Abstract
Women in oral health science face similar societal issues and challenges as those in other STEMM careers, and gender disparities continue to exist as evidenced by fewer women represented as first and last authors in scientific publications. Pre-prints may serve as a conduit to immediately disseminating one's work, bypassing the arduous peer review process and its associated inherent biases. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to 1] compare the gender of first and last authors in pre-print versus peer reviewed publications, 2] examine the composition of first and last author pairs as stratified by publication type, and 3] examine the correlation between woman authorship and institutional geographic location and publication metrics stratified by publication type. The keyword "oral health" was used to search for publications in BioRxiv and Pubmed in the years 2018 and 2019. Gender of first and last authors were determined, and its frequency was considered as the primary outcome. Additionally, the geographic location of the author's associated institution and publication metrics measured by Altmetrics score were extracted. Data was descriptively summarized by frequencies and percentages. Chi-square analysis was conducted for categorical variables which included the relationship between gender and publication type as well as gender and region of author's associated institution. Binomial regression analysis was conducted to analyze the relationship between gender and Altmetrics. Woman first authors comprised 40.3% of pre-prints and 64.5% of peer reviewed publications [p<0.05]. Woman last authors comprised 31.3% of pre-prints and 61.5% of peer reviewed publications [p<0.05]. When analyzing the relationships between first and last author, the Man-Man pairing represented 47.7% of the pre-print publications and the Woman-Woman pairing comprised a majority of the of the peer review publications at 47.5%. All results were statistically significant with a p-value <0.05. No significant correlation was found between region of institution or Altmetrics and gender of first or last authors [p>0.05]. For the first time in oral health science, it was found that women show higher representation as first and last author positions in peer reviewed publications versus pre-prints.
Highlights
Women are increasingly entering careers in Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, and Medicine [STEMM] [1]
We considered covariates in the analysis including geographic region and Altmetrics score
Binomial regression analysis was conducted to analyze the relationship between gender as the dependent categorical variable and Altmetrics as the continuous independent variable
Summary
Women are increasingly entering careers in Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, and Medicine [STEMM] [1]. Output in the form of research publications in peer reviewed journals is the principal measure of an individual’s scientific productivity, creativity and conduit for disseminating evidence, which greatly influence the prominence and future career prospects in these fields for both men and women [1]. The man dominated editorial boards have been found to influence the outcomes of the publication process and act as a hindrance to women from being published in peer reviewed journals [2, 5]. Others have adopted other forms of peer review including single blind and open reviews [4] This invites other forms of review bias such as content-based bias, conservatism bias, publication bias, and bias as related to the author based on gender, affiliation, nationality etc. The impartiality of the peer review process has been widely challenged and may still act as a barrier to women’s success [4]
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