Any Old Tom, Dick or Harry: The Citation Impact of First Name Genderedness

Abstract: This paper attempts a first analysis of citation distributions based on the genderedness of authors' first name. Following the extraction of first name and sex data from all human entity triplets contained in Wikidata, a first name genderedness table is first created based on compiled sex frequencies, then merged with bibliometric data from eponymous, US-affiliated authors. Comparisons of various cumulative distributions show that citation concentrations fluctuations are highest at the opposite ends of the genderedness spectrum, as authors with very feminine and masculine first names respectively get a lower and higher share of citations for every article published, irrespective of their contribution role.