[Increase in the percentage of female authors in the international psychiatric literature since 1970].
BACKGROUND
The participation of women in medicine and psychiatry is increasing.


OBJECTIVE
To find out whether this trend is also reflected in the international psychiatric literature.


METHODS
We took steps to discover the gender of the first and the last author as listed below the title of 290 articles sampled at random from three leading psychiatric journals published between 1970 and 2007. results Women turned out to be underrepresented as the first or last author of these psychiatric articles; this conclusion was also found to apply to the first and last authors who were medical authors. Whereas the proportion of female first authors had increased significantly since 1970 and had reached almost 50% in 2007, there had been no such increase as far as last authors were concerned.


CONCLUSIONS
In the psychiatric literature studied, the proportion of female first authors rose to almost 50%.
Opgenhaffen
M
M
Universitair Psychiatrisch Centrum van de Katholieke Universiteit (ku) Leuven, campus Kortenberg.
Vansteelandt
K
K
Germeau
P
P
Pieters
G
G
D001319:Authorship; D015706:Bibliometrics; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010506:Periodicals as Topic; D010822:Physicians, Women / Q000706:statistics & numerical data* / Q000639:trends; D011570:Psychiatry / Q000706:statistics & numerical data* / Q000639:trends; D017678:Sex Distribution; D014931:Women, Working