Investigating potential biases in research assessment: LGBTQ in American Physicist Society

Summary

The aim of this thesis is to examine and highlight indications regarding potential lack of equality and inclusivity within the researchers’ society, in the field of Physics of the United States of America, against LGBTQ researchers. Until recent years the over-reliance on quantitative metrics, such as h-index and citation counts evaluating individual research performance, is raising concerns on the marginalization of minorities. Utilizing a list of researchers that relate to, or publicly support, the LGBTQ movement, in addition to a summary of publications’ data from journals of American Physical Society (APS), we will try to pinpoint potential bias stemming from the mentioned metrics. Initially, a matching process took place to define a summary of publications within the APS dataset for the LGBTQ researchers, and afterwards calculated the impact and popularity for mentioned researchers based on publications’ data, including citation counts, etc.

To facilitate comparisons, subsets of not matched researchers/authors were generated from the APS dataset, using heuristic methods and a variation of genetic algorithm for sampling, based on the parameters of career stage and time intervals since last publications of the matched LGBTQ researchers. By analyzing the results, we will try to present some indications that support or weaken the initial hypothesis, namely the existence of bias against LGBTQ minorities within the research landscape of Physics for the last 50 years, or try to identify patterns that imply marginalization.