Women are less often listed as authors on retracted scientific papers, especially when an author has more than one retraction, according to a new study in PLOS One.
Led by Paul Sebo from the University of Geneva, the study reviewed 878 retracted papers from 131 top medical journals across nine fields. Using an AI tool to estimate gender, he analyzed 3,743 authors whose gender could be identified with at least 60 percent accuracy.
The results showed that only about 23 percent of the authors were women. It also found that women made up just 16.5 percent of first authors and 12.7 percent of last authors, which is far below typical rates of female authorship in biomedical research during 2008-2017.
The gap was even bigger in retractions linked to misconduct. In these cases, only 11.5 percent of first authors were women, and women were also much less likely to have more than one retracted paper.
Women were underrepresented in nearly all the medical specialties studied. The only exceptions were dermatology and radiology, where women were slightly more represented as first authors, and pediatrics as last authors, but these findings were based on small sample sizes.
Notably, the study has some limitations as it primarily relies on an algorithm to guess gender and focuses only on high-impact journals.
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