RESEARCH ARTICLE

Gender bias in clinical case reports: A cross-

sectional study of the “big five” medical
journals
Pascale Allotey1, Caitlin Allotey-Reidpath2, Daniel D. Reidpath1,2*

1 Jeffrey Cheah School of Medicine and Health Sciences, Monash University Malaysia, Bandar |Sunway,
Malaysia, 2 College of Medicine & Veterinary Medicine, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom

* [email protected]

Abstract
a1111111111
a1111111111
a1111111111 Background
a1111111111 Gender bias in medical journals can affect the science and the benefit to patients. It has
a1111111111
never been investigated in clinical case reports. The oversight is important because of the
role clinical case reports play in hypothesis generation and medical education. We investi-
gated contemporary gender bias in case reports for the highest ranked journals in general
and internal medicine.
OPEN ACCESS

Citation: Allotey P, Allotey-Reidpath C, Reidpath Methods

DD (2017) Gender bias in clinical case reports: A
cross-sectional study of the “big five” medical PubMed case reports data from 2011 to 2016 were extracted for the Annals of Internal Medi-
journals. PLoS ONE 12(5): e0177386. https://doi. cine, British Medical Journal, the Journal of the American Medical Association, The Lancet,
org/10.1371/journal.pone.0177386 and New England Journal of Medicine. The gender of the patients were identified and a text
Editor: Dermot Cox, Royal College of Surgeons in analysis of the Medical Subject Headings conducted.
Ireland, IRELAND

Received: February 8, 2017 Results

Accepted: April 26, 2017 A total of 2,742 case reports were downloaded and 2,582 (95.6%) reports contributed to the
Published: May 11, 2017 final analysis. A pooled analysis showed a statistically significant gender bias against female
Copyright: © 2017 Allotey et al. This is an open
case reports (0.45; 95%CI: 0.43–0.47). The Annals of Internal Medicine was the only journal
access article distributed under the terms of the with a point estimate (non significant) in the direction of a bias against male patients. The
Creative Commons Attribution License, which text analysis identified no substantive difference in the focus of the case reports and no obvi-
permits unrestricted use, distribution, and
ous explanation for the bias.
reproduction in any medium, provided the original
author and source are credited.

Data Availability Statement: The R script that

Conclusion
extracts the full data from PubMed is published on Gender bias, previously identified in clinical research and in clinical authorship, extends into
GitHub and referenced in the manuscript. the patients presented in clinical case reports. Whether it is driven by authors or editors is
Funding: The author(s) received no specific not clear, but it likely contributes to and supports an overall male bias of clinical medicine.
funding for this work.

Competing interests: The authors have declared

that no competing interests exist.

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 Gender bias in clinical case reports

Introduction
The late 1980s saw an acceleration in efforts to highlight and address the gender bias in science
and medical research.[1,2] There are issues of justice associated with such a bias, and there are
significant empirical concerns about the generalizability of gender biased findings and their
applicability to clinical practice.[3] The efforts to address the imbalance has resulted in the
establishment of several peak bodies to address gender in science, targeted funding streams to
enhance both opportunities for women scientists and extend women’s participation in
research, and policies that require researchers to address specifically the gender implications of
their design, recruitment strategies and findings. A recent “call for action” is seeking to include
gender in research impact assessment.[4] Similarly, key biomedical journals increasingly
require gender reporting.[2,5]
A recent review of progress on gender equality was undertaken across a range of indicators.
including on authorship of research papers. The prevalence of female first authors in major
medical journals increased from 27%-37% between 1994–2014, but this result was not consis-
tent across journals.[6] We sought to investigate the gender gap further with a focus on the
gender bias in clinical case reports.
“The [clinical] case report is the archetypical medical article”, at least that was a view
expressed in JAMA in 1968.[7] Today, the case report is less common, having been overtaken
by research papers of experimental and quasi-experimental studies. Nonetheless the clinical
case report maintains a key role in the medical literature as a vehicle for reporting unusual dis-
ease presentations or outbreaks,[8,9] as a hypothesis generator,[10,11] and most typically as a
pedagogic tool.[12–14] In their “Instructions to Authors”, for example, the British Medical
Journal, and the Lancet highlight the place of the case report in this latter role. The British Med-
ical Journal mentions the requirement for “real cases . . . suitable for presentation in specifically
educational formats”, and the Lancet observes that “novelty is not essential, but at least one
broadly useful learning point is.”
A case report could be about any patient or any clinical condition, and it is unreasonable to
expect that a single case report is gender balanced. In their specificity they are necessarily
biased. As a corpus of case reports within a general and internal medicine journal, however,
one would hope to see a representative sample of the patient population, gender balanced.

