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- Open Access
Female authors in top-rank journals of different medical specialties
- Published: 1 March 2011
Keywords
- Medical Research
- Emergency Medicine
- Scientific Community
- Lower Percentage
- Medical Journal
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
Percentage of female authors
First authors | Senior authors | |
---|---|---|
S | 20.8 | 12.8 |
EM | 22.1 | 15.3 |
CC | 25.6 | 13.8 |
M,GI | 30.3 | 19.8 |
R | 35.1 | 17.1 |
H | 35.7 | 17.2 |
N | 38.6 | 17.1 |
A | 38.7 | 23.6 |
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.
Authors’ Affiliations
References
- Puuska HM: Scientometrics. 2010, 82: 419-437. 10.1007/s11192-009-0037-7.View ArticleGoogle Scholar
- Jagsi R: N Engl J Med. 2006, 355: 281-287. 10.1056/NEJMsa053910.View ArticlePubMedGoogle Scholar
Copyright
This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.