articles by scientists accused of sexual harassment receive fewer citations in the three years following an accusation. The drop is more significant than for researchers who commit scientific misconduct, such as plagiarism or fraud, concluded a study published in the journal PLOS ONE. The authors, led by Giulia Maimone of the School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles, analyzed the citations of 30 scientists. Fifteen have been accused of sexual harassment, such as astrophysicist Geoffrey Marcy, who resigned from his teaching position at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2015, after allegations that he kissed and inappropriately touched four female students.
The other 15 were involved in cases of scientific misconduct. One was nutrition expert Brian Wansink, who was fired from Cornell University in 2019 after it was discovered that he manipulated statistics in studies that arrived at curious conclusions and attracted media attention. Trends were evaluated in how papers by the 30 researchers were cited over the 10 years before the allegations and the three following years. Patterns in the scientific work of a third group—142 researchers with similar profiles but who had not been accused of misconduct or harassment—were used for comparison.
Citations of the harassment group’s work visibly declined in absolute numbers and in comparison with the control group, but for those involved in scientific misconduct, the drop was small and not statistically significant. Maimone told the journal Science that she was surprised by the result, having predicted that researchers accused of scientific misconduct would feel a greater impact. One explanation for the finding, she suggests, is that those accused of sexual harassment experience a more immediate moral backlash, while those who violated scientific integrity norms lose citations over a longer time period because investigations can be lengthy.
Lisa Rasmussen, editor in chief of Accountability in Research, told Science that the scientific community may feel that there are more processes in place to address scientific misconduct, such as retractions, than there are for sexual misconduct. Not citing scientists accused of the latter could thus be a way of trying to restore the balance. Susan Feng Lu of the University of Toronto, Canada, has another hypothesis. She points out that the researchers accused of sexual misconduct received more citations in the years before the allegations than the control group, and the reaction against them may have been more severe because they were famous and well-known.
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