Date: 02.05.2025
Global science faces persistent geographic disparities
There is an increasing awareness and understanding in global science about a troubling and persistent research imbalance, where studies overwhelmingly originate from economically developed countries, particularly those in Europe and North America. However, a new study published in Frontiers in Ecology and the Evironment argues that despite growing efforts within the scientific community to promote inclusivity, such initiatives often fail to address, or even perpetuate underlying regional biases that continue to shape research collaborations. In reality, research collaborations and consortia claiming to be based on global involvement are regionally mostly skewed to a few particular countries within the continent.
“Our analysis of global studies within the wider field of ecology and conservation revealed surprisingly huge regional disparities in authorship”, says Ivan Jarić, researcher from the Biology Centre of the Czech Academy of Sciences and the University of Paris-Saclay, and lead author of the study. “For example, studies involving researchers from Africa had only a quarter of authorships coming from regionally low-income countries, while the majority of studies were from South Africa. In fact, just South Africa alone published twice more than all the regionally low-income countries put together.”
The study revealed such trends in all of the continents. As much as two-thirds of studies involving researchers from Asia and South America were published respectively by China and Brazil, while all the regionally low-income countries together contributed to less than a quarter of studies. This disparity largely comes from the tendency of international research networks to prioritize traditional partners, established institutions, and experts from economically developed countries. At the same time, experts from regionally misrepresented countries often face limited professional visibility, and restricted access to international meetings, funding and collaboration networks.
Distribution of authorship in global studies in the fields of ecology and conservation. Data represent log-transformed number of coauthored publications per country; blank countries - no authorship in assessed publications.
Such widespread and persistent regional biases provide a misleading image of global inclusiveness. “Beside poor global coverage of studies and considerable data gaps, this could misleadingly suggest that no research is being conducted in these underrepresented countries”, says Shawan Chowdhury from the Monash University in Australia, one of the authors of the study. “Such collaboration practices are excluding voices from these regions, and missing the opportunity to build capacity in marginalized countries. What is especially worrying is that many of those countries are characterized by a high level of biodiversity, and with an urgent need for the local scientific community to implement effective conservation plans”.
“We believe that science must urgently move beyond continents and prioritize regional geographical equity in research”, explains Christophe Diagne from the French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development, another co-author of the study. “It is necessary to proactively engage scientists from underrepresented countries, and move beyond traditional partners within regions when planning international research teams and consortia. Alongside long-term, structural and systemic solutions, promoted by sustainability science—which we consider essential and seek to actively promote—we also strongly advocate creation of a global, open-access database that would aggregate local expertise, and build equitable partnerships by facilitating access to international collaborations and funding opportunities.”
For more detailed information, check the article published in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment:
Jarić, I., Diagne, C. and Chowdhury, S. (2025). Moving beyond continents for global and inclusive science. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment https://doi.org/10.1002/fee.2851
Contact: Ivan Jarić, ivan.jaric@hbu.cas.cz
