Gender disparity in authorship of guidelines and recommendations in rheumatology

Women are generally less represented as first author among original medical researches and clinical guidelines. Indeed, women are first authors in only 30% of clinical guidelines published in high impact medical journals.1 2 Nevertheless, the trend seems to be improving over the last 20 years but it has plateaued in recent years.3 It is not known if a comparable under-representation occurs also in rheumatological guidelines. We have conducted a bibliometric analysis to evaluate the representation of female authors in rheumatological guidelines and recommendations over a period of time between 2004 and 2019. We searched PubMed for guidelines and recommendations published in English in the rheumatological field from 1 January 2004 to 1 January 2019. We included …