Middlesex and Oxford study finds ‘profound diversity biases’ in academic research recognition

New research calls for action after gender, race and age inequalities revealed across biomedical publication authorship

A Middlesex public health lecturer who co-authored a major study examining whether scientists of different ages, sexes and ethnic backgrounds receive equal recognition for their research discovered “profound diversity biases”.

Dr Sarwar Shah is the senior author of the paper – published in BMJ Open – which examined the outputs of 476 authors affiliated with the National Institute for Health and Care Research’s Oxford Biomedical Research Centre (Oxford BRC) from 2012-22.

Women accounted for 44% of those listed as first author (typically the one carrying out most of the research) but only 24% of last authors (the senior researcher leading the project) across the decade studied. Black, Asian and other ethnic minority researchers accounted for just 16% of first authors and 14% of last authors, or 13% of publications overall.

Other findings include that researchers in the so-called “golden age of authors,” aged between 40 and 59, were most productive in terms of publications. White, male authors in their fifties produced the highest proportion of publications across the ten years examined, while authors in the older 60–64-year-old age group had the greatest average number of citations per publication.

The report stated: “Our findings illustrate and confirm profound author diversity biases in both publication outputs and citation counts, as reported by others.”

Despite their underrepresentation particularly in the prestigious last author role, female authors had a higher average number of citations per publication than male authors (51 v 45 citations per publication), supporting earlier studies and attesting, the paper says, to women scientists’ excellence in research and innovation.

Dr Shah and his co-authors from Oxford, London and Denmark also found ethnic minority researchers had a broadly similar and from 2017-22 slightly higher average number of citations than white researchers. They charted a huge increase in citations for authors under 50 in 2017-22 compared to the previous five years, while citations for those aged 50 or above fell.

Reviewing their findings, the BMJ paper’s authors suggest wider issues in universities and research funding systems, such as unequal access to research grants, mentoring and career development, and unconscious bias.

They identify a need for “proactive initiatives to provide fairer and equitable opportunities to disadvantaged researchers who are young, women and belong to ethnic minority backgrounds”, while pointing out that other factors besides discrimination, such as researchers’ career stage and the size of their teams, may contribute to disparities.

They call for better information to be collected about researcher backgrounds and progression (e.g. the data available for Oxford BRC groups all ethnic minorities together) and for monitoring of inequalities.

The authors write that “this study was imperative as there is limited understanding of and evidence on the diversity of authors of scientific research, especially in biomedical and translational health research [ie converting lab findings into clinical treatments and public health practices].”

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