Study on the Analysis of Gender Trends Among the First Authors of Publications on Budd-Chiari Syndrome

Budd-Chiari syndrome (BCS) is primarily a disease of hepatic vein blockage, which involves a backflow of blood to the liver. Although there have been many causes linked to this disease, most commonly, it occurs due to hypercoagulable states and blood disorders. In recent times, there has been a fast spread of knowledge regarding early diagnosis and various treatment modalities, which has enabled the prevention of mortality in most cases. This has primarily spread through research articles published in various journals. Thus, the article aims to compare the gender trend ratios to identify the associated discrepancies in terms of male and female author contributions who have been the primary authors for articles pertaining to this disease.  Methodology: A PubMed database between the years 2013 and 2022 was used for the bibliometric analysis. The gender of the primary author was analyzed by NamSor, an application programming interface (API). The statistical analysis was conducted using R software, the ARIMA model, and graphs were prepared using Datawrapper.

Out of 667 articles extracted, the analysis showed that there were 455 (68.2%) first male authors and 212 (31.8%) first female authors. We also formulated various other results, which depicted a higher female-to-male author ratio including various journals and different countries. Although there has been an increasing trend of male authors as compared to female authors, this study found that male authorship for research on this disease is still higher.

This study depicts that there is a necessity to draw attention to the inequitable systems favoring men over women for publications. The predictive analysis conducted also helps to foresee the trend in the next few years and explains the necessity of addressing the disparities among both genders in healthcare systems.