Abstract No. 486 Scholarly trends in interventional radiology: an analysis of U.S. female authorship in the Journal of Vascular and Interventional Radiology

Abstract

To assess trends in U.S. female authorship of scientific articles published in a high-impact interventional radiology (IR) journal. A review of scientific articles published in the Journal of Vascular and Interventional Radiology (JVIR) from 2009-2018 was performed. Articles published over the last decade were reviewed for their authorship characteristics, including gender of the first and last authors, total number of female authors, total number of authors, and level of training of the female authors. From January 2009 to August 2018, 999 scientific articles were published in JVIR. Of these, 579 articles (58.0%) had at least one female author, while 997 articles (99.8%) had at least one male author. The average number of male authors per article outnumbered the average number of female authors per article when compared on a yearly basis. Over the last ten years, there has been an average of 5.7 male authors for every female author. 118 (11.8%) of all articles had a female first author and 79 (7.9%) had a female last author. When exclusively looking at the 579 articles having a female author, 118 (20.4%) had a female first author while 79 (13.6%) had a female last author. Training level was also examined with 663 (62.6%) of the 1059 female authors having an MD and 149 (14.1%) having a PhD. Although approximately 12% of all interventional radiologists are female, recent studies suggest there is an increasing number of women entering the field, particularly after the institution of the Integrated IR residency. However, female authorship of scientific articles in a leading IR journal has remained relatively stagnant over the past decade, while the number of female first and last authors remains disproportionately low. Further research which identifies barriers to scholarly involvement of females in IR will be essential as more females join the field and proportional representation in future academic contributions will be of critical importance.