summary
background The participation of women in medicine and psychiatry is increasing.
aim To find out whether this trend is also reflected in the international psychiatric literature.
method 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.
conclusion In the psychiatric literature studied, the proportion of female first authors rose to almost 50%.