Abstract 13734: Gender Differences in Authorship of Top Congenital Heart Disease Publications

Abstract

Introduction: Despite progress in the representation of women in medical training, men continue to dominate fields such as academic medicine and cardiology. The proportion of female cardiology trainees and physicians has increased over time; however, women continue to be underrepresented in published cardiology literature. Research Question: Our study aims to investigate whether there are gender disparities in authorship amongst the top congenital heart disease publications. Methods: We performed a bibliometric analysis of publications indexed in PubMed from 2018 to 2022 from the top seven Cardiology and congenital heart disease (CHD) journals by impact factor and H5-index. The first authors, last authors, affiliations, and countries of origin were extracted. The genders of the authors were then determined from a database of name-to-gender mappings ( Gender API; gender-api.com ). One sample and independent sample t-tests were performed. Results: We identified 1058 CHD articles on PubMed which met the inclusion criteria. Female authors accounted for 38.1% of all first authors and 29.6% of all last authors, which was a statistically significant difference from the proportion of male authors (61.9% and 70.4%, respectively, p<0.001). Europe showed a greater bias towards male first authors than the United States (p=0.010), whereas there was no significant gender difference seen in last authors between the two regions (p=0.170). Publications with a male senior author were more likely to have a male first author (67.1% male, p<0.001), whereas there was no difference in first author gender in publications with a female last author (49.8% male, p=0.954). Conclusions: We analyzed the first and last author genders of publications in high-impact cardiology journals over the past 5 years and found that women are underrepresented in both first and last authorship positions. Patterns in underrepresentation emerged, both geographically and based on the gender of the senior author. Additional work is needed to address these gender disparities and identify concrete solutions to increasing female representation in CHD research, as it may elucidate obstacles to female representation in cardiology leadership, recruitment, and academic advancement.