Materials and methods

Search strategy
We selected the top five ranked journals, by impact factor (IF), in general and internal medi-
cine for the review (the “big five”): Annals of Internal Medicine (IF: 16.6); British Medical Jour-
nal (IF: 19.7); Journal of the American Medical Association (IF: 37.7); The Lancet (IF: 44.0); and
New England Journal of Medicine (IF: 59.6).[15] We did not go beyond those five journals,
because of their place and impact in medicine; and the sixth ranked journal, PLoS Medicine,
does not publish case reports. We focused the search on case reports since 2011 to capture con-
temporary rather than historical editorial/authorial behavior.
PubMed was the only on-line data base searched because the journals’ articles are
completely indexed in the single database. The search terms combined each journal’s
PubMed abbreviation for its name (e.g., “JAMA” for the Journal of the American Medical
Association and “Ann Intern Med” for the Annals of Internal Medicine) with the case reports
as the type of article (“Case Reports[ptyp]”) limited to the five years from 01 January 2011
to 02 September 2016 ("2011/01/01"[PDAT]: "2016/09/02"[PDAT]). The complete Lancet
search, for example, was:

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 Gender bias in clinical case reports

"Lancet"[Journal] AND (Case Reports[ptyp] AND "2011/01/01"[PDAT]: "2016/09/

02"[PDAT])
The retrieved records from the searches formed the data for the subsequent analyses. The
Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) were used to identify the sex of the individual(s) described
in the case report.

Analysis
We defined a bias in case reports in favour of one or other gender by a proportion of female
case reports significantly different from 0.5. The proportion and 95% confidence intervals of
case reports relating to female patients were estimated for each journal. A mixed effects logistic
model was estimated with random intercepts and fixed effect for the journals. Finally the
pooled data was used to estimate the proportion and 95% confidence intervals of case reports
relating to female patients.
We took into account that a gender bias in case reports might be explicable by the type of
clinical condition being reported. A text analysis of the MeSH of the case reports was therefore
conducted. Specifically, the MeSH within each case report were combined and any repeat
words were removed. By gender, the MeSH text for all case reports were combined and a
count made of the occurrence of each word. For example, if “neoplasm” occurred twice in a
single case report’s MeSH only one occurrence was counted. The total count for “neoplasm”
reflected the number of case reports in which the word occurred at least once. Two of the
authors (PA and DDR) independently categorised the most frequently occurring words into
one of four categories: Body/Organ; Disease; Symptom; Investigation/Treatment. Disagree-
ments were resolved by discussion and the results tabulated.
Bibliographic details of individual case report were downloaded from PubMed using the
RISmed package in the R statistical environment.[16,17] With the exception of the final classi-
fication of MeSH words, all analyses were conducted in R. The R script for extracting the rele-
vant data is publicly available.[18]

Results
The initial search identified 2,742 case reports. Forty (40) case reports were excluded because
the gender of the patient was not identified; and a further 120 case reports were excluded
because they related to patients of both sexes. The final sample of case reports was 2,582,
accounting for 94.2% of the initially identified reports. The flow diagram of case report inclu-
sion is shown in Fig 1.
Of the 2,582 case reports, just under half (46.8%) appeared in the New England Journal of
Medicine (NEJM), 23% appeared in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), 17.4% appeared in The
Lancet (Lancet), 8.7% appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA),
and 4.1% appeared in the Annals of Internal Medicine (AnnInternMed). Of the case reports,
1,168 (45.2%) involved female patients and 1,414 (54.8%) involved male patients. Table 1
shows the sex distribution of the case reports for each journal.
A series of logistic regression models were developed with the sex in the case report as a
dichotomous outcome variable, and the journal as a potential explanatory factor for observed
variation in the proportion of female case reports. A random intercepts logistic regression
model was developed to estimate the variance associated with journal as a random intercept.
The associated variance was extremely small (4.0x10-14) and the inclusion of the journals as a
fixed effect in a second model reduced the variance to zero. A Wald test for inclusion of the
fixed effects showed no significant difference between the two models (Chi-sqr = 4.178, df = 4,
p = 0.382) indicating that the data from the 2,582 case reports could be directly pooled.

