New analysis of cited and general dental publications from 1996-2015 have noted significant gender disparities. Two groups of data were retrieved from the Scopus database for analysis. Both groups were of 1,000 articles, the first group was a random sampling and the second was a collection of the top-cited articles.
The gender of the first and last author of each article was manually identified. In instances were this was not possible, an online software program was used. Researchers then identified the proportion of female first and last authors in both samples, stratifying by dental discipline and geographic region. Trends were ascertained by frequency metrics across years.
The media outlet Eureka Alert! summarised the key statistics:
- “Women led 28.4 per cent and 20.3 per cent of articles in the random and top cited samples, respectively.”
- “The last authorship group mirrored this pattern with 22.1 per cent of the random samples and 16.1 per cent of top cited publications.”
- However, a marked increase in the proportion of articles led by women over time was observed. “The increase was larger in the top cited sample (from 15.0 per cent in 1996-2000 to 25.1 per cent in 2015) than in the random sample (from 26.3 per cent in 1996-2000 to 33.2 per cent in 2011).”
The study concluded that there are clear disparities in dental research publications in both general and top cited manuscripts. These disparities span across dental disciplines, countries, first and last authorship and time.