A bibliometric analysis of gender in microbiology collaborations

Women are underrepresented in senior academic positions within microbiology globally. Studies show that gender bias affects the progression of women in academia, but there is evidence that improving conscious awareness of bias can improve equity in this regard. Here we carry out a bibliometric analysis of review articles within the microbiology field to investigate the statistical associations with author gender. We analyse the publication data from 1857 review articles published between 2010 and 2022 in three leading microbiology review journals: Nature Reviews Microbiology, Trends in Microbiology, and Annual Review of Microbiology. We find a significant association between the gender of the lead author and the gender of co-authors in multi-author publications. Review articles with men lead authors have a significantly reduced proportion of women co-authors compared to reviews with women lead authors. Given the existing differences in the proportions of men and women in lead author positions, this association may have important consequences for the relative visibility of women in microbiology, along with potential negative impacts on scientific output relating to reduced collaboration diversity. We further probe associations between gender and citation metrics, acknowledgement of contributions, and publishing during the Covid-19 pandemic within microbiology reviews.