A multifactorial analysis of first-author retention in ASCO accepted works.

Abstract

9045 Background: Ensuring clinician oncologists remain engaged with research is an important step in maintaining optimal patient care in a rapidly changing field, and can be especially difficult for clinicians of marginalized groups. To identify trends in research engagement among oncologists, we performed a retrospective analysis on first-author retention in ASCO accepted works from 2019-2024, focusing on year presented, presentation type, and gender. Methods: Data from publicly available ASCO works from 2019 to 2024 were obtained from ASCO online materials, including first author (or speaker/chair) and presentation type (limited to education session, oral abstract, poster discussion session, poster session, and online-only ASCO meeting publication). Gender was identified by name using Namsor, a public web-tool. Names that could not be predicted by the web-tool were identified manually by physical presentation on institutional websites, if possible. An original script was created to identify first-author retention year-to-year, outputting the proportion of first authors found in both years and appropriate statistical tests. This analysis focused on comparing one-year retention (e.g. 2019-2020, 2020-2021, etc.). Results: We found that the period with the highest one-year first-author retention of all works was during 2022 to 2023, with 22% retention (985 of 4445 first-authors). First-author retention remained 20-22% for all other periods analyzed, except during 2023-2024 where retention decreased to 15% (806/5568; Two-proportion test comparing 2022-2023 and 2023-2024: p < 0.001). Focusing on specific presentation types, education sessions were found to have the lowest one-year retention, averaging 5.1%, as compared with poster sessions, which had the highest average one-year retention of 15.3% (Two-proportion test: p < 0.001). Looking at gender, we found that education sessions were the least male-prevalent, with an average of 49.6% retained speakers being male across all years. For oral abstracts, poster discussion sessions, and online-only publications, 53-54% of retained first-authors were male. Notably, first-author retention in poster sessions was much more male-prevalent, with an average of 62.7% of first-authors being male (Two-proportion test comparing male proportion in education and poster sessions: p = 0.002). Lastly, we found that five-year first-author retention of all works from 2019 to 2024 was significantly male-dominated, with 61% of those retained being male (267/437; one-proportion test p < 0.001). Conclusions: Trends of retention at a major oncology conference were identified, including recent decreases in retention, which could be due to a relative increase in first-time authors. The male prevalence in poster sessions and decrease in first-author retention of women over longer periods of time reveal specific areas to create more equitable opportunities for women in research.