Original ArticlesGender Differences in the Authorship of Original Research in Pediatric Journals, 2001-2016
Section snippets
Methods
We assessed the prevalence of female first authorship and senior (last-listed) authorship of original research articles published in 3 high-impact general pediatric-focused journals Pediatrics, JAMA Pediatrics (entitled Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine until 2013), and The Journal of Pediatrics as well as the gender congruence between first and senior authors. We also examined the gender breakdown of their main editors and their broader editorial board.
All original articles
Results
Data on a total of 3895 original articles were collected. Of these articles, 22 (0.6%) were excluded because of an inability to determine the gender of the first or senior author. There were 173 (4.5%) articles with a single author, coded as first author. The Table shows the percentages of female first and senior authors of original research articles, overall, by journal, and by time of publication. Overall, 49.9% (1935/3873) of the first authors and 34.5% (1278/3700) of the senior authors were
Discussion
Our findings of increasing female authorship in the field of pediatrics is in line with previously reported trends from Jagsi et al who examined articles from The Journal of Pediatrics and articles from other specialty journals.1, 10, 11, 12 These data may reflect, in part, the increase in female physicians in academic medicine overall since 2000,2, 3, 6 and more specifically, the increase in female pediatricians in academic pediatrics. And yet, although US female researchers accounted for
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D.M.G serves as an Associate Editor and L.F.R. serves as an Editorial Board member for The Journal of Pediatrics. L.F.R. serves on the editorial board for the Journal of Clinical Ethics, the Journal of Empirical Research in Human Research Ethics (JERHRE), and Perspectives in Biology and Medicine. The other authors declare no conflicts of interest.