Smith Rachel M, Rathore Srishti, Donnelly D'Andrea, Nicksic Peter J, Poore Samuel O, Dingle Aaron M
Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine, Richmond, VA, USA.
University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health Division of Plastic Surgery, Madison, WI, USA.
Aesthet Surg J. 2022 Dec 14;42(12):1470-1481. doi: 10.1093/asj/sjac137.
Gender disparities are pervasive in academic plastic surgery. Previous research demonstrates articles authored by women receive fewer citations than those written by men, suggesting the presence of implicit gender bias.
The aim of this study was to describe current citation trends in plastic surgery literature and assess gender bias. The expectation was that women would be cited less frequently than their male peers.
Articles published between 2017 and 2019 were collected from 8 representative plastic surgery journals stratified by impact factor. Names of primary and senior authors of the 50 most cited articles per year per journal were collected and author gender was determined via online database and internet search. The median numbers of citations by primary and senior author gender were compared by Kruskal-Wallis test.
Among 1167 articles, women wrote 27.3% as primary author and 18% as senior author. Women-authored articles were cited as often as those authored by men (P > 0.05) across all journal tiers. Articles with a female primary and male senior author had significantly more citations than articles with a male primary author (P = 0.038).
No implicit gender bias was identified in citation trends, a finding unique to plastic surgery. Women primary authors are cited more often than male primary authors despite women comprising a small fraction of authorship overall. Additionally, variegated authorship pairings outperformed homogeneous ones. Therefore, increasing gender diversity within plastic surgery academia remains critical.
性别差异在学术整形外科学中普遍存在。先前的研究表明，女性撰写的文章比男性撰写的文章被引用的次数更少，这表明存在隐性性别偏见。
本研究的目的是描述整形外科学文献当前的引用趋势并评估性别偏见。预期女性被引用的频率会低于男性同行。
从8种按影响因子分层的代表性整形外科学期刊中收集2017年至2019年发表的文章。收集每种期刊每年被引用次数最多的50篇文章的第一作者和资深作者姓名，并通过在线数据库和互联网搜索确定作者性别。通过Kruskal-Wallis检验比较第一作者和资深作者性别的引用次数中位数。
在1167篇文章中，女性作为第一作者撰写的文章占27.3%，作为资深作者撰写的文章占18%。在所有期刊级别中，女性撰写的文章与男性撰写的文章被引用的频率相同（P>0.05）。女性第一作者和男性资深作者的文章比男性第一作者的文章被引用的次数显著更多（P=0.038）。
在引用趋势中未发现隐性性别偏见，这是整形外科学特有的发现。尽管女性在总体作者中所占比例很小，但女性第一作者被引用的频率高于男性第一作者。此外，多样化的作者组合比单一性别的组合表现更好。因此，增加整形外科学术界的性别多样性仍然至关重要。
