WEIRD Psychological Science – Geographical and Gender Patterns of Knowledge Production
Lejla Džanko (SWPS Warsaw University, University of Padova)
Authors from Western, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) countries comprise 12% of the scientific community, but accounted for 60-88% of authorship in the six most prominent APA Journals. To examine the current distribution of authors’ characteristics in recent years, especially after the onset of COVID-19, we inspected papers published between 2019 and 2023. Unlike earlier studies, we considered the entire sample of psychology journals indexed in Scopus (N_journals=1,407; N_articles=429,733), regardless of the impact factor. The two demographic variables that could be coded from author data (N_authors =642,698) were gender and country of affiliation. The results indicated that there are more WEIRD (vs. non-WEIRD) authors overall, but this number has been decreasing for the last five years. Yet, the probability of being published in a prestigious journal is still higher for WEIRD authors. The number of female (vs male) authors was consistent over time, while the relationship between gender and journal prestige was unsystematic.
Having in mind the arguments for the need for diversification of science, we beg the question of whether the prestigious journals indeed represent good scientific practices.
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