Article type
Year
Abstract
Background: Cochrane methodology is the gold standard for systematic reviews, providing healthcare professionals, stakeholders and patients with a firm foundation for decision-making. As health care is broad and complex, involving patients, professionals, stakeholders, health issues and resources, it is important that those who contribute to research have different backgrounds. It is also important to ensure that there is diversity in the field of knowledge, which helps to develop a vast foundation for the best clinical decisions.
Objectives: to identify which professional class most collaborated as first authors of Cochrane Reviews in the last three years.
Methods: we searched the Cochrane Library for all systematic reviews published in the last three years (from 2017 to 2019). We primarily analysed the first six Cochrane groups alphabetically (Acute Respiratory Infections; Airways; Anaesthesia; Back and Neck; Bone, Joint and Muscle Trauma; and Breast Cancer), and identified the first listed authors’ profession, gender and nationality, searching for their names on online platforms such as LinkedIn, ResearchGate, Google Scholar, Plataforma Lattes, the Cochrane Library and web pages of institutions to which the authors are professionally linked. We classified the authors into nine different professional categories. We calculated the percentage distribution for each category.
Results: we identified nine classes of professionals that contributed as first authors: physicians (47.65%), teachers (9.4%), physiotherapists (5.37%), nurses (4.03%), psychologists (1.34%), odontologists (0.67%), pharmacists (0.67%) and statisticians (0.67%). We could not identify the profession of 25.5% of the authors. We found that 52.34% of the authors were female, 33.55% were male, and we could not identify the sex of 13.42% of the authors. The authors who contributed the most were from Australia (20.13%), the UK (19.46%), Canada (9.4%), Brazil (4.7%) and the USA (3.36%).
Conclusions: physicians are the professionals who most consistently contributed to Cochrane Reviews as first authors in the six Cochrane Review Groups we analyzed. We also noted that women contributed the most. Australia and the UK, together, account for nearly half of the authorships.
Objectives: to identify which professional class most collaborated as first authors of Cochrane Reviews in the last three years.
Methods: we searched the Cochrane Library for all systematic reviews published in the last three years (from 2017 to 2019). We primarily analysed the first six Cochrane groups alphabetically (Acute Respiratory Infections; Airways; Anaesthesia; Back and Neck; Bone, Joint and Muscle Trauma; and Breast Cancer), and identified the first listed authors’ profession, gender and nationality, searching for their names on online platforms such as LinkedIn, ResearchGate, Google Scholar, Plataforma Lattes, the Cochrane Library and web pages of institutions to which the authors are professionally linked. We classified the authors into nine different professional categories. We calculated the percentage distribution for each category.
Results: we identified nine classes of professionals that contributed as first authors: physicians (47.65%), teachers (9.4%), physiotherapists (5.37%), nurses (4.03%), psychologists (1.34%), odontologists (0.67%), pharmacists (0.67%) and statisticians (0.67%). We could not identify the profession of 25.5% of the authors. We found that 52.34% of the authors were female, 33.55% were male, and we could not identify the sex of 13.42% of the authors. The authors who contributed the most were from Australia (20.13%), the UK (19.46%), Canada (9.4%), Brazil (4.7%) and the USA (3.36%).
Conclusions: physicians are the professionals who most consistently contributed to Cochrane Reviews as first authors in the six Cochrane Review Groups we analyzed. We also noted that women contributed the most. Australia and the UK, together, account for nearly half of the authorships.
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