Association Between Female Corresponding Authors and Female Co-Authors in Top Contemporary Cardiovascular Medicine Journals
Authors: David Ouyang, Robert A. Harrington, Fatima Rodriguez
Journal: Circulation (2019)

Despite progress in the representation of women in medical training, women continue to be underrepresented in cardiology, medical literature, and leadership positions in academic medicine. 1While over 50% of matriculating medical students are women, they make up less than a quarter of US general cardiology fellowship trainees and 12% of practicing general cardiologists. 1 In academic cardiology, female authors are underrepresented among authors in cardiology journals and authors of R01-funded research manuscripts. 2Identifying disparities in research productivity and acknowledgment can highlight barriers to female representation in academic cardiology leadership and academic promotion.Corresponding authors on manuscripts typically lead and organize research projects, and representation of female researchers in this role may be an important marker for female representation in academic cardiology.We hypothesized that female representation as corresponding authors lags behind overall representation in research, but that female researchers in corresponding authorship roles may be associated with more female representation in research manuscripts.Our analysis used a bibliometric approach to analyze the authorships of manuscripts from the 20 top impact cardiology journals of 2017.Using citation data extracted from PubMed by the Entrez database, we identified relevant manuscript and authorship data from all articles published in these journals in 2017.For all authors with a complete name listed, gender was determined by matching first name with gender using a previously validated Genderize database containing 216 286 distinct names across 79 countries and 89 languages. 3Author names not found in the Genderize database were compared with historical datasets from the US Social Security Administration, the US Census Bureau, and the North Atlantic Population Project to further match less common names. 4Sensitivity analyses were performed on the confidence of matching gender to name by excluding all nonconfident matches and by assuming extreme case scenarios of the gender distribution of unmatched names.These analyses did not significantly affect the study results.Student's t test and χ 2 test were used to determine significant differences between groups.Statistical analyses were performed using R 3.4.2(R Foundation, Vienna, Austria) and were based on 2-sided tests with a significance level of 0.05.This study was Institutional Review Board exempt using only pre-existing publicly available data.The data, analytic methods, and study materials has been made available for purposes of reproducing the results. 3e extracted a total of 2379 articles from the top 20 impact cardiology journals of 2017 with full author names and corresponding authorship information on PubMed.Of 10 646 unique authors, we were able to match gender to 9597 (90.1%) authors.Of the 9597 unique authors, of which 2800 (29.2% were female).There were 445 single-author publications, of which only 67 (15.1%) manuscripts were written by a female author.