ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2016
Beyond sex differences: new approaches for thinking about variation in brain structure and function.
Review in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 45 papers, 5 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
45 citing papers in PubMed, 5 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Sex differences in electrical activity of the brain during sleep: a systematic review of electroencephalographic findings across the human lifespan.Biomedical engineering online · 2025Pooled it
- Human studies of mitochondrial biology demonstrate an overall lack of binary sex differences: A multivariate meta-analysis.FASEB journal : official publication of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology · 2022Pooled it
- Greater male than female variability in regional brain structure across the lifespan.Human brain mapping · 2022Pooled it
- A systematic literature review of sex differences in childhood language and brain development.Neuropsychologia · 2018Pooled it
- Potential Reporting Bias in Neuroimaging Studies of Sex Differences.Scientific reports · 2018Pooled it
- Microchimerism and the need to rethink sex and gender binaries.Biology of sex differences · 2025Review
- No sex differences in the association between regional brain structure abnormalities and cognitive functioning in a geriatric memory clinic population.Aging brain · 2025Article
- More similarity than difference: Comparison of within- and between-sex variance in early adolescent brain structure.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Beyond the binary: Characterizing the relationships between sex and neuropeptide receptor binding density measures in the rat brain.Hormones and behavior · 2024Article
- After the trans brain: a critique of the neurobiological accounts of embodied trans* identities.History and philosophy of the life sciences · 2024Article
- Large scale investigation of the effect of gender on mu rhythm suppression in motor imagery brain-computer interfaces.Brain computer interfaces (Abingdon, England) · 2024Article
- Best practices to promote rigor and reproducibility in the era of sex-inclusive research.eLife · 2023Article
- Classifying sex with volume-matched brain MRI.Neuroimage. Reports · 2023Article
- Pattern recognition reveals sex-dependent neural substrates of sexual perception.Human brain mapping · 2023Article
- Sex differences in multilayer functional network topology over the course of aging in 37543 UK Biobank participants.Network neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2023Article
- Authentic gender development in non-binary children.Frontiers in sociology · 2023Article
- Neurocognitive effects of binge drinking on verbal episodic memory. An ERP study in university students.Frontiers in pharmacology · 2023Article
- Fairly Criticized, or Politicized? Conflicts in the Neuroscience of Sex Differences in the Human Brain.Cold Spring Harbor perspectives in biology · 2022Review
- Machine Learning Evidence for Sex Differences Consistently Influences Resting-State Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Fluctuations Across Multiple Independently Acquired Data Sets.Brain connectivity · 2022Article
- Teaching About Sex and Gender in Neuroscience: More Than Meets the "XY".Journal of undergraduate neuroscience education : JUNE : a publication of FUN, Faculty for Undergraduate Neuroscience · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In the study of variation in brain structure and function that might relate to sex and gender, language matters because it frames our research questions and methods. In this article, we offer an approach to thinking about variation in brain structure and function that pulls us outside the sex differences formulation. We argue that the existence of differences between the brains of males and females does not unravel the relations between sex and the brain nor is it sufficient to characterize a population of brains. Such characterization is necessary for studying sex effects on the brain as well as for studying brain structure and function in general. Animal studies show that sex interacts with environmental, developmental and genetic factors to affect the brain. Studies of humans further suggest that human brains are better described as belonging to a single heterogeneous population rather than two distinct populations. We discuss the implications of these observations for studies of brain and behaviour in humans and in laboratory animals. We believe that studying sex effects in context and developing or adopting analytical methods that take into account the heterogeneity of the brain are crucial for the advancement of human health and well-being.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.