![]() The last listed author is usually the senior author, often (but not always) a senior researcher who has typically has less of a role but may have overseen the project or maybe a department chair or mentor of the lead author. Typically, the first listed author of a medical study is the lead author, who usually does most of the research. The authors calculated the proportions of males/females and different races/ethnicities who appeared anywhere in the author list and junior and senior authorship positions. (Note the JAMA articles are only in JAMA, not in the other JAMA publications such as JAMA Network Open or JAMA Pediatrics.) They included articles with a digital object identifier (DOI), meaning their data set would consist of actual studies as well as editorials, commentaries and essays. The study authors, led by Moustafa Abdalla, DPhil, currently at Oxford’s Radcliffe Department of Medicine, analyzed the gender and racial/ethnic demographics of authors of every article published in NEJM and JAMA from 1990 through May 2020. And when presented with two equally impactful studies to cover, we can opt for the one with more diversity among the authors. We can also pay attention to the authors of the studies we review.We can and should also make a point to seek out women, gender minorities and Black and Hispanic researchers and clinicians. As journalists, we can’t change who study authors are but we can control who we contact for outside comments.It will take centuries for the proportion of Black and Hispanic lead and senior authors to match the population of Blacks and Hispanics in the U.S.Women and racial/ethnic minorities aren’t just heavily underrepresented - their representation as lead or senior authors isn’t increasing in any meaningful way in either NEJM or JAMA.Before I go into more details about the study, here are a few key takeaways: The findings are discouraging in light of all the lip service in the past decade about needing to improve parity and diversity in medical research. That’s exactly what a new study published in the Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities has analyzed. So, the combined authorship of articles in these two journals is a reasonable yardstick for assessing the diversity of researchers represented in the most influential medical studies. NEJM has the highest impact factor (number used to measure the importance of a journal) of any medical journal (IF 74.7). JAMA is more widely circulated than any other medical journal in the world. Two of the most influential and esteemed medical journals - if not the top two - are the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) and the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). ![]()
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