Abstract :
Surnames have been used as a proxy in studies on health care for various ethnic groups and also applied to ascribe ethnicity in studies on the genetic structure of a population. The aim of this study was to use a surname-based bibliometric indicator to assess the representation of Jewish authors in US biomedical journals. The other aim was to test the hypothesis that the representation of Jewish authors in US biomedical journals corresponds to their representation among US Nobel Prize winners in Medicine, 1960–2009. From among articles published 1960–2009 in all journals covered by Medline (>5,000), and in the top 10 US biomedical journals we counted articles by authors from the following three groups: Kohenic–Levitic surnames, other common Jewish surnames, and the most frequent non-Jewish surnames in the USA. The frequency of a surname in the US population (1990 US Census) was used to calculate the expected number of scientific publications: the total number of published articles multiplied by a surname’s frequency. The actual number of articles with that surname was also determined. The ratio of actual to expected number of articles was used as a measure of representation proportionality. It was found that the ratio of actual to expected number of articles in both Jewish groups is close to 10 among all (>5,000) journals, and close to 20 in the top 10 journals. The ratio of actual to expected numbers of Jewish Nobel Laureates in the USA is also close to 20. In conclusion, the representation of Jewish authors in top 10 US biomedical journals corresponds to the representation of Jewish Nobel Laureates among US laureates. We hypothesize that disproportional representation of Jewish scientists as authors in top biomedical journals and among Nobel Prize laureates in Medicine is mostly due to their overrepresentation as research participants, not because of the increased chances for reward for a Jewish researcher per se.
