Author positions: topics
The proportion of female authorships in first and last author positions is shown for the top 50 topics by total authorships in 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
Proportion of female first and last authorships in top 10 research topics 2025*
* Top research topics by total number of authorships in 2025.
All topics 2025*
| Topic | Proportion of female authorship (first) | Proportion of female authorship (last) |
|---|
*Among the natural- and health-sciences journals tracked by the Nature Index are some journals that have been classified as 'multidisciplinary', which means some applied- and social-sciences topics appear in the analysis.
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.