Female Dynamics in Authorship of Scientific Publications in the Public Library of Science: A 10-year Bibliometric Analysis of Biomedical Research

Abstract

Women are generally underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). As scientific production reflects scholarly impact and participation in the scientific process, the number of journal publications forms a pertinent measure of academic productivity. This study examined the prevalence and evolution of female representation in prominent author positions across multidisciplinary biomedical research. Publications from seven exemplar cross-specialty journals of the Public Library of Science (PLoS) between January 2010 and December 2020 were extracted from Web of Science. Using Genderize.io, the gender of authors from their first names was estimated using a 75% threshold. The association between female prevalence in first and last authorship and journal was evaluated using a binary logistic regression, and odds ratios were estimated against a 50:50 reference on gender. In 266,739 publications, 43.3% of first authors and 26.7% of last authors were females. Across the ten-year period, female first-authorship increased by 19.6% and last-authorship by 3.2%. Among all journals, PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases had the greatest total proportion of female first authors (45.7%) and PLoS Medicine of female last authors (32%), while PLoS Computational Biology had the lowest proportion in these categories (23.7% and 17.2%). First authors were less likely to be females in all PLoS journals (p < 0.05) except for PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases (odds ratio: 0.84, 95% confidence interval: 0.71–1.00), where the odds of female authorship were not significantly different (p = 0.054). Last authors were not more likely to be females in all PLoS journals (p < 0.001). Overall, women still appear underrepresented as first authors in biomedical publications and their representation as last authors has severely lagged. Efforts towards gender equality in scholarly authorship will contribute to the representation of women in biomedical research and ensure that their potential is not lost.

A bibliometric analysis of the gender gap in the authorship of leading medical journals

“…Despite Genderize.io performing well, its accuracy is suboptimal for Asian names 27 . However, recently reported gender-related bibliometric observations were in line with our findings indicating that the gender prediction based on authors’ first names provided realistic results 15 , 17 , 21 . Inclusion of gender ethnicity and career stage as well as shared first or last authorships were unavailable but could be important factors to further study gender representation.…”

“…The representation of women in leading and senior publication authorship positions remains disproportionately low 14 , 15 . Medical journals with high journal impact factors (JIF) have not been comprehensively examined, although these share demanding editorial and peer-review assessment, and priority for groundbreaking science.…”