Methods:

See our January 2018 Journal Watch post for details on methods. Beginning this month, we will also be excluding middle authors from contributed papers with over 100 authors.

Base rates:

First authors are more likely to be graduate students or postdoctoral fellows. Using our calculations based on registration for the 2017 Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, 49% of graduate students and postdocs in neuroscience are women.

For last or sole authors we take the base rate to be 32%,  the percentage of women faculty at the same meeting. We take the base rate for all authors to be the overall percentage of 43%.

Journal of Neuroscience
Volume 38, Issues 10 through 13
Excluding: This Week in The Journal, Editorial, Correction
First author gender ratio: 32 women : 44 men (42%)
Last/sole author gender ratio: 27 women : 53 men (34%)
Middle author gender ratio: 111 women : 187 men (37%)
All author gender ratio: 170 women : 284 men (37%)

Excluded: 0 last authors, 1 first author and 13 middle authors. 14 in total.

Neuron
Volume 97, Issue 5 and Issue 6
Excluding: Corrections, Obituary, middle authors of “Genome-wide Analyses Identify KIF5A as a Novel ALS Gene”
First author gender ratio: 9 women : 25 men (26%)
Last/sole author gender ratio: 6 women : 32 men (16%)
Middle author gender ratio: 64 women : 115 men (36%)
All author gender ratio: 79 women : 172 men (31%)

Excluded: 0 last authors, 2 first authors and 3 middle authors. 5 in total.

Nature Neuroscience
Volume 21, Issue 3
First author gender ratio: 7 women : 9 men (44%)
Last/sole author gender ratio: 5 women : 15 men (25%)
Middle author gender ratio: 51 women : 61 men (46%)
All author gender ratio: 63 women : 85 men (43%)

Excluded: 0 last authors, 2 first authors and 17 middle authors. 19 in total.