https://doi.org/10.1140/epjh/s13129-023-00066-z
Regular Article
Addressing the problem of the LIGO–Virgo–KAGRA visibility in the scientific literature
1
Departament de Física Quàntica i Astrofísica (FQA), Universitat de Barcelona (UB), c. Martí i Franquès 1, 08028, Barcelona, Spain
2
Institut de Ciències del Cosmos (ICCUB), Universitat de Barcelona (UB), c. Martí i Franquès 1, 08028, Barcelona, Spain
3
Dipartimento di Scienze Matematiche, Informatiche e Fisiche, Università di Udine, Via delle Scienze 206, 33100, Udine, Italy
4
Sezione di Trieste, Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, Via Valerio, 2, 34127, Trieste, Italy
5
Laboratoire Kastler Brossel, Sorbonne Université, ENS - Université PSL, CNRS, Collège de France, Campus Pierre et Marie Curie, 4 place Jussieu, 75005, Paris, France
6
Sezione di Padova, Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, Via Marzolo, 8, 35131, Padua, Italy
7
Departamento de Astronomía y Astrofísica, Universitat de València, Dr. Moliner 50, 46100, Burjassot, València, Spain
8
Dipartimento di Fisica, Università di Trieste, Via Valerio 2, 34127, Trieste, Italy
9
Laboratoire Univers et Théories, Observatoire de Paris, Université PSL, CNRS, 92190, Meudon, France
Received:
27
June
2023
Accepted:
1
December
2023
Published online:
25
January
2024
As members of the Virgo Collaboration—one of the large scientific collaborations that explore the universe of gravitational waves together with the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and the KAGRA Collaboration—we became aware of biased citation practices that exclude Virgo, as well as KAGRA, from achievements that collectively belong to the wider LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA Collaboration. Here, we frame these practices in the context of Merton’s “Matthew effect”, extending the reach of this well-studied cognitive bias to include large international scientific collaborations. We provide qualitative evidence of its occurrence, displaying the network of links among published papers in the scientific literature related to Gravitational Wave science. We note how the keyword “LIGO” is linked to a much larger number of papers and variety of subjects than the keyword “Virgo”. We support these qualitative observations with a quantitative study based on a year-long monitoring of the relevant literature, where we scan all new preprints appearing in the arXiv electronic preprint database. Over the course of one year, we identified all preprints failing to assign due credits to Virgo. As a further step, we undertook positive actions by asking the authors of problematic papers to correct them. Here, we also report on a more in-depth investigation which we performed on problematic preprints that appeared in the first three months of the period under consideration, checking how frequently their authors reacted positively to our request and corrected their papers. Finally, we measure the global impact of papers classified as problematic and observe that, thanks to the changes implemented in response to our requests, the global impact (measured as the number of citations of papers which still contain Virgo visibility issues) was halved. We conclude the paper with general considerations for future work in a wider perspective.
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© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to EDP Sciences, Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2024. Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
