Background: Women are historically underrepresented in cardiovascular publications. We sought to investigate sex-specific differences in authorship of cardiovascular research over the last decade.

Methods: All 387,463 cardiovascular publications between 2010-2019 were retrieved from Web-of-Science and analyzed regarding the authors’ sex, the average impact factor (IF), the number of citations, and co-authors per article. Publications whose authors could not be clearly assigned to one sex were excluded, leaving a final sample of 257,940 articles. Linear regression models were used to calculate trends over time.

Results: The number of cardiovascular research articles increased between 2010-2019 from 19,960 to 29,604 articles per year (p>0.001). The number of articles written by female first authors increased by 76.3% (6434 articles in 2010 and 11,343 articles in 2019) and by 35.0% for male first authors (13,526 articles in 2010 and 18,261 articles in 2019) (p for trend over time <0.001). The first author was more likely to be female in articles with female last authors compared with male last authors (relative “chance” 1.99, 95% confidence interval 1.96-2.02, p<0.001). The median IF for articles by female first authors was lower compared to male (2.46 [IQR 7 1.11–4.03] vs. 2.51 [IQR 1.17–4.10],p<0.001). Likewise, the median H-Index was lower for female than male first authors as was the number of citations per articles. Female first authors had fewer co-authors per article than their male peers (6 [IQR 4–9] vs. 7 [IQR 4–10],p<0.001) and were less represented in articles with >15 co-authors (3,623 articles by female and 8,941 by male first authors; ratio female to male 0.41). Female authorship articles reached the highest IF in North America (average IF 3.7), the lowest Africa (average IF 1.8).

Conclusions: Publications in cardiovascular research have increased over the last decade, particularly by female authors. Female researchers are cited less often compared with their male peers and publish with fewer co-authors. The IF remains lower for articles by female researchers. Efforts to further increase women-led research activities are needed.