Author positions: journals

The proportion of female authorships in first and last author positions is shown for selected high-quality journals tracked by the Nature Index in 2025. First authorship often reflects early-career researchers, while last authorship typically indicates the senior or principal investigator.

Gender was inferred by feeding unique combinations of first name, last name and origin country/territory to an algorithm. The analysis counts authorship instances rather than individual authors and so reflects publication activity rather than a strict headcount of individuals. See methodology for more information.

A guide to author gender ratio data on Nature Index

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Rank Journal Total authorships (2025) Total female authorships (2025) Proportion of female authorship (first) Proportion of female authorship (last)

Back to the Nature Index author gender ratio


Numerical information only (in the tables above) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International.