Methods:

See our January 2018 Journal Watch post for details on methods.

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 6 through 9
Excluding: This Week in The Journal, Editorial
First author gender ratio: 31 women : 43 men (42%)
Last/sole author gender ratio: 24 women : 57 men (30%)
Middle author gender ratio: 121 women : 190 men (39%)
All author gender ratio: 176 women : 290 men (38%)

Excluded: 0 last authors, 4 first authors and 27 middle authors. 31 in total.

Neuron
Volume 97, Issue 3 and Issue 4
Excluding: Corrections
First author gender ratio: 16 women : 24 men (40%)
Last/sole author gender ratio: 10 women : 33 men (23%)
Middle author gender ratio: 200 women : 209 men (49%)
All author gender ratio: 226 women : 266 men (46%)

Excluded: 0 last authors, 2 first authors and 15 middle authors. 17 in total.

Nature Neuroscience
Volume 21, Issue 2
Excluding: Obituary
First author gender ratio: 5 women : 13 men (28%)
Last/sole author gender ratio: 7 women : 11 men (39%)
Middle author gender ratio: 28 women : 68 men (29%)
All author gender ratio: 40 women : 92 men (30%)

Excluded: 0 last authors, 0 first authors and 4 middle authors. 4 in total.

eNeuro
January/February 2018; Volume 5, Issue 1
Excluding: Erratum/Corrigendum, Editorial
First author gender ratio: 21 women : 35 men (38%)
Last/sole author gender ratio: 19 women : 40 men (32%)
Middle author gender ratio: 85 women : 138 men (38%)
All author gender ratio: 125 women : 213 men (37%)

Excluded: 0 last authors, 2 first authors and 7 middle authors. 9 in total.

Starting in 2018, BiasWatchNeuro will be monitoring author diversity in key journals in the field, on a monthly basis. Below is our first such entry.

Methods:

We have separated authors into three types: first authors, last (and sole) authors and middle authors.

We separated names out and classified them using Python, Beautiful Soup and the genderize.io API. When the inferred gender from the API was either below 60% probability or had less than 5 examples, we searched for the author’s gender manually. When we were not able to easily find a gender in these cases we excluded the author and noted the number and the type of author.

Suggestions and other comments are appreciated.

Base rates:

Based on numbers from the 2017 Society for Neuroscience Meeting, 49% of graduate students and postdocs in neuroscience are women and 32% of faculty in neuroscience are women. Combined, neuroscience has an overall base rate of 43%.

These numbers are now documented on our general neuroscience base rate page.

Journal of Neuroscience
Volume 38, Issues 1 through 5
Excluding: Section “This Week in The Journal”
First author gender ratio: 42 women : 50 men (46%)
Last/sole author gender ratio: 28 women : 74 men (27%)
Middle author gender ratio: 169 women : 214 men (44%)
All author gender ratio: 239 women : 338 men (41%)

Excluded: 0 last authors, 5 first authors and 27 middle authors. 32 in total.

Neuron
Volume 97, Issue 1 and Issue 2
Excluding: Corrections
First author gender ratio: 11 women : 28 men (28%)
Last/sole author gender ratio: 10 women : 31 men (24%)
Middle author gender ratio: 52 women : 94 men (36%)
All author gender ratio: 73 women : 153 men (32%)

Excluded: 0 last authors, 1 first author and 5 middle authors. 6 in total.

Nature Neuroscience
Volume 21, Issue 1
First author gender ratio: 11 women : 7 men (61%)
Last/sole author gender ratio: 2 women : 19 men (10%)
Middle author gender ratio: 51 women : 70 men (42%)
All author gender ratio: 64 women : 96 men (40%)

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