Authorship Trends and Gender Concordance in Surgical Research

Building inclusive and diverse research teams is increasingly important in the era of team science. We explored authorship trends over the last 3 decades to assess progress in academic surgery.

Two general surgical journals (Journal of the American Medical Association Surgery and Annals of Surgery) and two nonsurgical multidisciplinary scientific journals (Nature and Science) were queried at 10-y intervals from 1991 to 2021. Data collected included total number of authors per article, instances of shared authorship, authors' gender, geographic location of the authors, and number of references per article.

A total of 741 journal articles were examined. Over the last 3 decades, the number of women authors has nearly doubled in surgical journals and tripled in nonsurgical journals. The proportion of women authors per article, women first authors, and women senior authors all increased significantly, though women remain only 26% of all authors. Intriguingly, articles with a woman senior author had a significantly greater proportion of women coauthors than articles with a man senior author (55 ± 4% versus 12 ± 6%; P < 0.05) across all 3 decades in all journals. In 2021, only 10% of articles with a man senior author had an equal or greater proportion of women coauthors.

Though there are now more women authors, we describe a pattern of gender concordance where women senior authors may publish with other women more than men senior authors. Our findings highlight both the progress made and potential for growth in achieving gender equity in academic surgery.