Women and authorship in an international journal dedicated to cardiovascular diseases: analysis of the last decade

Abstract

The Revista Española de Cardiología (REC) is an international journal dedicated to cardiovascular diseases. The present study analyzes the authorship gender differences of the studies published in the REC over the last decade. A cross-sectional study was made of the REC issues published between January 2011 and December 2020, with a gender-based analysis of the number of authors, the type and year of publication and preferential authorship (first author, corresponding author or last author). Female participation was calculated from the female/male ratio, with an analysis of the trend observed over the years. A total of 2859 articles were documented, and the total signing authors corresponded to 4275 women and 12,061 men. In 1035 articles a woman held at least one preferential authorship. In 699 articles a woman was the first author, while in 548 articles a woman was the corresponding author, and in 481 articles a woman was the last author. The number of articles in which a woman was the first author or the corresponding author was seen to increase (p = 0.008 and p = 0.002, respectively), while no significant changes were observed in relation to last authorship (p = 0.09). The percentage of articles in which at least one woman held at least one of the three preferential authorship positions tended to increase over time (p = 0.056). In conclusion, although the participation of female authors in the scientific production of the REC has increased during the last decade, authorship gender inequalities persist.