A recent report compiled by Ryan Beardsley (Senior Consultant) and Gali Halevi (Director) at the Insitute for Scientific Information, explored the diversity of authorship of STEM publications and found that the ethnicity of authors in the United States has not changed significantly during the past 10 years.
It is widely acknowledged that diversity encourages innovation, improved decision-making, and improved outcomes. Reasons for the continued lack of diversity within higher education mentioned in the report included “insufficient time, funding and knowledge of best practices” (Beardsley & Halevi, 2022).
The report aimed to accomplish the following:
- Identify the ethnicity of authors of research articles published in STEM disciplines
- Identify the gaps in ethnic diversity within the published research
- Discover participation and inclusivity trends of authorship
- Discover and identify changes in levels of authorship among underrepresented minorities
The report tracked the ethnicity of authorship using bibliographic authors’ last names as retrieved from articles indexed in Web of Science. Articles selected for inclusion were limited to publications from U.S. institutions authored by U.S. authors. Articles published by organizations outside of the U.S. and/or with international authors were excluded from this analysis. The authors’ last names were extracted from the bibliographic data and compared to U.S. Census data.
Since publishers don’t typically gather ethnicity or demographic data about authors, a system needed to be developed to estimate author ethnicity. Author names were not assigned to a single ethnic group. Author names were “assigned the fractional probability of the respective ethnicities” based upon the frequency of the last name being self-identified within a specific ethnic group in U.S. Census data (Beardsley & Halevi, 2022). For example, if the last name appears in Census data to have self-identified as “90% White Only, 5% Black Only, 2% Asian/Pacific Islands Only, and 3% Two or More Races,” the last name was assigned the same percentage in those same ethnicity categories (Beardsley & Halevi, 2022).
The report selected four areas of research within STEM on which to focus: biochemistry, mathematics, medical research, and computer science. The table below displays the authorship findings for biochemistry and medical research.
| 2020 Authorship Data | ||
| Biochemistry | Medical Research | |
| White Only | 41.90% | 42.00% |
| Asian/Pacific Island Only | 24.00% | 23.00% |
| Black Only | 5.50% | 5.50% |
| Hispanic | 5.20% | 5.10% |
| Native American /Alaska Native | 0.33% | 0.32% |
In the discipline of biochemistry, Asian/Pacific Island Only authorship was higher than the representation in the general population. At the same time, Hispanic authorship was significantly underrepresented compared to the representation in the general population.
In medical research, Asian/Pacific Island Only authorship (23% in 2020) was significantly higher than the representation within the general population, while all other ethnicities were underrepresented compared to the general population. White Only authorship continues to make up the largest percentage of published research but has decreased from 45% in 2010 to 42% in 2020.
The conclusions of this report found that there has been very little change in the overall rate of authorship within specific ethnic groups over the past ten years, despite an “increasing awareness of the importance of improved diversity” (Beardsley & Halevi, 2022). The authors recommend increased mentorship, development, and education efforts in this area. They also stated a need for increased collaboration between universities, funding agencies, and publishers. For those interested in learning more, download the full report.
Are you interested in learning more about diversity in STEM? Here are some articles for further reading on this topic:
- Asserson, D. B., & Janis, J. E. (2022). Does Diversity of Authorship Matter? An Analysis of Plastic Surgery’s Top 100 Articles. Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery Global Open, 10(3). https://proxygw.wrlc.org/login?url=https://oce.ovid.com/article/01720096-202203000-00051/HTML
- Greider, C. W., Sheltzer, J. M., Cantalupo, N. C., Copeland, W. B., Dasgupta, N., Hopkins, N., ... & Wong, J. Y. (2019). Increasing gender diversity in the STEM research workforce. Science, 366(6466), 692-695. https://proxygw.wrlc.org/login?url=https://www.science.org/doi/epdf/10.1126/science.aaz0649
- Miriti, M. N. (2020). The elephant in the room: Race and STEM diversity. BioScience, 70(3), 237-242. http://proxygw.wrlc.org/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,uid&db=ulh&AN=142202463&site=ehost-live&scope=site&custid=s8987071
- Pendlebury, E. C., & Cushman, M. (2020). Diversity, equity, and inclusion in publishing: Calling thrombosis and hemostasis journals to action in support of women. Research and Practice in Thrombosis and Haemostasis, 4(7), 1076. https://proxygw.wrlc.org/login?url=https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/rth2.12434
- Usha, L. M. (2022). Even as medicine becomes more diverse, main authors in elite journals remain mostly white and male. Boston Globe Life Sciences Media LLC: STAT. http://proxygw.wrlc.org/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/other-sources/even-as-medicine-becomes-more-diverse-main/docview/2645427979/se-2?accountid=11243
References:
Beardsley, R., & Halevi, G. (2022). Insights: Ethnic diversity in STEM in the United States.
