Does Diversity of Authorship Matter? An Analysis of Plastic Surgery's Top 100 Articles

Diversity, whether related to age, gender, ethnicity, race, geography, or experience, is increasing in all realms of medicine, including plastic surgery. Research has also become more diverse in those who conduct studies and those who participate in them. Fittingly, surgeons who produce prominent research are likely to come from diverse backgrounds. This study was designed to analyze the diversity of authorship in peer-reviewed plastic surgery journals.

Using the Web of Science database, the authors identified the 100 most-cited articles from the highest-impact plastic surgery journals from January 2010 to December 2020. Author, institutional, and topic information was collected.

There was an average of 5.6 authors on the top 100 articles, of which 96.1% involved collaboration and 75.7% mixed-gender authorship. The average number of affiliations was 2.1, of which 51.5% involved cross-institutional collaboration, 12.6% came from both domestic and international institutions, 30.1% involved multiple specialties, and 10.7% came from both academia and private practice. Having both domestic and international authors was found to be most predictive of more citations on multiple regression, with year as a nonconfounding variable (P < 0.05), followed by mixed-gender authorship (P < 0.10).

Impactful publications in plastic surgery come from diverse sets of authors and institutions.