Impact of the Pandemic on Gender Differences in Scientific Publication Authorship Among Turkish Adult Cardiologists

Abstract

Objective: Despite efforts spent on promotion of gender equity in the academia, the gender gap is feared to have widened after the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic. Herein, we aimed to compare the distribution of female authorship by Turkish adult cardiologists in journals indexed at PubMed before and after the pandemic.

Methods: In this cross-sectional study, an advanced search on PubMed (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/) was carried out based on the following criteria: "entrez date" and keywords "Turkey" and "cardiology" to identify papers that entered the online database in April-September 2019 and April-September 2020. After the study sample was determined, type of the article and details of the author list were recorded.

Results: Of 1318 articles screened, 708 met the inclusion criteria. Overall, 85 (12.0%) of first authors and 67 (10.0%) of senior authors were female. Females were less likely to first author original articles, editorials, case reports/series and papers with international participation (9.5%, P = .012; 33.3%, P = .045; 18.3%, P = .033; 4.8%, P = .032, respectively). A higher proportion of females were in first and corresponding author positions in original articles (73.2%, P = .032; 76.5%, P = .019, respectively), but not in other article types (all P > .05), after emergence of the pandemic.

Conclusion: These suggest that significant gender differences exist with regard to authorships of scientific publications that were submitted by Turkish adult cardiologists. Future studies may aim to evaluate the trends across a wider time span and based on a more extensive scientific output follow-up.