ArticlePloS one2025
Evaluating Covid-19 publications for sex and gender-specific health content: A bibliometric analysis.
Article in PloS one, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 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
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- Incorporation of the National Institute of Health (NIH) sex as a biological variable policy by R01 grant awardees.Communications medicine · 2026Article
- Mechanisms of sex differences in acute and long COVID sequelae in mice.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
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
backgroundSex and gender are key variables which inform human health and disease. It remained unclear how sex and gender were considered, evaluated, reported, or analyzed within Covid-19 research. This article evaluates the proportion of Covid-19-related articles which highlighted sex- or gender-specific health content and examines associations with author gender. MATERIALS AND
methodsArticle records for 134,008 publications indexed in the LitCovid database were extracted on June 1st, 2021. Metadata such as publication year, author names, and country of institutional affiliation were obtained from Elsevier's SCOPUS database by matching PubMed Identifiers (PMIDs). Only articles with matching SCOPUS records were included in the study, resulting in a final sample of 94,488 articles. First and last author gender was assigned to a subset of 71,597 articles. Article title, abstracts, and keywords were screened for sex or gender-specific health content using a text-based search strategy. Descriptive statistics and regression analyses were used to study associations between author gender and the presence or absence of sex or gender-related health content.
resultsOnly 4% of Covid-19-related articles highlighted sex or gender-related health content. Papers with women first authors were more likely to highlight sex or gender-related health content compared to papers with men as first authors (4.15% n = 1,339 vs 3.68%, n = 1,997) [X2 (1, n = 86,468) = 12,01, p = 0.0005]. Papers with women first and last authors had an increased probability of addressing sex or gender-related health with an odds ratio of 1.16 (95% CI 1.04 - 1.29). While there was no association between author gender and journal impact, articles which highlighted sex or gender-related health content were published in journals with higher CiteScores [Mdn = 5.0, Q1-Q3 (3.5-8.2) vs. Mdn = 4.7, Q1-Q3 (2.8-8.0)].
conclusionsThe paucity of publications to highlight sex or gender in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic is alarming. Research that focuses on the influence of sex and or gender is essential for advancing the scientific understanding of disease processes.
Indexed as
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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.