While more women are entering the field of academic medicine, they are less likely to be recognised as experts, receive prestigious awards, hold leadership roles or author original research in major journals.
Research has now shown that papers written by women as primary and senior authors have roughly half as many median citations as those authored by men in high-impact medical journals.
Citations of peer-reviewed articles are seen as key indicator of scholarly impact: they are a key metric for academic recognition, influence, and acceptance by scientific communities, as well as in professional evaluations and promotions.
The study encompassed 5,554 articles published between 2015 and 2018 in five leading academic medical journals, of which 35.6% had a female primary author and 25.8% had a female senior author.
During this period, the articles with women as primary author were referenced in other academic articles a median of 36 times, versus 54 times for those with male primary authors. Women who co-authored with other women as senior authors had the fewest median citations, while men who co-authored with other men as senior authors had the most citations.
Given gender-based disparities in other aspects of medicine and academia, the findings are not particularly surprising. “In all likelihood, our findings of gender disparities in citations represent the tip of the iceberg,” the study’s authors wrote in the journal JAMA Open Network.
Dr Rachel Werner, the study’s senior author and the executive director of the Leonard Davis Institute for Health Economics at the University of Pennsylvania, said that although there was general agreement on the need for greater diversity in medicine and science: “I have sat through meetings where women are routinely talked over – where their ideas are just dismissed – and then repeated by men in the room as if they’re original. I think this is just those unconscious things that happen on a regular basis.”
One potential explanation is that men are more likely to self-cite. Preliminary evidence from other fields of academia has shown that men are up to 60% more likely to cite themselves in their own future work, said Dr Paula Chatterjee, an assistant professor of general internal medicine at Penn Medicine.
“Even within the past decade or two we’ve seen some improvement at least in the representation of women in academic medicine, so I think that … allows for hopefulness,” she said. “But what the new literature is showing us is how entrenched these issues are, and how interconnected they are. The fact that citations are related to promotion and advancement makes it a particularly thorny problem.”
Addressing the issue will not be easy. “I think that everybody has a role to play to really be conscious of … whose research they promote. I think it’s also [that] women tend to trumpet their own work less than men do,” Werner said. “I get called by reporters and almost always women call me, because I think people who make a conscious effort to find women to talk to can do it – but it does take effort.”
