Gender disparities in high-quality dermatology research: a descriptive bibliometric study on scientific authorships
Publication type
journal article
Publication date
2018
Author(s)
Bendels, Michael H. K.
Dietz, Michelle Cathrin
Brüggmann, Dörthe
Oremek, Gerhard Maximilian
Schöffel, Norman
Publisher
British Medical Journal Publishing Group Section: Dermatology
Language
English
View point(s)
Peer Review System
Discipline(s)
Abstract
Objective The present study aims to elucidate the state of gender equality in high-quality dermatological research by analysing the representation of female authorships from January 2008 to May 2017. Design Retrospective, descriptive study. Setting 113 189 male and female authorships from 23 373 research articles published in 23 dermatological Q1 journals were analysed with the aid of the Gendermetrics Platform. Results 43.0% of all authorships and 50.2% of the firstauthorships, 43.7% of the coauthorships and 33.1% of the last authorships are held by women. The corresponding female-to-male ORs are 1.41 (95% CI 1.37 to 1.45) for first authorships, 1.07 (95% CI 1.04 to 1.10) for coauthorships and 0.60 (95% CI 0.58 to 0.62) for last authorships. The annual growth rates are 1.74% overall and 1.45% for first authorships, 1.53% for coauthorships and 2.97% for last authorships. Women are slightly under-represented at prestigious authorships compared with men (Prestige Index=−0.11). The under-representation remains stable in highly competitive articles attracting the highest citation rates, namely, articles with many authors and articles that were published in highest-impact journals. Multiauthor articles with male key authors are only slightly more frequently cited than those with female key authors. Women publish slightly fewer papers compared with men (47.2% women hold 43.0% of the authorships). At the level of individual journals, there is a high degree of uniformity in gender-specific authorship odds. By contrast, distinct differences at country level were revealed. The prognosis for the next decades forecasts a consecutive harmonisation of authorship odds between the two genders. Conclusions In high-quality dermatological research, the integration of female scholars is advanced as compared with other medical disciplines. A gender gap consists mainly in the form of a career dichotomy, with many female early career researchers and few women in academic leadership positions. However, this gender gap has been narrowed in the last decade and will likely be further reduced in the future.
Journal
BMJ Open
ISSN
2044-6055
Volume
8
Issue
4
Pagination
e020089
Rights
© Article author(s) (or their employer(s) unless otherwise stated in the text of the article) 2018. All rights reserved. No commercial use is permitted unless otherwise expressly granted.. This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/