Department of Pain Medicine, Imperial College, London, UK.
Department of Anaesthesia, Guys and St. Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust, London, UK.
Anaesthesia. 2019 Nov;74(11):1432-1438. doi: 10.1111/anae.14797. Epub 2019 Aug 2.
More than 50% of medical students and 45% of practising doctors are female in the UK. In the specialty of anaesthesia, 32% of consultants are female. However, compared with males, females are under-represented as authors of articles published in high-impact journals. We investigated the proportion of female first authors by examining the case reports submitted to Anaesthesia Cases since its inception in 2013. We defined authors by their sex (male or female), that is, biological characteristics, rather than their gender. There were a total of 802 submissions to Anaesthesia Cases over 4.5 years. Sixteen submissions were excluded and of the remaining 786 submissions, 279 were accepted and 507 rejected, an acceptance rate of 35.5%. Twenty (2.5%) authors' sex could not be identified. The overall proportion of female first authors was 37.1%. The proportion of female first authors of accepted case reports was 42.1% and females were first authors of rejected case reports in 34.4%. We found that, compared with previous studies on female sex and gender bias in publishing, there was a relatively high proportion of female first authors publishing in Anaesthesia Cases and female first authors were more likely to be accepted than male first authors. Authorship is considered to reflect career success and there continues to be sex/gender inequity that must be tackled at all levels, from application to medical school, through research funding, journals and Editorial Boards.
在英国，超过 50%的医学生和 45%的执业医生是女性。在麻醉学专业中，32%的顾问是女性。然而，与男性相比，女性作为高影响力期刊文章的作者的代表性不足。我们通过检查自 2013 年创刊以来提交给《麻醉病例》的病例报告，调查了女性第一作者的比例。我们根据作者的性别（男性或女性），即生物学特征，而不是他们的性别来定义作者。在 Anaesthesia Cases 创刊的 4.5 年内，共收到 802 份投稿。有 16 份投稿被排除在外，在剩下的 786 份投稿中，有 279 份被接受，507 份被拒绝，接受率为 35.5%。有 20 位（2.5%）作者的性别无法确定。女性第一作者的总体比例为 37.1%。接受的病例报告中女性第一作者的比例为 42.1%，而被拒绝的病例报告中女性第一作者的比例为 34.4%。我们发现，与之前关于女性性别和出版中的性别偏见的研究相比，在 Anaesthesia Cases 中发表的女性第一作者的比例相对较高，而且女性第一作者比男性第一作者更有可能被接受。作者身份被认为反映了职业成功，而且在从申请医学院到研究经费、期刊和编辑委员会等各个层面都存在性别/性别不平等问题，必须加以解决。
