To end ‘author parasitism’, which is the exclusion of local authors in studies conducted in Africa, 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, a new study has said.
Gary and the rest of the AHRECS team are big fans of including consumers and community members as co-researchers/co-authors in research teams. This can improve the degree to which a design is respectful, inclusive and has impact. A component of this is assisting with the research career of those consumers/community members, assisting with their training providing them with an addition to their track record. To conduct work in a jurisdiction without local people is completely unacceptable. We have included links to 13 related items.
Many articles included only a moderate proportion of authors from the study country, the authors said.
The authors said that, given the recent and growing recognition of the perils of imbalanced research collaborations, future studies are merited to evaluate changes in the prevalence, location and associated factors in authorship parasitism.
A bibliometric review of articles from January 2014 to December 2018 reporting research conducted in Sub-Saharan Africa, and indexed in PubMed, was used by the researchers to investigate how author affiliations were assigned to countries based on regular expression algorithms.
