Some studies have suggested gender disparities in both pay and academic promotion which may adversely affect salary and career progression for female physicians. The areas of research output, funding, and authorship have not been fully and systematically examined in the emergency medicine literature. We hypothesize that gender differences may exist in research output, impact, authorship, and funding.

We conducted a cross-sectional study examining all published articles in the top three emergency medicine journals as determined by Impact Factor between February 2015 and February 2018. We compared the authorship, number of citations of each article, funding, and h-index of each author by gender.

Of the 10,118 authors representing 4166 original articles in our sample, 7562 (74.7%) were male and 2556 (25.3%) were female, with females underrepresented relative to the known proportion of female emergency medicine faculty. Males were proportionally more likely to be last authors (OR 1.65, 95% CI, 1.47–1.86) and less likely to be first authors than females (OR 0.85, 95% CI, 0.77–0.94). No difference in proportions of males and females in terms of being named as having funding was found (OR 1.02, 95% CI, 0.78–1.35). Males had higher h-indexes than females (5 vs. 3, p < .001) as well as a higher average number of citations (OR 1.068, 95% CI, 1.018–1.119).

Males outnumber females in terms of numbers of publications, but also in number of citations, h-index, and last authorship. Future studies on physician gender disparities in emergency medicine need to account for these population differences.