Gender parity in scientific authorship in a National Institute for Health Research Biomedical Research Centre: a bibliometric analysis

Abstract

ObjectiveScientific authorship is a vital marker of achievement in academic careers and gender equity is a key performance metric in research. However, there is little understanding of gender equity in publications in biomedical research centres funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR). This study assesses the gender parity in scientific authorship of biomedical research.DesignDescriptive, cross-sectional, retrospective bibliometric study.SettingNIHR Oxford Biomedical Research Centre (BRC).DataData comprised 2409 publications that were either accepted or published between April 2012 and March 2017. The publications were classified as basic science studies, clinical studies (both trial and non-trial studies) and other studies (comments, editorials, systematic reviews, reviews, opinions, book chapters, meeting reports, guidelines and protocols).Main outcome measuresGender of authors, defined as a binary variable comprising either male or female categories, in six authorship categories: first author, joint first authors, first corresponding author, joint corresponding authors, last author and joint last authors.ResultsPublications comprised 39% clinical research (n=939), 27% basic research (n=643) and 34% other types of research (n=827). The proportion of female authors as first author (41%), first corresponding authors (34%) and last author (23%) was statistically significantly lower than male authors in these authorship categories (p<0.001). Of total joint first authors (n=458), joint corresponding authors (n=169) and joint last authors (n=229), female only authors comprised statistically significant (p<0.001) smaller proportions, that is, 15% (n=69), 29% (n=49) and 10% (n=23) respectively, compared with male only authors in these joint authorship categories. There was a statistically significant association between gender of the last author with gender of the first author (p<0.001), first corresponding author (p<0.001) and joint last author (p<0.001). The mean journal impact factor (JIF) was statistically significantly higher when the first corresponding author was male compared with female (Mean JIF: 10.00 vs 8.77, p=0.020); however, the JIF was not statistically different when there were male and female authors as first authors and last authors.ConclusionsAlthough the proportion of female authors is significantly lower than the proportion of male authors in all six categories of authorship analysed, the proportions of male and female last authors are comparable to their respective proportions as principal investigators in the BRC. These findings suggest positive trends and the NIHR Oxford BRC doing very well in gender parity in the senior (last) authorship category. Male corresponding authors are more likely to publish articles in prestigious journals with high impact factor while both male and female authors at first and last authorship positions publish articles in equally prestigious journals.

Diversity in high-impact psychiatric publishing: gender parity within reach?

“…Gender parity and authorship diversity are declared goals in the publishing world in academic medicine (Clark and Horton 2019;Upthegrove et al 2021). Data on gender distribution in authorship in mostly high-impact Englishlanguage journals have been published for different medical specialties either focusing on their field (Shah et al 2021;Thelwall 2020) or on specific journals (Campbell et al 2019), disorders (Menzel et al 2019), study designs (Mehran et al 2021), or publication types (Mamtani et al 2020). The percentages of female authors in original research articles differ between medical specialties and range from about one-quarter to two-thirds with smaller rates of female first and senior authors in the fields of, e.g., cardiology (Asghar et al 2018) and anesthesia (Pagel et al 2019) in contrast to a larger female participation in, e.g., pediatrics (Fishman et al 2017) and dermatology (Bendels et al 2018).…”

A large National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Biomedical Research Centre facilitates impactful cross-disciplinary and collaborative translational research publications and research collaboration networks: a bibliometric evaluation study

“…Another important issue in relation to the performance and impact could be tackling the gender gap in scientific authorship, which could be reduced by promoting and providing fair and equitable opportunities especially to female scientists, early career researchers (both male and female) and researchers of ethnic minority background. Our earlier study on the gender equity in the authorship of scientific publications produced by researchers affiliated with the NIHR Oxford BRC revealed that although the overall proportion of female authors was lower than male authors, there were significant increasing trends of female first, last and corresponding authors and the proportions of male and female last authors were similar to their respective proportions as principal investigators in the BRC [ 66 ].…”

Evidence-based approaches for promoting gender equity in global mental health research: Study protocol for social network analysis of researchers in Nepal

“…We have chosen academic productivity as an indicator of professional development because this is a metric used by funding agencies and research institutions worldwide ( Sarli & Carpenter, 2014 ). Peer-reviewed articles use authorship as an important indicator of academic productivity and disparity in publications ( Filardo et al., 2016 ; Pinho-Gomes et al., 2020 ; Shah et al., 2021 ; Smith et al., 2014 ). Though number of peer-reviewed articles alone might not give a holistic picture of a researcher's productivity, it is still a common indicator of productivity.…”