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 Gender bias in clinical case reports

Fig 1. Study flow chart of clinical case report selection.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0177386.g001

Fig 2 shows a combined plot and table of the data associated with each journal; the number
of female case reports and the total; and the 95% confidence interval surrounding the individ-
ual journal estimate. The pooled result is shown last.
Squares and the horizontal lines represent the measures of effect, e.g. the proportion of case
reports about women, and associated confidence intervals for each journal, and the diamond
indicates the summary measure.
The NEJM (.44; 95%CI:.41–.47) and BMJ (.45; 95%CI:.41–.49) were the only two journals
that showed a statistically significant bias against case reports of female patients. The Annals of
Internal Medicine was the only journal that had a point estimate in the direction of a bias
against male patients (.53; 95%CI:.43–.63). The Annals of Internal Medicine, however, pub-
lished relatively few case reports (n = 105) and the confidence intervals were consequently
wide. The remaining two journals had point estimates in the direction of a bias against female
patients; however, neither of the individual estimates were significantly different from 0.5. In
the pooled analysis, there was a statistically significant gender bias in case reports against
female patients (0.45; 95%CI: 0.43–0.47). The 95% Confidence intervals of the individual jour-
nals’ estimates including the Annals of Internal Medicine overlapped the pooled estimate indic-
ative of a gender bias.
To clarify that the gender bias was not a “NEJM problem” we recalculated the pooled esti-
mate with only four of the journals, excluding the NEJM data (n = 1,444). The bias remains,

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 Gender bias in clinical case reports

Table 1. A word frequency analysis of the MeSH text associated with the 2,582 case reports aggregated into four categories for each gender:
body/organ, disease, symptom, and investigation/treatment.
Body / Organ Disease
Rank Female Freq Male Freq Female Freq Male Freq
1 Blood 155 Blood 161 Neoplasms 185 Neoplasms 195
2 Skin 68 Skin 110 Infections 86 Infections 131
3 Lung 68 Lung 105 Pregnancy 64 Injuries 83
4 Abdomen 62 Abdomen 78 Pulmonary 56 Pulmonary 49
5 Brain 60 Brain 71 Diabetes 34 Renal failure 40
6 Heart 49 Kidney 63 Injuries 32 Diabetes 38
7 Artery 46 Bone 61 Hypertension 29 HIV 37
8 Bone 45 Heart 58 Fractures 24 Hypertension 37
9 Kidney 41 Liver 53 Thrombosis 23 Infarction 36
10 Breast 38 Artery 49 Renal Failure 21 Fractures 34
Symptom Investigation/Treatment
Rank Female Freq Male Freq Female Freq Male Freq
1 Pain 119 Pain 133 Radiography 262 Tomography 186
2 Dyspnea 63 Fever 87 Tomography 119 X-Ray 176
3 Fever 42 Exanthema 47 X-Ray 112 Surgery 143
4 Headache 34 Dyspnea 44 Surgery 101 MRI 113
5 Inflammation 31 Hemorrhage 38 MRI 95 Biopsy 65
6 Hemorrhage 29 Edema 34 Ultrasonography 95 Electrocardiography 48
7 Anemia 26 Headache 29 Biopsy 48 Ultrasonography 42
8 Edema 25 Anemia 27 Transplanation 31 Transplantation 37
9 Exanthema 21 Inflammation 27 Echocardiography 30 Angiography 35
10 Vomiting 19 Fatigue 20 Angiography 28 Echocardiography 35
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albeit slightly smaller, and with wider confidence intervals because of the smaller sample size
(.46; 95%CI:.437–.497, p = .006).

Text analysis
Table 1 shows the top 10 most frequently used words related to body/organ, disease, symptom,
or investigation/treatment in the MeSH of the 2,582 case reports. The frequencies were calcu-
lated separately for case reports of male and female patients.

Fig 2. The gender bias in clinical case reports among the “big five” journals.
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 Gender bias in clinical case reports

There is some variation by sex in the rank order of words / conditions used in each cate-
gory; nonetheless, there is remarkable consistency. In the body/organ category for example,
the top five words for males and females fall in the same rank order. In the top 10 body/organ
words, the only difference by gender is the inclusion of “breast” for women (Rank 10) and
“liver” for men (Rank 9). There is similarly strong consistency in the disease category (“neo-
plasm” and “infection” ranked first and second for both groups). Investigation/treatment
words relate largely to imaging with the exceptions being “biopsy”, “transplantation” and “sur-
gery” for both males and females.

