Abstract
Purpose :
Authorship is a critical component of career advancement in medicine. While there has been a promising trend towards gender equality in academia, men disproportionately outnumber women in first and last author positions even when factoring in comparable publication counts. We performed a cross-sectional study to examine trends in first and last authorship within the field of retina over the last 25 years.
Methods :
Original retina articles published between 1995 and 2020 were selected from four journals with the highest h5-index in ophthalmology. Publications by single authors and collaborative study groups as well as those classified as comments, letters, and editorials were excluded. First and last author names were retrieved, and GenderAPI was used to assign sex. Regression analysis was performed to determine whether the changes over time were significant. Chi-square analyses were used to compare distributions of categorical variables in various samples.
Results :
A total of 4142 papers were included. The percentage of women in first and last authorship positions significantly increased from 23% to 37.7%, and 14.2% to 24.6% over 25 years, respectively (P<0.001, P<0.001, respectively; Figure 1A, 1B). When the last authors were women, 32.5% of the first authors were women, and when the last authors were men, only 27.1% of the first authors were women (P=0.002). Based on the ASRS 2020 database, only 17% of retina specialists in the United States are female. From our data, 28.2% of first authors and 22.3% of last authors of retina publications from the United States are female authors in 2020 (P<0.001, P<0.001, respectively).
Conclusions :
While a disparity in authorship persists in ophthalmology’s subspecialties, our study suggests that retina is a field where the gap is closing. Significantly, a woman as the senior author is associated with a higher likelihood of female first authorship.
This abstract was presented at the 2022 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in Denver, CO, May 1-4, 2022, and virtually.