Impact of COVID-19 on longitudinal ophthalmology authorship gender trends release_sgfo7qsljfbpzf4p3xpm4rlobu

Abstract

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:sec> <jats:title>Background</jats:title> The COVID-19 pandemic increased the gender gap in academic publishing. This study assesses COVID-19's impact on ophthalmology gender authorship distribution and compares the gender authorship proportion of COVID-19 ophthalmology-related articles to previous ophthalmology articles. </jats:sec><jats:sec> <jats:title>Methods</jats:title> This cohort study includes authors listed in all publications related to ophthalmology in the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset and CDC COVID-19 research database. Articles from 65 ophthalmology journals from January to July 2020 were selected. All previous articles published in the same journals were extracted from PubMed. Gender-API determined authors' gender. </jats:sec><jats:sec> <jats:title>Results</jats:title> Out of 119,457 COVID-19-related articles, we analyzed 528 ophthalmology-related articles written by 2518 authors. Women did not exceed 40% in any authorship positions and were most likely to be middle, first, and finally, last authors. The proportions of women in all authorship positions from the 2020 COVID-19 group (29.6% first, 31.5% middle, 22.1% last) are significantly lower compared to the predicted 2020 data points (37.4% first, 37.0% middle, 27.6% last) (<jats:italic>p</jats:italic> &lt; .01). The gap between the proportion of female authors in COVID-19 ophthalmology research and the 2020 ophthalmology-predicted proportion (based on 2002–2019 data) is 6.1% for overall authors, 7.8% for first authors, and 5.5% for last and middle authors. The 2020 COVID-19 authorship group (1925 authors) was also compared to the 2019 group (33,049 authors) based on journal category (clinical/basic science research, general/subspecialty ophthalmology, journal impact factor). </jats:sec><jats:sec> <jats:title>Conclusions</jats:title> COVID-19 amplified the authorship gender gap in ophthalmology. When compared to previous years, there was a greater decrease in women's than men's academic productivity. </jats:sec>
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