The Role of Women in the Top 100 Most Influential Arthroplasty Publications: A Bibliometric Analysis.

Background: Women account for 2% of arthroplasty surgeons in the United States. It is important to understand how women contribute to the literature in the field of arthroplasty currently. We compared the proportion of first, middle, and senior authorship by women in the top 100 most-cited hip and knee arthroplasty studies published between 2010 and 2024 to the national proportion of women hip and knee arthroplasty surgeons and evaluated the H-indices of authors by sex.

Methods: The literature search was performed on the Clarivate Analytics Web of Knowledge database. Once 100 studies met the inclusion criteria, those that did not originate from the US or whose author first names were not included were excluded. The author's sex was determined by first name. The Scopus author database was utilized to determine the H-index for first and senior authors.

Results: There were 91 papers that met the criteria. These papers were produced by a total of 458 authors, of whom 13.7% were women. There were six (7.4%) of 81 unique first authors, 50 (15.8%) of 315 middle authors, and seven (11.3%) of 62 unique senior authors who were women. Women had lower average H-indices than men.

Conclusion: Women's contributions to the most influential hip and knee arthroplasty articles are much higher than predicted given their underrepresentation in the field, indicating the substantial value they add to leading arthroplasty research. Despite this, disparities exist for women in authorship rank and H-index. These disparities may be mitigated by intentionally fostering greater support for women throughout all phases of orthopaedic surgery training to improve opportunities for impactful research and career advancement.