Background: Authorship 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.
Methods: We 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.
Results: A 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).
Conclusion: The 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.
Keywords: health policy; other study design.
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