Analysis of scientific society honors reveals disparities

Abstract

Delivering a keynote talk at a conference organized by a scientific society or being named as a fellow by such a society indicates that a scientist is held in high regard by their colleagues. To explore if the distribution of such indicators of esteem in the field of bioinformatics reflects the composition of this field, we compared the gender, name origin, and country of affiliation of 412 honorees from the "International Society for Computational Biology" (75 fellows and 337 keynote speakers) with over 170,000 last authorships on computational biology papers between 1993 and 2019. The proportion of honors bestowed on women was similar to that of the field's overall last authorship rate. However, names of East Asian origin have been persistently underrepresented among honorees. Moreover, there were roughly twice as many honors bestowed on scientists with an affiliation in the United States as expected based on literature authorship. A record of this paper's transparent peer review process is included in the supplemental information.

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