Study data point to gender disparities in oncology research citations

A recent study in JCO Oncology Practice found that in the oncology medical literature, women had a 15% lower Altmetric Attention Score (AAS) as first authors, and an 8% lower (AAS) in the last author position.¹ In a recent interview with Urology Times®, study author Rebecca A. Campbell, MD, described the background for the study.

“We focused on oncology specifically, and looked at various oncology subspecialties [as well as] medical oncology as a whole. We looked at 2 things mainly. One [was] citation rates, so rates of over- or under-citation. [We also looked at] a metric called Altmetric Attention Score, which takes into account media mentions, Twitter or X mentions, patent mentions—a wide variety of ways that research can be cited. We specifically were looking at combinations of first and last authors. We had author of papers that were male first authors/male last authors, women first authors/women last authors, as well as other combinations like male-women and women-male. We looked at over 600,000 citations, so quite a large amount of studies included,” said Campbell, a urologic oncology fellow at Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio.

In addition to the gender disparities seen in AAS as first and last authors, Campbell and her coauthors looked at mean citation percentage difference, “which would be that if men were over-cited, they would be positive, and if women were under-cited, they would be negative,” Campbell said. Men-men combinations, she said, were over-cited by 16% and women-women combinations were under-cited by 7.7%.

“Another main finding is that there was a lot of variation across all of the oncology subspecialties. So overall, we did find that there were significant gender disparities with both citation rates and with all metric attention score,” Campbell said.

REFERENCE

1. Campbell RA, Helstrom E, Chew L, et al. Gender disparities in citations and Altmetric Attention Score in oncology. JCO Oncol Pract. 2025 Apr 10:OP2400767. doi: 10.1200/OP-24-00767