Trends in Proportion of Women as Authors of Medical Journal Articles, 2008-2018

Hart, Kamber L.; Perlis, Roy H.

doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2019.0907

Cited by 84 publications

(82 citation statements)

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“…Prior studies have revealed a gender disparity in authorship of original research and editorial articles 8–10. Recent studies have also shown a gender gap in the authorship of perspective-type articles 11 12.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Publications in medical journals play an integral role in the academic promotion process, impacting the transition from assistant to full professor 7. Prior work reveals that women remain under-represented as authors of original research articles in medical journals, and in some journals women representation has declined over time 8–10. Prior evidence from subspecialty journals found that women physicians authored fewer perspective-type pieces 11 12.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Quantifying gender disparity in physician authorship among commentary articles in three high-impact medical journals: an observational study

et al. 2020

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BackgroundScholarship plays a direct role in career advancement, promotion and authoritative recognition, and women physicians remain under-represented as authors of original research articles.ObjectiveWe sought to determine if women physician authors are similarly under-represented in commentary articles within high-impact journals.Design/Setting/ParticipantsIn this observational study, we abstracted and analysed author information (gender and degree) and authorship position from commentary articles published in three high-impact journals between 1 January 2014 and 16 October 2018.Primary outcome measureAuthorship rate of commentary articles over a 5-year period by gender, degree, authorship position and journal.Secondary outcome measuresTo compare the proportion of men and women physician authorship of commentaries relative to the proportion of men and women physician faculty within academic medicine; and to examine the gender concordance among the last and first authors in articles with more than one author.ResultsOf the 2087 articles during the study period, 48% were men physician first authors compared with 17% women physician first authors (p<0.0001). Of the 1477 articles with more than one author, similar distributions were found with regard to last authors: 55% were men physicians compared with only 12% women physicians (p<0.0001). The proportion of women physician first authors increased over time; however, the proportion of women physician last authors remained stagnant. Women coauthored with women in the first and last authorship positions in 9% of articles. In contrast, women coauthored with men in the first and last author positions, respectively, in 55% of articles.ConclusionsWomen physician authors remain under-represented in commentary articles compared with men physician authors in the first and last author positions. Women also coauthored commentaries with other women in far fewer numbers.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantifying gender disparity in physician authorship among commentary articles in three high-impact medical journals: an observational study

et al. 2020

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“…Additionally, while there has been an increase in the representation of women within academic medicine, our results indicate that publications are becoming more unequally distributed across women, especially for the first and last author position. 10 Therefore, even though there has been an increase in the number of publications with a woman as the last author, this finding may be somewhat driven by the increased productivity of a small group of individuals (indicated by substantial increased GC in the last author position over time). Therefore, we must be careful to not mistake the success of a few as individuals as an indicator of equity of access and resources for the larger cohort.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Indeed, our prior work has noted inaccurate indexing of author names in PubMed, (ie, only including author initials instead of author full name). 10 Therefore, we may be failing to combine all articles for a given author. This is a problem known as name variability.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The methods for selecting journals and compiling these articles have been previously published. 10 To briefly summarise, we identified the top 15 journals by impact factor for 9 medical specialties (paediatrics, radiology, anaesthesiology, obstetrics and gynaecology, neurology, general medicine, dermatology, psychiatry and oncology) along with 4 additional high-impact crossspecialty journals (New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of the American Medical Association, British Medical Journal, and The Lancet; online supplemental table S1). 11 Metadata for articles published during the above time period were scraped from PubMed, and then the article list was limited to original research articles.…”

Section: Article Selectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Authorship inequality: a bibliometric study of the concentration of authorship among a diminishing number of individuals in high-impact medical journals, 2008–2019

Hart

Perlis

2021

BMJ Open

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ObjectiveAuthorship and number of publications are important criteria used for making decisions about promotions and research funding awards. Given the increase in the number of author positions over the last few decades, this study sought to determine if there had been a shift in the distribution of authorship among those publishing in high-impact academic medical journals over the last 12 years.DesignThis study analysed the distribution of authorship across 312 222 original articles published in 134 medium-impact to high-impact academic medical journals between 1 January 2008 and 31 December 2019. Additionally, this study compared the trends in author distributions across nine medical specialties and a collection of cross-specialty high-impact journal articles.Primary outcome measuresThe distribution of authorship was assessed using the Gini coefficient (GC), a widely used measure of economic inequality.ResultsThe overall GC for all articles sampled across the 12-year study period was 0.49, and the GCs for the first and last authorship positions were 0.30 and 0.44, respectively. Since 2008, there was a significant positive correlation between year and GC for the overall authorship position (r=0.99, p<0.001) the first author position (r=0.75, p=0.007) and the last author position (r=0.85, p<0.001) indicating increasingly uneven distribution in authorship over time. The cross-specialty high-impact journals exhibited the greatest rate of increase in GC over the study period for the first and last author position of any specialty analysed.ConclusionOverall, these data suggest a growing inequality in authorship across authors publishing in high-impact academic medical journals, especially among the highest impact journals. These findings may have implications for processes such as promotions and allocation of research funding that use authorship metrics as key criteria for making decisions.

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Trends in Female Authorship in Major Journals of 3 Oncology Disciplines, 2002-2018

2021

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IMPORTANCE Gender disparity exists among authors of the oncology literature. OBJECTIVE To quantify trends in authorship by gender within a comprehensive data set of Medlineindexed oncology articles in medical journals with high impact factors. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS This cross-sectional study used Medline citations to examine archives of research journals from 3 disciplines in the oncology literature. Authors from all oncology-related articles with Medical Subject Headings terms assigned from 2002 to 2018 from 13 general oncology/medicine, radiation oncology, and surgical journals were included for analysis, encompassing clinical trials, observational studies (excluding case reports), reviews, systematic reviews, meta-analyses, and all other published articles. Data were analyzed between April and May 2020. EXPOSURES Authors were assigned genders based on societal naming norms via third-party gender identification service Gender-API.com. This assignment was internally validated based on manually obtained publicly available data on the internet. MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES Trend in female authorship over time while considering journal type, authorship position, and article type.RESULTS A total of 420 526 authors from 58 368 articles were found, of which 400 945 were assigned a gender based on their name. In total, 29.5% (95% CI, 29.4%-29.6%) of authors were identified as female, rising from 25.5% (95% CI, 24.7%-26.3%) in 2002 to 31.7% (95% CI, 31.2%-32.3%) in 2018. Each subgroup of primary article type by journal type saw a rise in female authorship over the studied period.

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Trends in Proportion of Women as Authors of Medical Journal Articles, 2008-2018

Abstract: Pharmaceutical industry-sponsored meals and physician prescribing patterns for Medicare beneficiaries.

Cited by 84 publications

References 3 publications

Quantifying gender disparity in physician authorship among commentary articles in three high-impact medical journals: an observational study

Quantifying gender disparity in physician authorship among commentary articles in three high-impact medical journals: an observational study

Authorship inequality: a bibliometric study of the concentration of authorship among a diminishing number of individuals in high-impact medical journals, 2008–2019

Trends in Female Authorship in Major Journals of 3 Oncology Disciplines, 2002-2018

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