Social Determinants of Health and Demographic Change, Opik Research Group, University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), 48080 Leioa, Spain.
Doctoral Program in Public Health, Department of Preventive Medicine and Public Health, University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), 48080 Leioa, Spain.
Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2023 Jan 22;20(3):2025. doi: 10.3390/ijerph20032025.
Gender inequalities in biomedical literature have been widely reported in authorship as well as the scarcity of results that are stratified by sex in the studies. We conducted a bibliometric review of articles on COVID-19 published in the main Spanish medical journals between April 2020 and May 2021. The purpose of this study was to analyse differences in authorship order and composition by sex and their evolution over time, as well as the frequency of sex-disaggregated empirical results and its relationship with the author sex in articles on COVID-19 in the main Spanish biomedical journals. We identified 914 articles and 4921 authors, 57.5% men and 42.5% women. Women accounted for 36.7% of first authors and for 33.7% of last authors. Monthly variation in authorship over the course of the pandemic indicates that women were always less likely to publish as first authors. Only 1.0% of the articles broke down empirical results by sex. Disaggregation of results by sex was significantly more frequent when women were first authors and when women were the majority in the authorship. It is important to make gender inequalities visible in scientific dissemination and to promote gender-sensitive research, which can help to reduce gender bias in clinical studies as well as to design public policies for post-pandemic recovery that are more gender-equitable.
生物医学文献中的性别不平等现象在作者署名中得到了广泛报道，而且研究中按性别分层的结果也很少。我们对 2020 年 4 月至 2021 年 5 月期间在西班牙主要医学期刊上发表的关于 COVID-19 的文章进行了文献计量学回顾。本研究的目的是分析作者署名顺序和组成的性别差异及其随时间的演变，以及按性别划分的经验结果的频率及其与主要西班牙生物医学期刊上关于 COVID-19 的文章中作者性别的关系。我们确定了 914 篇文章和 4921 名作者，其中 57.5%是男性，42.5%是女性。女性占第一作者的 36.7%，占最后作者的 33.7%。在疫情期间，作者署名的月度变化表明，女性作为第一作者发表文章的可能性总是较低。只有 1.0%的文章按性别细分了经验结果。当女性是第一作者且在作者中占多数时，按性别细分结果的情况更为频繁。在科学传播中揭示性别不平等现象并促进性别敏感研究非常重要，这有助于减少临床研究中的性别偏见，并为后疫情时代的复苏设计更公平的性别政策。
