Woman authorship in pre-print versus peerreviewed oral health-related publications: A two-year observational study
Publication type
journal article
Publication date
2021
Author(s)
Rajendran, L.
Khandelwal, N.
Feine, J.
Ioannidou, E.
Language
English
View point(s)
Peer Review System
Discipline(s)
Geographical area
Abstract
Objectives Women in oral health science face similar societal issues and challenges as those in other STEMM careers, and gender disparities continue to exist as evidenced by fewer women represented as first and last authors in scientific publications. Pre-prints may serve as a conduit to immediately disseminating one's work, bypassing the arduous peer review process and its associated inherent biases. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to 1] compare the gender of first and last authors in pre-print versus peer reviewed publications, 2] examine the composition of first and last author pairs as stratified by publication type, and 3] examine the correlation between woman authorship and institutional geographic location and publication metrics stratified by publication type. Methods The keyword "oral health"was used to search for publications in BioRxiv and Pubmed in the years 2018 and 2019. Gender of first and last authors were determined, and its frequency was considered as the primary outcome. Additionally, the geographic location of the author's associated institution and publication metrics measured by Altmetrics score were extracted. Data was descriptively summarized by frequencies and percentages. Chi-square analysis was conducted for categorical variables which included the relationship between gender and publication type as well as gender and region of author's associated institution. Binomial regression analysis was conducted to analyze the relationship between gender and Altmetrics. Results Woman first authors comprised 40.3% of pre-prints and 64.5% of peer reviewed publications [p<0.05]. Woman last authors comprised 31.3% of pre-prints and 61.5% of peer reviewed publications [p<0.05]. When analyzing the relationships between first and last author, the Man-Man pairing represented 47.7% of the pre-print publications and the Woman-Woman pairing comprised a majority of the of the peer review publications at 47.5%. All results were statistically significant with a p-value <0.05. No significant correlation was found between region of institution or Altmetrics and gender of first or last authors [p>0.05]. Conclusion For the first time in oral health science, it was found that women show higher representation as first and last author positions in peer reviewed publications versus pre-prints. © 2021 Rajendran et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Journal
PLoS ONE
ISSN
1932-6203
Volume
16
Issue
12
Pagination
e0260791