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Research Club 3/20/18

Gender Differences in Peer Reviewers Between Three Prestigious Medical Journals Parisa Mortaji, Clare Batty, Eileen Barrett, MD Department of Internal Medicine, UNM School of Medicine. Research Club 3/20/18. Background.

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Research Club 3/20/18

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  1. Gender Differences in Peer Reviewers Between Three Prestigious Medical Journals Parisa Mortaji, Clare Batty, Eileen Barrett, MD Department of Internal Medicine, UNM School of Medicine Research Club 3/20/18

  2. Background • Declining gender inequalities has led to an increased number of women physicians • Despite this, women are not equally represented in academic medicine across many domains • Bias has been shown to be a contributing factor. • Peer review has recently been shown to be vulnerable to gender bias.

  3. Prior studies • Journals of American Geophysical Union (AGU) between 2012-2015 • Frontiers journals between 2007-2015 • both concluded that women are underrepresented as peer reviewers • Two main reasons were proposed as to why this is the case: • editors appoint fewer females to review • Bigger contributing factor • women decline more invitations to review than do men • women decline invitations at a slightly higher rate than men, with the main reason being workload • This was refuted by another study • Conclusion: editors should send out more invitations to potential female peer reviewers

  4. Study Questions • Is there a gender difference between peer reviewers for three prestigious medical journals? • Does the proportion of female peer reviewers represent their proportion in the physician population? • Hypothesis: the proportion of female peer reviewers will not represent their proportion in the physician population.

  5. Team and Roles • Parisa Mortaji • Clare Batty • Eileen Barrett, MD

  6. Planning/Study Phase • A compendium of 2001, 2006, 2011 and 2016 peer reviewers retrieved from the web for NEJM, JAMA, Annals of Internal Medicine • Gender of peer reviewers determined by inference, and if unknown, by an internet search. Unidentifiable reviewers excluded from the analysis. • The number of female peer reviewers was compared with the number of male reviewers for each journal. • Analyses controlled for the number of female physicians in the population. • Binomial analyses were performed.

  7. Study Limitations • Representation of one specialty society • Utilization of only three medical journals • Inability to account for other professions that contribute as peer reviewers

  8. UNM QI and Patient Safety Goal 2016 Strategic Goals • Goal 12 – Improve staff and faculty engagement and satisfaction

  9. Next Steps • Inviting more female peer reviewers to provide recommendations on manuscripts • Encouraging women to accept invitations to serve as peer reviewers

  10. What I would do with my project if I had unlimited resources • Study gender differences in peer reviewers in other specialties • Remove peer reviewers that are not MDs to provide for more accurate data

  11. Questions?

  12. References • Ali PA, & Watson R. Peer review and the publication process. Nursing Open. 2016; 3(4): 193–202. http://doi.org/10.1002/nop2.51 • Eloy JA, Svider PF, Cherla DV, et al. Gender Disparities in Research Productivity Among 9952 Academic Physicians. The Laryngoscope. 2013; 123: 1865-1875.  • Fridner A, Norell A, Akesson G, et al. Possible reasons why female physicians publish fewer scientific articles than male physicians - a cross-sectional study. BMC Med Educ. 2015; 15, 67. • Helmer M, Schottdorf M, Neef, A, & Battaglia, D. Gender bias in scholarly peer review. eLife. 2017; 6, e21718. http://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.21718 • Lerback, J, Hanson, B. Journals invite too few women to referee. Nature. 2017 Jan; 541(7638): 455-457. • Pasko T, Smart DR. Physician Characteristics and Distribution in the US 2003-2004. 2003-2004 edition. Division of Survey and Data Resources, American Medical Association, 2003. • Smart DR, Sellers J. Physician Characteristics and Distribution in the US 2008. 2008 edition. Division of Survey and Data Resources, American Medical Association, 2008. • Smart DR. Physician Characteristics and Distribution in the US 2013. 2013 edition. Division of Survey and Data Resources, American Medical Association, 2013. • Young A, Chaudhry HJ, Pei X, et al. A Census of Actively Licensed Physicians in the United States, 2016. Journal of Medical Regulation. 2017; 103(2): 7.

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