Background: Monitoring gender representation is critical to achieve diversity and equity in academia. One way to evaluate gender representation in academia is to examine the authorship of research publications. This study sought to determine the gender of first and senior authors of articles in leading medical journals and assess trends in the gender gap over time.
Methods: We gather bibliometric data on original research articles (n = 10,558) published in 2010-2019 in five leading medical journals to audit publication and citation frequency by gender. We explored their association with scientific fields, geographical regions, journals, and collaboration scope.
Results: We show that there are fewer women as senior (24.8%) than leading authors (34.5%, p < 0.001). The proportion of women varied by country with 9.1% last authors from Austria, 0.9% from Japan, and 0.0% from South Korea. The gender gap decreased longitudinally and faster for the last (-24.0 articles/year, p < 0.001) than first authors (-14.5 articles/year, p = 0.024) with pronounced country-specific variability. We also demonstrate that usage of research keywords varied by gender, partly accounting for the difference in citation counts.
Conclusions: In summary, gender representation has increased, although with country-specific variability. The study frame can be easily applied to any journal and time period to monitor changes in gender representation in science.
The publishing of medical research papers has traditionally been dominated by men. To better understand whether gender diversity in the authorship of research papers has changed recently, we analyzed over 10,000 articles published between 2010 and 2019 in five top medical journals. Usually, the first author is recognized as the leading contributor, whereas the last author supervises the study. We found that there were fewer women in senior positions compared to first author positions. The percentage of women as authors varied across countries. Over time, the gender gap decreased, but at different rates depending on the author’s position and country. Keywords selected by researchers to describe their work varied between genders. Our findings show progress in gender representation, but with country-specific differences. This study can be used as a model to track gender representation in other journals and time periods.
© 2023. The Author(s).