Hispanic Authorship in Orthopaedics: A Bibliometric Analysis of Orthopaedic Literature in the United States

Orthopaedic surgery has historically been among the least ethnically diverse fields in medicine. The latest American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS) Census report in 2018 indicates that only 2.2% of all practicing orthopaedic surgeons in the United States identify as Hispanic/Latino. The effect of Hispanic representation on research and orthopaedic literature authorship is unknown. The purpose of this study was to establish Hispanic authorship trends in orthopaedic research by analyzing eight high-impact orthopaedic journals in a recent 10-year period.

A bibliometric analysis was performed extracting original research articles with at least one US- based author from nine high-impact orthopaedic surgery journals from January 2012 to December 2021. Hispanic authorship was determined by matching author surnames to a modified Word and Perkins (1996) list of the most frequently occurring heavily Hispanic surnames. Data analysis was performed using Python and the statsmodels (v0.14.1) and SciPy (v.1.11.4) libraries. We determined the annual proportion of Hispanic authorship for first authors, senior authors, and any author, for all included articles and stratified by journal. Linear regression best-fit lines were employed to assess trends over time.

A total of 16,324 original research articles and 87,395 authors were included in the final analysis. Trend analysis of all included articles during the study period demonstrated increases in Hispanic first authorship (1.9% to 3.4%, P = 0.004), Hispanic senior authorship (2.0% to 3.0%, P = 0.087), and Hispanic total authorship (2.3% to 3.5%, P = 0.003). When stratified by journal, positive trends were seen in eight of nine journals for first and total authors. Six of nine journals demonstrated positive trends for senior authors.

Although Hispanic orthopaedic authorship increased modestly over the study period, it appears to remain disproportionately low compared with the overall Hispanic population in the United States. These findings highlight the importance of future efforts needed to better understand possible causes of this underrepresentation in orthopaedic literature.