Gender Differences in Pre-residency Academic Publications Among Recently Matched Neurosurgery Residents.

Introduction: Increasing importance is being placed on objectively evaluating the strength of academic publications among neurosurgery residency applicants. The current study quantifies the number of pre-residency academic publications by current neurosurgical PGY-1s including total number of publications and proportion of publications in neurosurgical journals to determine if there is a difference between male and female applicants.

Methods: A random sample of 50 current first-year neurosurgery residents (PGY-1s) was identified using an online random number sequence generator. All Pubmed indexed scholarly works published by each resident before the 2022 ERAS deadline were identified. Their authorship position and the total number of authors on each publication were tallied.

Results: Publications were identifiable for 43 of the 50 randomly selected residents (13 women, 30 men).
A median of 9 total publications were identified per resident with no significant difference between men and women (men: 9, women: 8, p=0.17). Of the total 545 reviewed publications, men published 58% of 408 publications in neurosurgical journals whereas women published 45% of 137 (p=0.07). Among female residents, the mean authorship position was 4.0 ± 8.8 (median: 3) out of mean total authors of 10.7 ± 21.8 (median: 7). Regarding male authorship positions, the mean authorship position was 3.2 ± 5.7 (median: 2) out of mean total authors of 8.8 ± 13.7 (median: 8), which was not statistically significant (p=0.17 for authorship position and p=0.18 for total number of authors).

Conclusion : Men tended to have higher proportions of pre-residency publications in neurosurgical journals, authorship position and total number of authors although this did not reach statistical significance. However, combined with previous work done at our institution demonstrating a lower female resident publication productivity, this warrants further investigation into factors which may improve female scholarly productivity during residency, which is ongoing.