Background Gender disparities are pervasive in academic plastic surgery. Previous research demonstrates articles authored by women receive fewer citations than those written by men, suggesting the presence of implicit gender bias. Objectives We aim to describe current citation trends in plastic surgery literature and assess gender bias. We expected women to be cited less frequently than their male peers. Methods Articles published between 2017 and 2019 were collected from eight representative plastic surgery journals stratified by impact factor. Names of primary and senior authors of the fifty most cited articles per year per journal were collected and author gender was determined via online database and internet search. Median number of citations by primary and senior author gender were compared via Kruskal-Wallis test. Results Among 1167 articles, women wrote 27.3% as primary author and 18% as senior author. Women-authored articles were cited as often as those authored by men (p>0.05) across all journal tiers. Articles with a female primary and male senior author had significantly more citations than articles with a male primary author (p=0.038). Conclusions No implicit gender bias was identified in citations trends, a finding unique to plastic surgery. Women primary authors are cited more often than male primary authors despite women comprising a small fraction of authorship overall. Additionally, variegated authorship pairings outperformed homogenous ones. Therefore, increasing gender diversity within plastic surgery academia remains critical.
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