L. T. Boitano1,2, K. L. Hart3, A. Tanious1,2, M. J. Eagleton1,2, K. D. Lillemoe2, R. H. Perlis3, S. D. Srivastava1,2 1Massachusetts General Hospital,Vascular And Endovascular Surgery, Surgery,Boston, MA, USA 2Massachusetts General Hospital,Surgery,Boston, MA, USA 3Massachusetts General Hospital,Center For Quantitative Health And Department Of Psychiatry,Boston, MA, USA
Introduction: Despite an increase in the female graduates entering surgical residency, there remains a gender disparity in academic surgical leadership. Scholarly activity, as measured by scientific publications in high impact journals, is the foundation for academic promotion. Thus, this study seeks evaluate the distribution of authorship by gender over the last 10 years among the top 25 surgical journals.
Methods: Original research articles published in the 25 highest-impact general surgery and general surgery subspecialty journals between January 2008 and March 2018 were considered for inclusion. Excluded were journals for which at least 70% of author gender could not be identified. Articles were categorized by gender of first, last and overall authorship using the established genderize.io application programming interface (API) for R, which predicts gender and provides the probability of the associated gender. We examined changes in proportions of female first, last, and overall authorship over time, and analyzed the correlation between these measurements and journal impact factor.
Results: There were a total of 71,867 articles from 19 journals included for analysis. The general surgery and sub-specialty journals included in this analysis represent the following subspecialties: general surgery, cardiothoracic surgery, vascular surgery, transplantation, bariatric surgery, surgical oncology, colorectal surgery, plastic surgery, surgical pathology and trauma and acute care surgery. Gender was successfully predicted for 87.3% of authors (range: 79.1%-92.5%). There were significant increases in the overall percentage of female authors (β = 0.55, p = 1.01e-6), in the percentage of female first authors (β = 0.97, p = 1.69e-8), and in the percentage of female last authors (β = 0.53, p = 3.09e-5) over the 10-year study period. In regards to last author, one journal, Eur J Cardiothorac Surg (β= -0.5), had a significant decrease in the proportion of female last authors. Furthermore, all journals representing the cardiothoracic subspecialty failed to show a significant increase in the proportion of female last authors over the study period. There were, however, no significant correlations between the impact factor of the journal and the overall percentage of female authors (rs = 0.39, p = 0.09), percentage of female first authors (rs = 0.29, p = 0.22), or percentage of female last authors (rs = 0.35, p = 0.13).
Conclusion: The current study identifies continued but slow improvement in female authorship of high impact surgical journals during the contemporary era. However, the improvement was more apparent in the first author compared to senior author positions.