Gender Difference in Cardiology Publications in South Asia

Introduction Women are still underrepresented in prestigious author positions in medical publications. This study was done to evaluate gender differences in the first authorship of cardiology-related publications in South Asia over the past two decades. Methodology This is a cross-sectional study, and we strictly followed the Strengthening the Reporting of Observational Studies in Epidemiology guidelines. An electronic search was conducted in PubMed on January 15, 2023, using specific MeSH terms and keywords for articles published from 2002 to 2022. The easyPubMed package of R statistical software was used to retrieve articles. The gender of the author was determined by first name. We used the www.genderapi.io and also did a manual search of the public profile of authors to determine the gender. Mann–Kendall’s trend test was used to know the trend for gender disparities. Results A total of 5,105 publications are included in the final analysis. The study found that a total of 1,470 (28.8%) studies have female first authors, and 3,632 (71.1%) have male first authors. According to the countries, 29 (31.5%) in Afghanistan, 104 (24.1%) in Bangladesh, 2 (33.3%) in Bhutan, 879 (27.8%) in India, 1 (25%) in Maldives, 84 (28.9%) in Nepal, 322 (33.4%) in Pakistan, and 49 (33.1%) in Sri Lanka publications have female first authors. It was found that from 2002 to 2022, there has been a significant increase in female first authors. Only 16.3% of publications had a female first author in 2002, which increased to 32.9% in 2022. Conclusion Gender disparities in the authorship of cardiology research publications persist despite the declining trend.