Conde-Ruiz, J. IgnacioGanuza, Juan JoséGarcía, ManuPuch, Luis A.2023-06-192023-06-192021Conde-Ruiz JI, Ganuza JJ, García M, Puch LA. Gender distribution across topics in the top five economics journals: a machine learning approach. SERIEs. 2022;13(1-2):269-308. DOI: 10.1007/s13209-021-00256-21869-4187http://hdl.handle.net/10230/57226We analyze text data in all the articles published in the top five (T5) economics journals between 2002 and 2019 in order to find gender differences in their research approach. We implement an unsupervised machine learning algorithm: the structural topic model (STM), so as to incorporate gender document-level meta-data into a probabilistic text model. This algorithm characterizes jointly the set of latent topics that best fits our data (the set of abstracts) and how the documents/abstracts are allocated to each topic. Latent topics are mixtures over words where each word has a probability of belonging to a topic after controlling by journal name and publication year (the meta-data). Thus, the topics may capture research fields but also other more subtle characteristics related to the way in which the articles are written. We find that females are unevenly distributed over the estimated latent topics. This and other findings rely on “automatically” generated built-in data given the contents in the abstracts of the articles in the T5 journals, without any arbitrary allocation of texts to particular categories (as JEL codes, or research areas).application/pdfeng© The Author(s) 2021. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/info:eu-repo/semantics/articlehttp://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s13209-021-00256-2Machine learningGender gapsStructural topic modelGendered languageResearch fieldsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess