Increase in female first authorship in top medical papers

A recently published paper titled “Trends and comparison of female first authorship in high impact medical journals: observational study (1994-2014)” reported that female first authorship among original research articles in top medical journals has grown by a third in the past two decades.

Giovanni Filardo, the lead author, and his colleagues selected six medicine journals that had the highest 2012 Journal Citation Reports impact factors in the category “Medicine, general & internal.” These included Annals of Internal Medicine, Archives of Internal Medicine, The BMJ, JAMA, The Lancet, and the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). To observe the share of female first authorship, they collected data for 3860 articles published from 1994 to 2014. They noted an upsurge in publications by female researchers: in 1994, the prevalence of female first author was a mere 27% as compared to 37% in 2014.

On the downside, however, the female authorship has declined in recent years in some journals such as The BMJ and the NEMJ, note the authors. Moreover, though an almost equal number of men and women join medical schools in the US and the UK, female representation in clinical faculty is less than 30% as compared to men. Additionally, less than 20% women hold senior leadership positions in European Union medical schools. The underrepresentation of women in high-ranking journals and senior positions is a worrying trend. Therefore, the authors recommend investigating the reasons behind the gender gap “to help to identify practices and strategies to increase women’s influence on and contributions to the evidence that will determine future healthcare policies and standards of clinical practice.”

Where gender misrepresentation is a topic of much debate in academia, this study brings a fresh perspective on the issue.

References:

More women publishing top medical papers (accessed March 8, 2016)

The gender gap in first authorship of research papers (accessed March 8, 2016)