ArticleBMJ global health2022
Bibliometric analysis of sub-Saharan African and US authorship in publications about sub-Saharan Africa funded by the Fogarty International Center, 2008-2020.
Article in BMJ global health, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed.
- Research capacity and decolonisation in Sub-Saharan Africa: a bibliometric analysis.BMJ global health · 2026Article
- International collaborative research and development (R&D) on traditional medicine and its contextual factors: a cross-sectional analysis from 1996 to 2022.Journal of global health · 2026Article
- Advancing Equity for Global Health Author Teams within the Publishing Ecosystem.Annals of global health · 2026Article
- Imbalances in authorship, geographic and institutional contexts, and funding sources in research on gender approaches to sexual and reproductive health in Africa: a scoping review.Sexual and reproductive health matters · 2025Article
- A scoping review of equity toolkits for international academic partnerships.International journal for equity in health · 2025Article
- Authorship Inequity in Global Health Research Conducted in Low- and Middle-Income Countries and Published in High-Income Country Family Medicine Journals.Annals of family medicine · 2025Article
- A bibliometric analysis of malignant pleural mesothelioma from 2010 to 2023.Journal of thoracic disease · 2025Article
- Exploring supportive roles for global north investigators in global health research.PLOS global public health · 2025Article
- Authorship of Publications Supported by NCI-Funded Grants Involving Low- and Middle-Income Countries.JAMA network open · 2024Article
- Bibliometric analysis of authorship patterns in publications from a research group at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, 2016-2020.BMJ global health · 2023Article
- Time to end parachute science.PLoS medicine · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundAuthorship and author order have been used as one measure to characterise equity in research partnerships. First and last (senior) authorships often denote scientific merit as well as potential for research career advancement. A previous analysis found that only about 20%-25% of publications about Africa with coauthors from top-ranking US universities had a first or last author from the topic country. In this bibliometric analysis, we evaluated authorship of publications about sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) funded by the Fogarty International Center (FIC) of the US National Institutes of Health, an institution with a mission of training and capacity building in low-income and middle-income countries.
methodsWe analysed publications from PubMed and Web of Science that were funded by FIC, about SSA, and published between 2008 and 2020. Relative citation ratio (RCR) data from iCite were used to compare group citation impact measures using the Wilcoxon rank sum test.
resultsA total of 3446 publications met the inclusion criteria, with annual number increasing from 114 in 2008 to 352 in 2020. SSA-affiliated first authors increased from 53 (47%) in 2008 to 224 (63%) in 2020. SSA-affiliated last authors increased from 32 (28%) to 166 (47%). For both first and last authorships, the median RCR value of publications with SSA-affiliated authors was lower than for US-affiliated authors (first authors: 0.84 vs 0.95, p=0.0021; last authors: 0.88 vs 0.91, p=0.010).
conclusionThe increase in first and last authorships by SSA-affiliated authors of publications about SSA suggests increasing equity in research activities funded by FIC. Further investigation and actions are needed to establish how authorship reflects other aspects of equity, the implication of the lower RCR in papers with SSA-affiliated first and last authors and what policies and practices are needed to further promote equity in global health research.
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.