Abstract
In peer-reviewed medical journals, authoring an invited commentary on an original article is a recognition of expertise. It has been documented that women author fewer invited publications than men do. However, it is unknown whether this disparity is due to gender differences in characteristics that are associated with invitations, such as field of expertise, seniority, and scientific output. To estimate the odds ratio (OR) of authoring an invited commentary for women compared with men who had similar expertise, seniority, and publication metrics. This matched case-control study included all medical invited commentaries published from January 1, 2013, through December 31, 2017, in English-language medical journals and multidisciplinary journals. Invited commentaries were defined as publications that cite another publication within the same journal volume and issue. Bibliometric data were obtained from Scopus. Cases were defined as corresponding authors of invited commentaries in a given journal during the study period. Controls were matched to cases based on scientific expertise by calculating a similarity index for abstracts published during the same period using natural language processing. Data analyses were conducted from March 13, 2019, through May 3, 2019. Corresponding or sole author gender was predicted from author first name and country of origin using genderize.io. The OR for gender was estimated after adjusting for field of expertise, publication output, citation impact, and years active (ie, years since first publication), with an interaction between gender and years active. The final data set included 43 235 cases across 2549 journals; there were 34 047 unique intraciting commentary authors, among whom 9072 (26.6%) were women. For researchers who had been active for the median of 19 years, the odds of invited commentary authorship were 21% lower for women (OR, 0.79 [95% CI, 0.77-0.81]; P < .001) compared with men who had similar scientific expertise, number of publications, and citation impact. For every decile increase in years active, the OR decreased by a factor of 0.97 (95% CI, 0.96-0.98; P < .001). In this case-control study, women had lower odds of authoring invited commentaries than their male peers. This disparity was larger for senior researchers. Journal editors could use natural language processing of published research to widen and diversify the pool of experts considered for commentary invitations.
Highlights
Women are underrepresented as authors of peer-reviewed publications across a wide variety of scientific fields,[1,2] including many areas of medical research[3,4,5,6,7,8] and nonresearch medical publications.[9]
For researchers who had been active for the median of 19 years, the odds of invited commentary authorship were 21% lower for women (OR, 0.79 [95% CI, 0.77-0.81]; P < .001) compared with men who had similar scientific expertise, number of publications, and citation impact
We restricted our analysis to intraciting commentary (ICC) for 3 reasons: (1) ICCs are a common type of invited commentary in medical journals; (2) ICCs are almost certainly solicited by journal editors, since citing another publication in the same journal volume and issue requires advance knowledge of the focal article and its publication timeline; and (3) ICCs can be identified through automated search in Scopus
Summary
Women are underrepresented as authors of peer-reviewed publications across a wide variety of scientific fields,[1,2] including many areas of medical research[3,4,5,6,7,8] and nonresearch medical publications.[9] According to a 2018 study by Holman et al,[10] most disciplines are years or decades from achieving gender parity. To our knowledge, previous studies of gender and invited article authorship did not control for these factors.[10,22,25,27,28,29,30] This raises the question of whether women author fewer invited articles than men with similar scientific expertise and credentials
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