Impact of COVID-19 on Scholarly Outcomes of Pharmacy Practice Faculty by Gender and Academic Rank

Objective

To determine how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted the scholarly outcomes of pharmacy practice faculty, and whether the impact varied by gender and academic rank.

Methods

Pharmacy practice faculty from the top 50 NIH-funded schools of pharmacy (2018-2021) were included. Faculty whose gender was indeterminable with Gender API or who has no Scopus record were excluded. Publications before and during the pandemic (2018-2019 and 2020-2021, respectively) were obtained from Scopus. Primary outcomes included scholarly activity (probability of publishing) and scholarly output (number of documents published). Secondary outcomes were fractional scholarly output (FSO) and collaboration coefficient (CC). Data was analyzed using generalized linear mixed-effects models, with fixed effects including pandemic, rank, and gender. Interaction effects were only included in final models if statistically significant.

Results

Faculty included were 1081 (61.2% women; 31.4%, 40.0%, and 28.7% assistant, associate, and professors, respectively). Unique documents published increased from 2428 to 2737 during the pandemic. There was a significant pandemic-rank interaction in scholarly activity, while scholarly output had both pandemic-rank and pandemic-gender interactions. Men had higher scholarly output versus women across all ranks, in both periods. During the pandemic, scholarly output increased among all assistants and associates, but among professors, men had no change, while women had a decrease.

Conclusion

The pandemic effect on pharmacy practice faculty scholarly outcomes varied across gender and academic ranks. Institutions should implement initiatives to mitigate the extant gender gap in scholarly output that persisted during the pandemic, as it may impact career progression, tenure prospects, and retention.