(105) Pandemic-Produced Penalty in Pharmacy Practice Publication Productivity: Effects by Faculty Gender and Academic Rank

Objective : To determine whether gender and/or academic rank impacted the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on scholarly productivity/outcomes of pharmacy practice faculty.

Methods: Faculty names and ranks (assistant, associate, and full professors) from the previously studied top 50 NIH-funded schools of pharmacy were obtained from the AACP roster of faculty and staff. Gender-API was used to determine gender based on first names. Faculty publication records before and during the pandemic (2018-2019 and 2020-2021, respectively) were obtained from Scopus. Main outcome measures were scholarly activity ratio (SAR: percentage of faculty with at least 1 publication) and scholarly output (SO: number of publications) for (a) any publications and (b) first-author publications. Data wrangling and analysis were done in R and Python. Results were analyzed using appropriate families of linear mixed models, with pandemic, rank and gender being fixed effects, and individual faculty as random effects. Interaction effects were considered significant when p-value is < 0.05.

Results: Faculty included were 1,081 (61.2% female). Before and during the pandemic, overall SAR were 71.7% and 71.3% (any authorship) and 34.8% and 32.6% (first authorship), respectively. Similarly, before and during the pandemic, overall SO were 3,174 and 3,557 (any author; 12.1% increase) and 743 and 682 (first authorship; 8.2% decrease), respectively. There were significant interactions between pandemic and ranks for SAR (any authorships, but not first-authorships) and SO (any authorships and first-authorships ). There were no pandemic-gender interactions in any of the scholarly outcome measures (p> 0.05).

Conclusions: The pandemic had varying effects on scholarly outcomes among ranks but not between genders. Further analysis using estimated marginal means will determine the gender-rank categories most negatively impacted by the pandemic and the role of collaboration.