Exploration of Gender-Specific Authorship Disparities in the Pain Medicine Literature

Abstract

BackgroundGiven the readily increasing membership of the pain physician community, efforts toward correcting notable gender disparities are instrumental. The under-representation of women is particularly prevalent within leadership roles in academic medicine, thought to be driven largely by diminished research efforts. Consequently, we aimed to characterize gender differences among the highest impact pain literature.MethodsThe 20 highest cited articles per year from 2014 to 2018 were extracted from each of seven impactful journals affiliated to the largest pain medicine societies. Collected data from each article included genders of the first and last authors, the number of citations accumulated and the journal impact factor at the time of publication.ResultsAcross all considered literature, female authors were surprisingly not under-represented when considering the national prevalence of female pain physicians. However, more in-depth analysis found trends toward significance to suggest that female authorship was relatively diminished within more impactful and higher cited literature. When exploring gender–gender collaboration patterns, we found that male authors were favored over female counterparts with statistical significance; it must be noted that this likelihood analysis and preference toward male authors may be statistically obfuscated by the high prevalence of male authors. Nonetheless, these findings help to quantify overt, demonstrated disparity patterns. Of note, this inequity may also be fully secondary to the lower number of female pain physicians and/or those involved in research endeavors and decreased number of submissions from female physicians. Establishing gender discrimination patterns as causal factors in such disparities can be extremely challenging to determine.ConclusionIn our analysis of authorship between genders within the context of pain medicine literature, we found trends, although non-significant, toward women being lesser represented in the more impactful literature. We suggest that these inequities are possibly resultant of a markedly small and outnumbered female pain physician membership that has yet to achieve a critical mass and possible implicit gender biases that may restrict female authorship. However, further exploration and analysis of this issue are necessary to more clearly illuminate which systemic deficits exist and how they may, in turn, be corrected with cultural and macroscopic organizational-driven change.

Women Representation as First and Corresponding Authors in Neuroanesthesiology and Neurocritical Care Journals: A Retrospective Analysis

“…In recent years there has been a plethora of evidence confirming a lower representation of women in academic anesthesiology, pain medicine, critical care and clinical neuroscience, but with limited literature pertaining to women representation in neuroanesthesiology and neurocritical care academia 3–15. The findings of our study, which is an attempt to understand the representation of women first and corresponding authors in the academic subspecialty of neuroanesthesiology and neurocritical care, support those of a previous investigation that identified women first authors in 30.3% of neuroanesthesiology-related articles published in 2 leading anesthesiology journals with general content ( Anesthesiology and Anesthesia and Analgesia ) 4.…”

“…However, when compared with men, women continued to be relatively underrepresented in corresponding and last author roles. Interestingly, when compared with other medical specialties, Karri et al10 reported that women authors were not underrepresented in 7 impactful journals affiliated with the largest pain medicine societies when considering the national prevalence of pain medicine physicians. Although that study reported a trend toward an increased prevalence of first authorship by women over time (from 28.5% in 2014 to 35.5% in 2018), an in-depth analysis of the data revealed a nonsignificant trend towards lower representation of women authors within more impactful and higher cited literature.…”

Thirty-year survey of bibliometrics used in the research literature of pain: Analysis, evolution, and pitfalls

“…In the first study, the authors noted the increase of female authorship in journals classified in the MeSH Journal Category "Pain" from 7.6% to 35.4% in 2002-2020 (236). Although this positive trend is certainly encouraging and heading towards parity, a recent study revealed a highly skewed gender disparity in the publications of the pain research community with a prevalence of 70.6% male first authors and 81.6% male senior authors (176). Their results, however, should be viewed with caution since:…”

“…(1) The first set includes bibliometric studies in which the IF appears as a "journal-level bibliometric index": generally, the authors provide tables in their Results section that include listings of journals containing "pain papers" in decreasing frequency order accompanied by the JIF of each journal (30, (176); and g. Kissin and Gelman assessed the publications on chronic postsurgical pain in leading journals (39), while Kissin assessed the long-term opioid treatment of chronic nonmalignant pain (43) and evaluated drugs for chronic pain (49).…”

Women authorship in pain research: A bibliometric analysis from 2002 to 2021

“…The proportion of women practicing pain medicine has been increasing, but at a very slow rate: from 18.0% in 2013 to 18.3% in 2015 and 18.4% in 2017 (2022a). Women have also been found to be under-represented in impactful literature as identified by a study investigating the highest 20 cited articles from pain journals (Karri et al, 2019).…”