Analysis of pharmacist authorship in leading critical care journals

To evaluate first and last (senior) pharmacist authorship in high-impact critical care journals with a focus on the representation and evolution of pharmacist contributions over time.

This literature-focused review analyzed pharmacist authorship across 6 high-impact critical care journals: Intensive Care Medicine, American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, Critical Care, Critical Care Medicine, CHEST, and Annals of Intensive Care. First and last authors were assessed for pharmacy-related degrees using article data and supplemental searches, with articles with unconfirmed pharmacist authorship excluded. Included study designs encompassed a variety of research and review article types, including, but not limited to, retrospective cohort studies, case-control studies, systematic reviews, case reports, surveys, narrative reviews, literature reviews, animal studies, clinical studies, evaluation studies, methods studies, and observational studies; nonresearch publications were excluded.

A total of 83,608 articles published between 1973 and 2024 were identified, of which 24,257 met the inclusion criteria. Pharmacist authorship was identified in 272 articles (1.12%), with an overall upward trend observed over time. The highest annual representation occurred in 1988 (12 articles; 3.67%). CHEST, evaluated from 2020 to 2024, had the highest proportion of articles with pharmacist authorship (11 articles; 4.47%). Pharmacist-authored studies were commonly classified as "other study designs," including narrative reviews, literature reviews, experimental studies, and survey studies.

Pharmacist authorship generally increased over the study period, although interpretation of temporal trends is limited by differences in journal inclusion across years; however, pharmacists remain underrepresented as first and last authors.