The Geographical Gap in Leading Medical Journals - a Computational Audit

ABSTRACT

Background Auditing geographical representation in medical publishing could help to mitigate possible national and regional disparities.

Methods Using the Web of Science indexing database, we collected bibliometric data of original research articles published between 2010-2019 in The New England Journal of Medicine, Nature Medicine, Journal of the American Medical Association, The BMJ, and The Lancet. We studied the corresponding authors’ geolocation in regard to publication and citation count, their temporal evolution, and the journals’ and citing organizations’ nationality.

Results We identified 10,558 articles. Based on the nationality of the corresponding authors’ institutes, only 32 countries published more than 10 publications in 10 years equaling to 98.9% of all publications. English-speaking countries USA (48.2%), UK (15.9%), Canada (5.3%), and Australia (3.2%) were most represented, but with a declining trend in recent years. Normalized to their accumulated citations, 9/32 countries were associated with ≥10% publication excess, of which USA (n=1,174 publications) and UK (n=410) accounted for 85.7%. Similar findings were replicated at the municipal level where all top 10 most productive cities were located in USA (n=7), UK (n=2), or Canada (n=1), and 21 out of 25 most productive cities published more articles than predicted based on their accumulated citations. Finally, we discovered that both journals published, and researchers cited more commonly research conducted in the same country.

Discussion The audit revealed Anglocentric dominance, domestic preference occurring in both journals and citation selection, and increased geographical representation in recent years in medical publishing.

Competing Interest Statement

O.B. declares the following Competing Financial Interests: consultancy fees from Novartis, Sanofi, and Amgen, outside the submitted work.

Funding Statement

This study was supported by research grants from the Helsinki University Hospital.

Author Declarations

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I understand that all clinical trials and any other prospective interventional studies must be registered with an ICMJE-approved registry, such as ClinicalTrials.gov. I confirm that any such study reported in the manuscript has been registered and the trial registration ID is provided (note: if posting a prospective study registered retrospectively, please provide a statement in the trial ID field explaining why the study was not registered in advance).

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I have followed all appropriate research reporting guidelines and uploaded the relevant EQUATOR Network research reporting checklist(s) and other pertinent material as supplementary files, if applicable.

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Data Availability

Codes and a 100-row data example are available at https://github.com/obruck/International-Research-Impact. Raw data can be downloaded from Clarivate Web of Science, with instructions provided in the Github repository.

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