Significant disparities in Altmetric Attention Scores and citation rates between women and men first/last authors in oncology were reported in a recent study in JCO Oncology Practice.1 In a recent interview with Urology Times®, study author Rebecca A. Campbell, MD, was asked about potential mechanisms driving these gaps.
“I think 1 thing that people might hypothesize is that the lower citation rates of women-women papers may be due to less female physicians in these fields, thus less papers published by women-women combinations. But actually, that can't explain things because the proportion of women in each field would not [affect] the expected or observed citation rates that we calculated with our gender-blind expectations model, so that is independent of the total women-women or male-male authorship or the other categories we looked at, so that cannot be explained by that,” said Campbell, a urologic oncology fellow at Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio.
She added, “In terms of receiving attention, we have some hypotheses about that, 1 being that there was another study that we cited showing that women were less likely to be published as first and last authors in high impact factor journals, and these articles, being that they're in high impact journals, would be more likely to be discussed in mainstream media, featured on Twitter, have more retweets, etc, and thus leading to a higher Altmetric Attention Score. And also, as we all know, social media mentions are becoming more important as the methods for disseminating scientific information and online discourse, such as on Twitter or other social media platforms, can drive new news coverage and broader engagement with academic work.”
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
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