Institute of Pharmacology, Hannover Medical School, Carl-Neuberg-Str. 1, 30625, Hannover, Germany.
Nova School of Business and Economics, Carcavelos Campus, Rua da Holanda, no. 1, 2775-405, Carcavelos, Portugal.
Naunyn Schmiedebergs Arch Pharmacol. 2022 Jan;395(1):39-50. doi: 10.1007/s00210-021-02166-3. Epub 2021 Oct 8.
Motivated by the worldwide debate on gender equality, we analyzed the gender structure of the authors and the editorial board of Naunyn-Schmiedeberg's Archives of Pharmacology. We wrote an algorithm to assign authors' first names to a gender to determine the gender distribution of publications. We evaluated publications from German research institutes from 2000 to 2020. This resulted in a data set of 2929 authors. We could assign a first name to almost all authors. The percentage of female authors increased until 2008, but thereafter stagnated at around 30%. The position of senior author is far less often held by women (around 15%). Even though multiple political measures were implemented to increase the female participation, our analysis has shown no increase regardless. We also observed a strong decrease in German authorship (both male and female) since 2000. In the editorial board and for advisory editors, there has been a substantial increase in the proportion of women since 2016 as the result of appointments by the editor-in-chief. We discuss the strengths and limitations of our study in context with the literature and current developments in society and science and methodological pitfalls of studies in this field. More research is required to obtain a full picture of gender structure in science and to be able to properly interpret the data.
受全球性别平等辩论的启发，我们分析了《纳文施密德伯格药理学档案》的作者和编委会的性别结构。我们编写了一个算法，将作者的名字分配到一个性别中，以确定出版物的性别分布。我们评估了 2000 年至 2020 年德国研究机构的出版物。这产生了一个由 2929 名作者组成的数据集。我们几乎可以为所有作者分配一个名字。女性作者的比例一直在增加，直到 2008 年，但此后一直停滞在 30%左右。资深作者的职位很少由女性担任（约 15%）。尽管采取了多项政治措施来增加女性的参与度，但我们的分析表明，无论如何都没有增加。自 2000 年以来，我们还观察到德国作者（男性和女性）的比例大幅下降。自 2016 年以来，由于主编的任命，编委会和顾问编辑中的女性比例大幅增加。我们根据文献以及社会和科学的当前发展讨论了我们研究的优势和局限性，并讨论了该领域研究的方法学陷阱。需要更多的研究来全面了解科学中的性别结构，并能够正确解释数据。