Discussion
There were 10% more case reports about male patients than female patients identified in the
review. What appears to be a relatively small effect in cross-section should really be seen as a
potentially accumulating effect over time; and small accumulating effects can have a substan-
tial impact.[19]
The concern is that a bias in clinical perception and decision making may be reinforced
with continuous exposure towards an over representation of case reports involving male
patients—supporting historical biases in clinical medicine and clinical research.[20] Medicine
in males may be regarded as more main stream, more interesting, more indicative of what is a
normal disease process. Because the case reports have become an integral part of medical edu-
cation, the risks of gender biased exposure to “interesting clinical medicine” is potentially
compounded, particularly in junior clinicians who are still laying down the matrix of exper-
tise.[21] Unfortunately, the nature of these kinds of influences on decision making are likely to
be subtle, hard to recognise in one’s own decision making, and even when one is alert to the
bias, formidable to overcome.[3]
What is surprising, is that the textual analysis of the MeSH words identified a remarkable
similarity between case reports about male and female patients. If similar kinds of clinical
cases are catching the eyes of authors and editors, is there a need to represent those clinical
cases with a gender imbalance? Are there inherently more interesting characteristics in male
than in female patients?
It is impossible to know the source of the observed bias, but there are three potential expla-
nations. First, the apparent bias is an artifact of random noise in the data. This seems unlikely
given the narrowness of the confidence interval around the estimate, but it is certainly a possi-
bility. The second possibility is that there is an authorial bias. Authors of case reports are sub-
mitting more case reports about male patients than female patients to journals, and the
journals are publishing them in the gender ratio with which they are received. The third possi-
bility is that there is an editorial bias. Authors submit a gender balance of equally meritorious
case reports and editors are more likely to approve for publication those reports about male
patients. The extension of explanation two and three is that some interplay arises between an
authorial and an editorial bias.
The sex and gender equity in research guidelines (SAGER) developed by the European
Association of Science Editors were designed primarily to guide authors in preparing their
manuscripts, but they are also useful for editors, as gatekeepers of science, to integrate assess-
ment of sex and gender into all manuscripts as an integral part of the editorial process.”[2] In
developing guidelines to ensure that gender is appropriately reflected in research the focus is
on the individual article.[2] With respect to case reports, the role of the editor needs to extend
beyond the impossible task of identifying bias in any specific case report, and should include
an overview of the journal’s corpus of published work.

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 Gender bias in clinical case reports

Strengths and limitations

This is the first study of its kind reported in the medical literature, and with the availability of
the data extraction script other researchers can readily update and adapt the approach.[18] In
conducting this study we relied on automated tools for database interrogation and text mining.
It may be that when each case report is understood in its complete context an apparent bias is
completely explicable and excusable, or disappears. This needs to be balanced against the
capacity of automated techniques to flag issues of potential concern and interest.
There are many internal and general medicine journals, and the five journals we examined
may not reflect the gender balance of case reports across the entire population of journals. The
results do, however, reflect the imbalance in the the most prestigious of the journals (IF>16),
and therefore in the journals with the greatest potential to influence the thinking of clinicians
and researchers. This also raises questions about the potential gender imbalance in specialist
journals. It is to be expected that some specialties will have a gender imbalance (e.g., obstet-
rics), but what of cases reports in journals of cardiology, gastroenterology, or neurology?

Conclusion
This is the first study to review gender bias in clinical case reports, and the results raise ques-
tions about the existence of other group biases (e.g., ethnicity or race bias), whether some
clinical areas are more prone towards a bias, and whether the source of the bias lies with the
authors or the editors. The study also provides a further benchmark in the assessment of prog-
ress towards gender parity in science and medicine. It is important that journals are aware of
the inherent bias and the implicit message this may convey to the medical community. Journal
Editors are well placed to monitor the bias over time and make affirmative decisions to reduce
it, and a reduction in the gender bias can only improve the overall quality and value of the case
reports to the readership.

Author Contributions
Conceptualization: PA CAR DDR.
Data curation: CAR DDR.
Formal analysis: DDR.
Investigation: CAR DDR.
Methodology: PA DDR.
Project administration: DDR.
Software: DDR.
Validation: PA DDR.
Visualization: DDR.
Writing – original draft: PA CAR DDR.
Writing – review & editing: PA CAR DDR.

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