Women are underrepresented among authors of retracted medical publications, according to an analysis published on 19 November in PLOS One.
Researchers led by Dr. Paul Sebo, from Geneva University Hospital in Switzerland, reported that this situation especially applies to cases of multiple retractions.
The study included 878 retracted publications from 131 high-impact medical journals across nine clinical disciplines, radiology being one of them. Among the authors of these publications, the researchers used an AI tool to infer gender. The study included authors to whom gender could be assigned with at least 60% confidence.
The study included 3,743 authors, with 23.1% being women. Women accounted for just 16.5% of first authors and 12.7% of last authors. These are below the 41.3% to 45.4% and 26.1% to 33.4% benchmarks for female first and last authors of biomedical publications between 2008 and 2017.
In misconduct-related retractions, women first authors accounted for only 11.5% of all cases, Sebo and colleagues pointed out.
Interestingly, however, female radiologists were overrepresented as first authors of retracted publications, the team found. The same went for dermatology for first authors and pediatrics as last authors. The team noted that these were based on small numbers.
