One and a half million medical papers reveal a link between author gender and attention to gender and sex analysis

Nielsen, Mathias Wullum; Andersen, Jens Peter; Schiebinger, Londa; Schneider, Jesper W.

doi:10.31219/osf.io/dumf6

Cited by 41 publications

(53 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…Papers with female first and last authors were more likely to report sexespecially female or both sexes-when we controlled for number of authors, representation of women in diseases, specialties, countries, continents, and publication year. These results complement findings published by Nielsen and colleagues, 19 which, based on the GenderMedDB, 35 showed that female first and last authors were more likely to report on sex. However, our results are based on a larger dataset-3394 versus 1•1 million papers reporting sex analysed in the regressions-with more controls and distinguishing between the sex that is reported (female, male, or both).…”

Section: Figure 3: Odds Ratio Of Sex-related Reporting From the Logissupporting

confidence: 90%

“…In our regression models, we did not explicitly model the missingness of gender variables and instead used the ignorability assumption, as was done in a similar study. 19 If the missingness of gender variables is strongly affected by unobserved factors, it might have produced biases in our results. Furthermore, as in the aforementioned study, 19 our main models also ignored papers that do not have the disease MeSH terms with associated average female first (last) author fraction; however, models that include such papers and do not use f_mesh produce qualitatively similar results.…”

Section: Figure 3: Odds Ratio Of Sex-related Reporting From the Logismentioning

confidence: 93%

“…18 Furthermore, the presence of female investigators might lead to increased sex analysis in research. 19,20 However, the extant literature fails to provide a contemporary and cross-disciplinary analysis of the degree of sex-related reporting across the health sciences-from biomedical, to clinical, to public health research-and the role of author gender in sex-related reporting. We aimed to address this gap.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Factors affecting sex-related reporting in medical research: a cross-disciplinary bibliometric analysis

et al. 2019

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Background Clinical and preclinical studies have shown that there are sex-based differences at the genetic, cellular, biochemical, and physiological levels. Despite this, numerous studies have shown poor levels of inclusion of female populations into medical research. These disparities in sex inclusion in research are further complicated by the absence of sufficient reporting and analysis by sex of study populations. Disparities in the inclusion of the sexes in medical research substantially reduce the utility of the results of such research for the entire population. The absence of sex-related reporting are problematical for the translation of research from the preclinical to clinical and applied health settings. Large-scale studies are needed to identify the extent of sex-related reporting and where disparities are more prevalent. In addition, while several studies have shown the dearth of female researchers in science, few have evaluated whether a scarcity of women in science might be related to disparities in sex inclusion and reporting. We aimed to do a cross-disciplinary analysis of the degree of sex-related reporting across the health sciences-from biomedical, to clinical, and public health research-and the role of author gender in sex-related reporting. Methods This bibliometric analysis analysed sex-related reporting in medical research examining more than 11•5 million papers indexed in Web of Science and PubMed between 1980 and 2016 and using sex-related Medical Subject Headings as a proxy for sex reporting. For papers that were published between 2008 and 2016 and could be matched with PubMed, we assigned a gender to first and last authors on the basis of their names, according to our gender assignment algorithm. We removed papers for which we could not determine the gender of either the first or last author. We grouped papers into three disciplinary categories (biomedical research, clinical medicine, and public health). We used descriptive statistics and regression analyses (controlling for the number of authors and representation of women in specific diseases, countries, continents, year, and specialty areas) to study associations between the gender of the authors and sex-related reporting.

