Scholars Accused of Sexual Misconduct Receive Significantly Fewer Citations After Allegations Are Made Public

According to a new study led Giulia Maimone, a postdoctoral researcher in the Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles, scholars who have been accused of sexual misconduct experience a significant citation decrease in the three years after accusations become public. Notably, the same pattern was not found among scholars accused of scientific misconduct.

Dr. Maimone and her co-authors examined public data from the Web of Science regarding 31,941 articles from 172 scholars: 15 who were accused of sexual misconduct, 15 who were accused of scientific misconduct, and a control group of 142 non-accused scholars from a wide-range of scientific disciplines. They found that the citation rates of scholars accused of sexual misconduct decreased in both absolute terms and compared to the control group within three years of their public allegations. For scholars accused of scientific misconduct, there was no meaningful citation penalty in absolute terms or compared to their non-accused peers. The research team also found that the citation penalty of scholars accused of sexual misconduct decreased with every additional author included in the publication, with papers with fewer authors experiencing the largest citation penalties.

To gauge how people respond to sexual or scientific misconduct in academia, Dr. Maimone and her co-authors conducted two surveys: one with 240 academics and another with 231 non-academics. Interestingly, the academic participants’ responses contradicted Dr. Maimone’s findings from the Web of Science analysis. These participants were more likely to say that they would prefer to cite research from scholars accused of sexual misconduct than from scholars accused of scientific misconduct. Conversely, the sample of non-academics overwhelmingly responded that sexual misconduct should be punished more than scientific misconduct.

Based on these findings, Dr. Maimone and her co-authors theorize that academics may be mis-predicting their citing behavior and overestimating their ability to separate a colleague’s immoral behavior from their scientific performance. They also theorize that academics may be aware they are less likely to cite colleagues accused of sexual misconduct, but are unwilling to admit it because of self-presentation concerns and the belief they should separate themselves from those accused of scientific misconduct.

In addition to Dr. Maimone, the study included authors from George Washington University and the University of California, San Diego.