Women's representation as authors of retracted papers in the biomedical sciences.
File(s)journal.pone.0284403.pdf (1.06 MB)
Published version
Author(s)
Pinho-Gomes, Ana-Catarina
Hockham, Carinna
Woodward, Mark
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Women are under-represented among authors of scientific papers. Although the number of retractions has been rising over the past few decades, gender differences among authors of retracted papers remain poorly understood. Therefore, this study investigated gender differences in authorship of retracted papers in biomedical sciences available on RetractionWatch. Among 35,635 biomedical articles retracted between 1970 and 2022, including 20,849 first authors and 20,413 last authors, women accounted for 27.4% [26.8 to 28.0] of first authors and 23.5% [22.9 to 24.1] of last authors. The lowest representation of women was found for fraud (18.9% [17.1 to 20.9] for first authors and 13.5% [11.9 to 15.1] for last authors) and misconduct (19.5% [17.3 to 21.9] for first authors and 17.8% [15.7 to 20.3] for last authors). Women's representation was the highest for issues related to editors and publishers (35.1% [32.2 to 38.0] for first authors and 24.8% [22.9 to 26.8] for last authors) and errors (29.5% [28.0 to 31.0] for first authors and 22.1% [20.7 to 23.4] for last authors). Most retractions (60.9%) had men as first and last authors. Gender equality could improve research integrity in biomedical sciences.
Date Issued
2023
Date Acceptance
2023-03-20
Citation
PLoS One, 2023, 18 (5), pp.1-8
ISSN
1932-6203
Publisher
Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Start Page
1
End Page
8
Journal / Book Title
PLoS One
Volume
18
Issue
5
Copyright Statement
Copyright: © 2023 Pinho-Gomes et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Identifier
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37134049
PII: PONE-D-22-33690
Subjects
Authorship
Biomedical Research
Female
Fraud
Humans
Scientific Misconduct
Publication Status
Published
Coverage Spatial
United States
Date Publish Online
2023-05-03