Jessica G Y Luc1, Dominique Vervoort2, Edward Percy3, Sameer Hirji4, Gurkiran K Mann1, Kevin Phan5, Mahmoud Dibas6, Muthiah Vaduganathan7, Ourania Preventza8, Mara B Antonoff9. 1. Division of Cardiovascular Surgery, Department of Surgery, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. 2. Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, Maryland. 3. Division of Cardiovascular Surgery, Department of Surgery, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada; Division of Cardiac Surgery, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts. 4. Division of Cardiac Surgery, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts. 5. Faculty of Medicine, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia. 6. Sulaiman Al Rajhi Colleges, College of Medicine, Qassim, Saudi Arabia. 7. Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital Heart and Vascular Center, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts. 8. Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery, Michael E. DeBakey Department of Surgery, Texas Heart Institute, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas. 9. Department of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery, University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, Texas. Electronic address: mbantonoff@mdanderson.org.
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Women continue to comprise a small minority of cardiothoracic surgeons. Representation of women in areas of academic achievement has not been well characterized. This study aims to evaluate female representation among authorship positions in high-impact articles published in The Annals of Thoracic Surgery. METHODS: Altmetric scores were used to identify the top 50 articles published in 2013, 2015, and 2017 in The Annals of Thoracic Surgery. Article characteristics as well as author demographics were collected. Bibliometric analysis was performed to identify longitudinal changes with regard to female representation as first and last authors. RESULTS: Female authors remain underrepresented in authorship, despite a temporal trend toward improvement in female representation over the years for first author position (16% in 2013, 22% in 2015, 20% in 2017) and last author position (8% in 2013, 16% in 2015, 20% in 2017). Articles authored by women were equally likely to achieve high impact as compared with men, as evaluated by Altmetric score (women 30.1 ± 38.6 vs men 39.1 ± 73.5, P = .53), citations (women 14.3 ± 19.1 vs men 17.6 ± 20.8, P = .45), and to be mentioned by news outlets, blogs, patents, Facebook, Wikipedia, Mendeley, Google, LinkedIn, and Reddit. Female first and last authors achieved comparable numbers of publications and H-index scores compared with male authors. CONCLUSIONS: Significant sex-based differences in authorship representation persist, but with favorable improvement in female representation over time. Importantly, citations and high-impact status were independent of author sex. Characterization of the representation of women in academic achievement helps us strive for gender equity in our specialty.
BACKGROUND: Women continue to comprise a small minority of cardiothoracic surgeons. Representation of women in areas of academic achievement has not been well characterized. This study aims to evaluate female representation among authorship positions in high-impact articles published in The Annals of Thoracic Surgery. METHODS: Altmetric scores were used to identify the top 50 articles published in 2013, 2015, and 2017 in The Annals of Thoracic Surgery. Article characteristics as well as author demographics were collected. Bibliometric analysis was performed to identify longitudinal changes with regard to female representation as first and last authors. RESULTS: Female authors remain underrepresented in authorship, despite a temporal trend toward improvement in female representation over the years for first author position (16% in 2013, 22% in 2015, 20% in 2017) and last author position (8% in 2013, 16% in 2015, 20% in 2017). Articles authored by women were equally likely to achieve high impact as compared with men, as evaluated by Altmetric score (women 30.1 ± 38.6 vs men 39.1 ± 73.5, P = .53), citations (women 14.3 ± 19.1 vs men 17.6 ± 20.8, P = .45), and to be mentioned by news outlets, blogs, patents, Facebook, Wikipedia, Mendeley, Google, LinkedIn, and Reddit. Female first and last authors achieved comparable numbers of publications and H-index scores compared with male authors. CONCLUSIONS: Significant sex-based differences in authorship representation persist, but with favorable improvement in female representation over time. Importantly, citations and high-impact status were independent of author sex. Characterization of the representation of women in academic achievement helps us strive for gender equity in our specialty.