  Like many scientific disciplines, neuroscience has increasingly attempted to
confront pervasive gender imbalances within the field. While much of the
conversation has centered around publishing and conference participation,
recent research in other fields has called attention to the prevalence of
gender bias in citation practices. Because of the downstream effects that
citations can have on visibility and career advancement, understanding and
eliminating gender bias in citation practices is vital for addressing inequity
in a scientific community. In this study, we sought to determine whether there
is evidence of gender bias in the citation practices of neuroscientists. Using
data from five top neuroscience journals, we find that reference lists tend to
include more papers with men as first and last author than would be expected if
gender were not a factor in referencing. Importantly, we show that this
overcitation of men and undercitation of women is driven largely by the
citation practices of men, and is increasing over time as the field becomes
more diverse. We develop a co-authorship network to assess homophily in
researchers' social networks, and we find that men tend to overcite men even
when their social networks are representative. We discuss possible mechanisms
and consider how individual researchers might address these findings in their
own practices.
