Smith Brandon T, Villela-Castrejon Javier, Rodriguez Larissa, Kalva Prathik, Beal Taylor, Lee Taylor, George Jason T, Weaver M Libby, Cheng Lily S
Department of Surgery, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas; Department of Pediatric Surgery, Texas Children's Hospital, Houston, Texas.
Department of Biomedical Engineering, Texas A & M University, College Station, Texas; Department of Translational Medical Sciences, Texas A & M Health Science Center, Houston, Texas.
J Surg Res. 2025 Jun 27;312:148-154. doi: 10.1016/j.jss.2025.06.001.
Building inclusive and diverse research teams is increasingly important in the era of team science. We explored authorship trends over the last 3 decades to assess progress in academic surgery.
Two general surgical journals (Journal of the American Medical Association Surgery and Annals of Surgery) and two nonsurgical multidisciplinary scientific journals (Nature and Science) were queried at 10-y intervals from 1991 to 2021. Data collected included total number of authors per article, instances of shared authorship, authors' gender, geographic location of the authors, and number of references per article.
A total of 741 journal articles were examined. Over the last 3 decades, the number of women authors has nearly doubled in surgical journals and tripled in nonsurgical journals. The proportion of women authors per article, women first authors, and women senior authors all increased significantly, though women remain only 26% of all authors. Intriguingly, articles with a woman senior author had a significantly greater proportion of women coauthors than articles with a man senior author (55 ± 4% versus 12 ± 6%; P < 0.05) across all 3 decades in all journals. In 2021, only 10% of articles with a man senior author had an equal or greater proportion of women coauthors.
Though there are now more women authors, we describe a pattern of gender concordance where women senior authors may publish with other women more than men senior authors. Our findings highlight both the progress made and potential for growth in achieving gender equity in academic surgery.
在团队科学时代，建立包容和多元化的研究团队变得越来越重要。我们探讨了过去30年的作者署名趋势，以评估学术外科领域的进展。
从1991年到2021年，每隔10年对两本普通外科期刊（《美国医学会杂志·外科学》和《外科学年鉴》）以及两本非外科多学科科学期刊（《自然》和《科学》）进行查询。收集的数据包括每篇文章的作者总数、共同署名情况、作者性别、作者地理位置以及每篇文章的参考文献数量。
共审查了741篇期刊文章。在过去30年中，外科期刊的女性作者数量几乎翻了一番，非外科期刊的女性作者数量则增加了两倍。每篇文章中女性作者、女性第一作者和女性资深作者的比例均显著增加，尽管女性作者仅占所有作者的26%。有趣的是，在所有期刊的过去30年中，有女性资深作者的文章中女性共同作者的比例显著高于有男性资深作者的文章（55±4%对12±6%；P<0.05）。2021年，有男性资深作者的文章中，只有10%的文章女性共同作者比例相等或更高。
尽管现在女性作者更多了，但我们描述了一种性别一致性模式，即女性资深作者可能比男性资深作者更多地与其他女性合作发表论文。我们的研究结果既突出了所取得的进展，也凸显了在学术外科领域实现性别平等方面的增长潜力。
