Abstract Details

Title Longitudinal Gender Authorship Trends in Neurology Research

Topic Health Care Disparities

Presentation(s) Health Care Disparities Posters (7:00 AM-5:00 PM)

Poster/Presentation
Number 001

Background

Professional advancement benefits from inclusion and diversity. Despite an improvement in female authorship observed in US neurology journals over the past 35 years, there is still a significant gender gap in neurology publication productivity. To date, no study has examined gender disparities in international academic neurology authorship, nor performed analyses by journal type and topic.

Objective To determine longitudinal gender authorship trends in clinical neurology articles by authorship rank and journal.

Design/Methods

This cohort study examines authorship trends in 218 “Clinical Neurology” journals listed in 1997-2020 Journal Citation Reports. Authors’ names, ranks and countries of affiliation were extracted from PubMed. Gender-API assigned binary genders to authors (>98% accuracy).* Journals were classified into types (medical/surgical), and 30 topics (ex.sleep, autonomic disorders, headache, neuro-oncology).

*Study limitation: The authors were unable to self-report gender.

Results 2,374,432 authors wrote 800,580 unique articles published from 1945 up to September 2020. 733,669 (30.9%) were female and 1,640,763 (69.1%) were male authors. Overall female authorship did not exceed 33.9% in any year with >50 authors. Women were more likely to be middle authors (32.7%), followed by first (32.3%), and ultimately last/senior (22.1%). From 1974 to 2000, the increasing rate of first female authors (slope=0.2748,R²=0.2263) was higher than that of last female authors (slope=0.2465,R²=0.2419). From 2001 to 2020, similar results were observed between first female authors (slope=0.7457,R²=0.9352) and last female authors (slope=0.4606,R²=0.9883).The proportion of first female authors doubled from 1974-2000 (15.5%) to 2001-2020 (32.4%). In comparison to the 34.0% women in medical journals (N_{med:female+male}=1,880,114), there were only 19.0% female authors in surgical journals (N_{surg:female+male}=494,318). In topic-specific comparisons, nursing journals had the highest proportion of female authors (82.5%, N_{nursing:female+male}=1881), while neuroradiology had the lowest female representation (13.6%, N_{neuroradiology:female+male}=611).

Conclusions This is the first study analyzing an exhaustive list of neurology journals and stratifying them into subgroups by rank, type, topics and time periods.

Authors/Disclosures
Anne Xuan-Lan Nguyen PRESENTER	Ms. Nguyen has received research support from Sigma Xi. Ms. Nguyen has received research support from McGill University. Ms. Nguyen has received research support from Université de Montréal.
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