Where there is no local author: a network bibliometric analysis of authorship parasitism among research conducted in sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

Introduction: Authorship parasitism (ie, no authors affiliated with the country in which the study took place) occurs frequently in research conducted in low-income and middle-income countries, despite published recommendations defining authorship criteria. The objective was to compare characteristics of articles exhibiting authorship parasitism in sub-Saharan Africa to articles with author representation from sub-Saharan African countries.

Methods: A bibliometric review of articles indexed in PubMed published from January 2014 through December 2018 reporting research conducted in sub-Saharan Africa was performed. Author affiliations were assigned to countries based on regular expression algorithms. Choropleth maps and network diagrams were created to determine where authorship parasitism occurred, and multivariable logistic regression was used to determine associated factors.

Results: Of 32 061 articles, 14.8% (n=4754) demonstrated authorship parasitism, which was most common among studies from Somalia (n=175/233, 75.1%) and Sao Tome and Principe (n=20/28, 71.4%). Authors affiliated with USA and UK institutions were most commonly involved in articles exhibiting authorship parasitism. Authorship parasitism was more common in articles: published in North American journals (adjusted OR (aOR) 1.26, 95% CI 1.07 to 1.50) than in sub-Saharan African journals, reporting work from multiple sub-Saharan African countries (aOR 8.41, 95% CI 7.30 to 9.68) compared with work from upper-middle income sub-Saharan African countries, with <5 authors (aOR 14.46, 95% CI 12.81 to 16.35) than >10 authors, and was less common in articles published in French (aOR 0.60, 95% CI 0.41 to 0.85) than English.

Conclusions: Authorship parasitism was common in articles reporting research conducted in sub-Saharan Africa. There were reliable predictors of authorship parasitism. Investigators and institutions in high-income countries, as well as funding agencies and journals should promote research from sub-Saharan Africa, including its publication, in a collaborative and equitable manner.

Keywords: cross-sectional survey; public health.

Figure 1

Selection of articles included in the analysis. *Eleven articles were previously excluded when devising query and had insufficient data for algorithmic processing. **The following set of article characteristics as high risk for algorithmic misassignment and were manually reviewed: (1) absence of abstract, (2) single author, (3) presence of group author and (4) presence of the same number of affiliation fields for all authors (potentially indicating that all authors’ affiliations were reported in the same field).

Figure 2

Prevalence of authorship parasitism in sub-Saharan Africa in articles published from 2014 to 2018 among 32 061 articles indexed on PubMed.

Figure 3

Choropleth of proportion of papers indexed on PubMed without any local authors (authorship parasitism) for original research done in sub-Saharan Africa, 2014–2018.

Figure 4

Network diagram of relationships between sub-Saharan African countries and foreign authors’ country affiliations among papers without any local authors. *Parasitism index calculated by dividing the number of articles in each pairwise combination by the highest number in any pain-wise combination, which was 548 in the US-Kenya combination. Each pairwise combination thus received a value between 0 and 1, values closer to 0 represented low parasitism and numbers at the opposite end of the spectrum represented high parasitism.