"First authorship" refers to the position of an author who has made the most significant contribution to a research paper or scientific article. They are usually listed first in the list of authors, indicating that they played a major role in the study and take primary responsibility for its content.
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«The underlying causes need to be investigated to help to identify practices and strategies to increase women's influence on and contributions to the evidence that will determine future healthcare policies and standards of clinical practice,» Giovanni Filardo, PhD, MPH, and his co-authors wrote in the paper, titled «Trends and comparison of
female first authorship in high impact medical journals: observational study (1994 - 2014).»
I now draw on this mindset in running my lab, whether I need to assign people to empty the garbage or decide who should get
first authorship on a paper.
[P] ostdocs try to eschew collaborations with peers in their groups, fearing authorship disputes and loss
of first authorship.
Female
first authorship in high - impact medical journals increased «significantly» over the 2 decades preceding 2014, according to a paper published earlier this month in The BMJ.
Another disadvantage is being author number 53 in publications from the project,
since first authorship is used to evaluate job and tenure candidates.
Determining the first author's gender for 3758 articles published in six top medical journals between 1994 and 2014, Filardo and co-authors found that «female
first authorship increased significantly from 27 % in 1994 to 37 % in 2014,» with some variation between the individual journals.
The NEJM seemed to follow a different pattern, with female
first authorship decreasing; it also seemed to decline in recent years in The BMJ but started substantially higher (approximately 40 %), and The BMJ had the highest total proportion of female first authors.
The role - playing situations address real - life issues such as disputes
over first authorship or students with low motivation.
Also investigate the community norms for sharing authorship with students; in some fields,
first authorship carries the highest prestige, in others, it is the last - author position.
Moreover, female
first authorship declined from 2009 through 2014 compared with 1994 through 1998 in two of the journals with the highest impact factor in the world: The BMJ and the New England Journal of Medicine.»
2010 * 247 * 012009 * Joint first authorship
In a linked paper (doi: 10.1136 / bmj.i847), 3 Filardo and colleagues examined the prevalence of female
first authorship among original research articles published over the past two decades (1994 - 2014) in six high impact general medical journals.
To
ensure first authorship, avoid authorship conflicts and keep the number of co-authors low, they articulate a preference for working mainly individually.
The interviews showed that, if possible, postdocs try to eschew collaborations with peers in their groups, fearing authorship disputes and loss
of first authorship.
The plateauing or drop in
female first authorship since 2009 may, they suggest, arise from «the subtle and unconscious gender bias that persists in the scientific community.»
Rather the opposite was true, the altered epigenetic regulation of the gene was responsible for the development of the fatty liver,» added Sophie Saussenthaler, who shared
the first authorship with Baumeier.
He has apologised to the authors for his mistake and the name of Dr Lee has been removed from
the first authorship.
The authors also note the «intriguing» fact that the four journals that had «female editors - in - chief for all or most of the 2009 - 14 period had the highest unadjusted rates of female
first authorship» — 45 %, 44 %, 42 %, and 36 % — while the remaining two journals «had considerably lower rates» of 20 % and 35 %.
«Women made meaningful gains in
first authorship — from 27 % in 1994 to 37 % in 2014,» Dr. Filardo said.
What was obviously the cause of some annoyance and some criticism is that he didn't get
the first authorship on the Dolly paper.
Figure 2 ⇓ shows the adjusted odds ratios for female
first authorship, comparing each journal with the mean across the six journals: first authors were significantly less likely to be female in the NEJM compared with the overall mean (adjusted odds ratio 0.68, 95 % confidence interval 0.53 to 0.89), whereas first authors in The BMJ were significantly more likely to be female (1.30, 1.01 to 1.66).