Purpose:

In medical education, researchers are encouraged to publish knowledge syntheses and educators to apply those findings. 1, 2 Knowledge syntheses are produced by author teams, which are required to make many, often subjective decisions during the review process. These decisions can impact the conduct and conclusions of knowledge syntheses, creating important implications for the field’s evidence base. Additionally, author decisions can be guided by author characteristics and the institutional cultures and power structures within which they operate. In medical education, we know little about who writes knowledge syntheses and thus do not know which author voices dominate or are absent. The purpose of this study is to examine and describe the characteristics of knowledge syntheses authors, focusing on gender, geographical location, and institutional affiliation. This work is meant to illuminate who is creating the evidence base in medical education through their knowledge synthesis efforts.

Methods:

We conducted a case study of authors of knowledge syntheses published between 1999 and 2019 that included citations for 963 knowledge syntheses in 14 core medical education journals. We created a publicly accessible dataset in 2020 3 and enriched it by characterizing the authors using Genderize. io, a gender prediction tool, the World Bank Country Classification, and Times’ Higher Education World University Rankings 2020. We calculated descriptive statistics using Google Sheets, and we visualized the data using Tableau.

Results:

We identified 4,110 authors across all authorship positions, of which 3,199 were unique authors. The number of authors per knowledge synthesis ranged from 1 to 60 with an average of 4.31 (SD= 3.07, median= 4). Seventy-nine knowledge syntheses (8.2%) were single-author publications. Over the 20-year time period analyzed, the average number of authors per knowledge synthesis increased (M= 1.80 in 1999; M= 5.34 in 2019).