ArticleJournal of racial and ethnic health disparities2023
The Under-representation and Stagnation of Female, Black, and Hispanic Authorship in the Journal of the American Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine.
Article in Journal of racial and ethnic health disparities, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed.
- Effect of Race and Ethnicity on Academic Achievements in Cancer Physicians and Scientists.Current oncology (Toronto, Ont.) · 2026Article
- Female first and senior authorship in high-impact critical care journals 2005-2024.Critical care (London, England) · 2025Article
- Sex-Associated Disparities in Industry Payments to US Authors in High-Impact Rheumatology Journals: Correlation with Author Impact.ACR open rheumatology · 2025Article
- Composing authorship teams for health equity: an introduction to the health equity research production model.International journal for equity in health · 2025Article
- Uptake and user characteristics of MyChart within a Canadian community hospital with a diverse patient population: A comparative study.PLOS digital health · 2025Article
- Factors related to the severity of research misconduct administrative actions: An analysis of office of research integrity case summaries from 1993 to 2023.Accountability in research · 2025Article
- A multi-perspective study assessing Black and African American participation barriers in prostate cancer clinical trials.Future oncology (London, England) · 2025Article
- Article
- Gender, Race, and Regional Disparities in Leading Authorships of Gastroenterology and Hepatology Randomized Controlled Trials.Journal of gastrointestinal cancer · 2024Article
- Incorporating Anti-racist Principles Throughout the Research Lifecycle: A Position Statement from the Society of General Internal Medicine (SGIM).Journal of general internal medicine · 2024Review
- American Black Authorship Has Decreased Across All Clinical Specialties Despite an Increasing Number of Black Physicians Between 1990 and 2020 in the USA.Journal of racial and ethnic health disparities · 2024Review
- Does diversity beget diversity? A scientometric analysis of over 150,000 studies and 49,000 authors published in high-impact medical journals between 2007 and 2022.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2024Article
- Escaping the midway trap: A mixed method study highlighting roadblocks and coping mechanisms of female researchers in Cameroon.PLOS global public health · 2024Article
- The room where it happens: addressing diversity, equity, and inclusion in National Clinical Trials Network clinical trial leadership.Journal of the National Cancer Institute · 2023Article
- Ethnicity and gender trends of UK authors inEClinicalMedicine · 2023Article
- Gender and racial differences in first and senior authorship of high-impact critical care randomized controlled trial studies from 2000 to 2022.Annals of intensive care · 2023Article
- New considerations of health disparities within allergy and immunology.The Journal of allergy and clinical immunology · 2023Review
- Underrepresentation of Hispanic women in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine.CA: a cancer journal for cliniciansArticle
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Publication in leading medical journals is critical to knowledge dissemination and academic advancement alike. Leveraging a novel dataset comprised of nearly all articles published in JAMA and NEJM from 1990 to 2020, along with established reference works for name identification, we explore changing authorship demographics in two of the world's leading medical journals. Our main outcomes are the annual proportion of male and female authors and the proportion of racial/ethnic identities in junior and senior authorship positions for articles published in JAMA and NEJM since 1990. We found that women remain under-represented in research authorship in both JAMA (at its peak, 38.1% of articles had a female first author in 2011) and NEJM (peaking at 28.2% in 2002). The rate of increase is so slow that it will take more than a century for both journals to reach gender parity. Black and Hispanic researchers have likewise remained under-represented as first and last authors in both journals, even using the best-case scenario. Their appearance as authors has remained stagnant for three decades, despite attention to structural inequalities in medical academia. Thus, analysis of authorship demographics in JAMA and NEJM over the past three decades reveals the existence of inequalities in high-impact medical journal authorship. Gender and racial/ethnic disparities in authorship may both reflect and further contribute to disparities in academic advancement.
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.