Sex Differences Remain Under-Reported in Cardiovascular Publications

Area of Science:

• Cardiology
• Bibliometrics
• Sex Differences Research

Background:

• Growing interest in studying sex differences in cardiovascular (CV) disease over the past two decades.
• Calls to action from organizations like the National Institutes of Health emphasize the need for sex-specific CV research.
• Uncertainty regarding whether this emphasis has led to increased publications on sex differences in CV disease.

Purpose of the Study:

• To conduct a bibliometric analysis of cardiovascular publications from 2006 to 2015.
• To determine the trend in the proportion of sex-specific publications over a 10-year period.
• To analyze changes in sex-specific publications across different categories (e.g., reviews, clinical trials, general articles).

Main Methods:

• Bibliometric analysis of cardiovascular publications from 2006-2015 using PubMed database.
• Searched for articles with "cardiac," "cardiovascular," or "cardiology" in the first author affiliation.
• Identified sex-specific publications by searching for terms like "woman," "female," "gender," or "sex" in the title and/or abstract.

Main Results:

• A total of 189,543 cardiovascular publications were identified.
• 12.99% (24,615) of these publications were sex-specific.
• No significant change in the overall proportion of sex-specific publications was observed over the 10-year period, with an exception for general articles.

Conclusions:

• Only a small fraction of cardiovascular publications addressed sex differences in the analyzed decade.
• There was no significant proportional increase in sex-specific cardiovascular research over the 10-year period.
• An increase in sex-specific publications was noted only within the general articles category.