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There has been a considerable interest in conducting research in nephrology in low - and lower-middle income countries (LLMICs) in recent years. Researchers from high-income countries (HICs) contribute enormously to research in LLMICs and may end up leading such research work and this is not without issues. In most cases, the conceptualization and design of these studies are done by the investigators of HICs, which may not represent the true research needs of these LLMICs. The authorship order does not favour data collection as a key input, yet this is mostly performed by local researchers from these LLMICs. This leads to low representation of researchers from LLMICs as authors and even less frequently as lead authors.
We there set out to identify all collaborative studies conducted in LLMICs published in the last 10 years in the leading international nephrology journals to assess the proportion of local investigators listed as authors. We also studied the position assigned to authors from LLMICs in the author list, their author contributions and the funding source for the individual studies.
The original research articles emerging from collaborative research conducted in low- or low-middle income countries, published in English language from 1st of January 2012 to 31st of December 2021 in the 10 top-ranked nephrology journals (based on the impact factor) were included. In the articles that were selected, the country affiliations of the authors including first, second, third and the last author were extracted. The countries were categorized according to World Bank country classification by income status. Author contributions to the manuscript were categorized as follows; Conception or design of the work, acquisition of data, analysis of data, interpretation of data, drafting the work and revising the work critically for intellectual content. Two researchers independently evaluated the articles in full as published in each of the included journals.
Conclusions
There is scope for enhancing the representation and recognition of investigators from LIC and LMIC in collaborative research conducted in these regions. This may help developing context specific and more rewarding research ecosystem in LLMICs.