Bibliometric analysis of authorship trends and collaboration dynamics over the past three decades of BONE's publication history

Abstract

The existence of a gender gap in academia has been a hotly debated topic over the past several decades. It has been argued that due to the gender gap, it is more difficult for women to obtain higher positions. Manuscripts serve as an important measurement of one's accomplishments within a particular field of academia. Here, we analyzed, over the past 3 decades, authorship and other trends in manuscripts published in BONE, one of the premier journals in the field of bone and mineral metabolism. For this study, one complete year of manuscripts was evaluated (e.g. 1985, 1995, 2005, 2015) for each decade. A bibliometric analysis was then performed of authorship trends for those manuscripts. Analyzed fields included: average number of authors per manuscript, numerical position of the corresponding author, number of institutions collaborating on each manuscript, number of countries involved with each manuscript, number of references, and number of citations per manuscript. Each of these fields increased significantly over the 30-year time frame (p<10). The gender of both the first and corresponding authors was identified and analyzed over time and by region. There was a significant increase in the percentage of female first authors from 23.4% in 1985 to 47.8% in 2015 (p=0.001). The percentage of female corresponding authors also increased from 21.2% in 1985 to 35.4% in 2015 although it was not significant (p=0.07). With such a substantial emphasis being placed on publishing in academic medicine, it is crucial to comprehend the changes in publishing characteristics over time and geographical region. These findings highlight authorship trends in BONE over time as well as by region. Importantly, these findings also highlight where challenges still exist.

Authorship Trends Over the Past 30-Years in the Annals of Biomedical Engineering

“…Similar 30 year bibliometric studies were performed recently in several orthopaedic surgery (which is traditionally a male dominated field)/bone biology journals (which have a higher female representation than orthopaedic surgery). 8,17,24,32,42,43,49 ABME® was tied with the Journal of Orthopaedic Research for the highest percentage point increase (rounded to nearest whole number) in manuscripts with female first authors over 30 years (Range: 1 to 30). Similarly, ABME® was second for the highest percentage point increase over 30 years in female corresponding author manuscripts published (Range: 0 to 27).…”

A Bibliometric Study of Authorship and Collaboration Trends Over the Past 30 Years in Four Major Musculoskeletal Science Journals

“…The detailed data for three of the four journals (BONE®, JBMR®, and JOR®) has been previously published [17][18][19]; the reader is directed to those manuscripts for detailed results. That data is from the same group of researchers and senior authors as the CTI® data; thus, we were able to use the raw data for comparison purposes in this manuscript.…”

Authorship trends in the Journal of Orthopaedic Research: A bibliometric analysis

“…If we examine the percentage point increase over time we see that for JOR® , there was a 29 point increase in female first authors (from 5% to 34%) and a 27 point increase in female corresponding authors (from 0% to 27%) from 1983 to 2015. JOR® has seen stronger improvements than all bone/orthopaedic journals for which similar data have been recently published . Examination of data from the mid 1980s to 2015 from the Journal of Bone and Mineral Research shows a 12 point and 17 point increase in female first and corresponding authors, Bone shows a 25 point and 14 point increase in female first and corresponding authors, Journal of Pediatric Orthopaedics shows a 20 point and 12 point increase in female first and corresponding authors, Spine shows a 0.9 and −0.3 point increase in women first and corresponding authors, and Journal of Hand Surgery shows a 14 point increase in female first authors (corresponding author gender was not documented in that study) .…”