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Section: Figure 3: Odds Ratio Of Sex-related Reporting From the Logissupporting

confidence: 90%

Section: Figure 3: Odds Ratio Of Sex-related Reporting From the Logismentioning

confidence: 93%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Factors affecting sex-related reporting in medical research: a cross-disciplinary bibliometric analysis

et al. 2019

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“…However, the gender of study authors appears to play a role, as female authorship was significantly positively correlated with the inclusion of both sexes and analysis by subject gender/sex[17]. …”

Section: How Bad Is the Status Quo?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Inclusion of females does not increase variability in rodent research studies

Beery

2018

Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences

244

160

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The underrepresentation of female subjects in animal research has gained attention in recent years, and new NIH guidelines aim to address this problem early, at the grant proposal stage. Many researchers believe that use of females will hamper research because of the need for increased sample sizes, and increased costs. Here I review empirical research across multiple rodent species and traits that demonstrates that females are not more variable than males, and that for most traits, female estrous cyclicity need not be considered. I present statistical simulations illustrating how factorial designs can reduce the need for additional research subjects, and discuss cultural issues around the inclusion of male and female subjects in research.

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“…This has blinded the field for gender differences in symptoms, diagnosis and in medication and treatment (Chapman et al 2013). At the same time, several studies have shown that female researchers are more inclined to take gender issues into account than male researchers do (Nielsen et al 2017). If this holds for research and research output, it may also hold for research input: grants.…”

Section: Gender Issues In Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Panel composition as pathway to impact: Do we need stakeholder expertise to select relevant mission-oriented projects?

Besselaar¹,

Sandström

2019

Fteval Journal for Research and Technology Policy Evaluation Issue 48/July 2019 - Proceedings of the Conference "Impact of Soci

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those interactions may help policy makers to stimulate the conditions for impact and through this increasingly open up for the probability that research projects do generate not only scholarly but also (and especially) societal impact (Spaapen et al. 2011; Eric 2010). In the ERiC project i and in its successor the SIAMPI project ii , the concept of productive interactions was deployed to study research impact in a broad way, including societal impact. The approach was applied in several scientific and technological fields like information and communication technology (De Jong et al. 2014), architecture (De Jong et al. 2011), law (Van Arensbergen et al. 2010), electronic engineering (Propp et al. 2010); mechanical engineering (Van der Meulen et al. 2010), in biomedical fields (Prins 2010), and in the social sciences and humanities (Molas et al. 2011). iii Many of these productive interactions or "impact pathways" were found when the investigations were focused on the direct or indirect links between users and producers of knowledge. More recently, the concept of co-production of knowledge has become fashionable, pointing at collaboration between researchers and stakeholders in the process of knowledge creation. It is expected that such collaboration, in which stakeholders bring in local knowledge about the topic under study and knowledge about possibilities and constraints of applying knowledge, the dissemination and use of scholarly research output will be more frequent, easier and faster (see among others: Wardenaar 2014; Hegger et al. 2012; Hegger and Dieperink 2014; Djenontin and Meadows 2018). The model of co-production is mainly deployed in studying complex problems such as climate change and environmental studies, and many problems are still to be solved, such as resourcing knowledge co-production and the cultural differences between researchers and stakeholders (Djenontin and Meadows 2018). Furthermore, the role of stakeholders is often not so much in the co-production of the knowledge, but more in the start of the project when the research questions are formulated, and in the end when disseminating the new knowledge (Wardenaar 2014). However, also other interactions may be relevant. As research is de-ABSTRACT I t is often argued that the presence of stakeholders in review panels may improve the selection of societal relevant research projects. In this paper, we investigate whether the composition of panels indeed matters. More precisely, when stakeholders are in the panel, does that result in more positive evaluation of proposals of relevance to that stakeholder? We investigate this for the gender issues domain, and show that this is the case. When stakeholders are present, the relevant projects obtain a more positive evaluation and consequently a higher score. If these findings can be generalised, they are an important insight for the creation of pathways to and conditions for impact.

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One and a half million medical papers reveal a link between author gender and attention to gender and sex analysis

Cited by 41 publications

References 9 publications

Factors affecting sex-related reporting in medical research: a cross-disciplinary bibliometric analysis

Factors affecting sex-related reporting in medical research: a cross-disciplinary bibliometric analysis

Inclusion of females does not increase variability in rodent research studies

Panel composition as pathway to impact: Do we need stakeholder expertise to select relevant mission-oriented projects?

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