A bibliometric analysis of the gender gap in the authorship of leading medical journals

Abstract

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.