Postdoctoral Research Fellow Miami Cancer Institute, Baptist Health South Florida Miami, Florida, United States
Introduction: Cochrane, a non-profit collaboration, publishes high‐quality systematic reviews and meta‐analyses. Cochrane reviews are widely considered to be amongst the highest sources of evidence, with their conclusions frequently impacting policy and practice globally. Little is known regarding the country-wise and gender-wise author representation in spine-related Cochrane reviews, which this work sought to describe.
Methods: We searched Cochrane Library for all reviews under the filter “Group: Back and Spine” on November 30, 2022. We extracted authorship and affiliation data from both active reviews and those withdrawn for updates. We treated a collaborative group belonging to one country as a single author. We classified authors' national affiliations into either high- and upper-middle-income countries (HICs) or LMICs based on the World Bank classification. Given the higher accuracy of manual searches for gender ascertainment over algorithmic estimation, we utilized former to achieve ~95% ascertainment rate. We endeavored to capture at least one webpage that demonstrated their gender, e.g., institutional profile, Google Scholar, etc.
Results: A total of 90 spine-related reviews, co-authored by 571 authors, were included. Only 2.45% (14/571) co-authors were from LMICs. Top-five countries with the highest representation of co-authors were the Netherlands (24.7%), Canada (22.1%), Australia (11.2%), the US (8.1%), and the UK (7.5%). Amongst the first and corresponding authors, merely 1.1% (1/90) in both cases came from LMICs, here being Iran.
Gender could be ascertained for 95% (540/569) of co-authors, excluding collaborative authors since these were treated as single author for analysis. Overall, as a proportion of those with gender ascertained, women were 32.6% (176/540) of co-authors, 48.2% (40/83) of first authors, and 41.7% (35/83) of corresponding authors. 35% (14/40) of female first authors and 37% (13/25) of female corresponding authors were from Canada.
Conclusion : This is the first analysis of authorship of spine-related Cochrane reviews, with its strength being gender determination accuracy, compared to similar works in other journals utilizing name-based algorithmic prediction. Women were better represented here compared to spine-specific journals and their general representation in spine care. With < 3% of authors being from LMICs, equitable authorship representation may help expand the global utilization and relevance of recommendations provided by high-impact spine literature.
