Skip to main content
  • Poster presentation
  • Open access
  • Published:

Female authors in top-rank journals of different medical specialties

Introduction

In various scientific fields, including medical research, men have been found to have a higher scientific output than women. These differences may be due to women's lower integration in the scientific community [1]. Even though the proportion of female authors has increased in the past decades, women still contribute less to prominent medical journals [2].

Methods

Thirty-five top-10-ranked journals of eight different medical categories were analysed: Medicine, General & Internal (M,GI), Critical Care (CC), Anaesthesiology (A), Surgery (S), Emergency Medicine (EM), Radiology (R), Haematology (H) and Clinical Neurology (N). Over a 12-month period, we evaluated the first and senior authors' first name for gender.

Results

Thirty-one percent of evaluable first authors were female, compared with 18% of all senior authors. There were significant differences between the evaluated categories, with the lowest percentage of female first authors in the category Surgery, followed by Emergency Medicine (Table 1). In every category, the proportion of female senior authors was significantly lower than that of first authors.

Table 1 Percentage of female authors

Conclusions

There is a wide variation in the proportion of contributing female authors between the subspecialties analysed, probably reflecting the varying percentage of female scientists. However, in all evaluated medical categories, the proportion of papers authored by females was significantly lower than those authored by men.

References

  1. Puuska HM: Scientometrics. 2010, 82: 419-437. 10.1007/s11192-009-0037-7.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Jagsi R: N Engl J Med. 2006, 355: 281-287. 10.1056/NEJMsa053910.

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Rights and permissions

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Amrein, K., Putz-Bankuti, C., Mader, J. et al. Female authors in top-rank journals of different medical specialties. Crit Care 15 (Suppl 1), P537 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1186/cc9957

Download citation

  • Published:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/cc9957

Keywords