Abstract No. 469 Representation of developing countries in interventional radiology research

Abstract

The developing world accounts for greater than ¾ of the global population, yet prior studies have shown a disproportionately low representation of developing countries in the medical literature. No prior study has assessed the participation of authors from the developing world in interventional radiology (IR) journals. The purpose of this study was to determine the representation of studies from developing countries in two influential IR journals. We reviewed all articles published from January 2014 through December 2016: 1) Journal of Vascular and Interventional Radiology (JVIR) and 2) CardioVascular and Interventional Radiology (CVIR). The country of origin of the first author was identified for each study. Each country was grouped into either “developed” or “developing” based on designations provided by the International Monetary Fund. We compared representation of developing countries by journal and year using Chi-Square tests with Freeman-Halton extension, as appropriate. 1300 articles were reviewed from 2014 to 2016, of which 153 (12%) were from developing countries. The most prevalent developing country was China with 88 articles (58%), followed by Turkey with 24 (16%), India with 13 (8%), and Brazil with 9 (6%). Excluding China, only 5% of articles were from Developing countries. In contrast, the United States accounted for 462 articles (36%), followed by Japan with 113 (9%). There was significantly less representation of developing countries in JVIR (9%) compared with CVIR (15%) (p = 0.003). There was no significant difference in representation of developing countries between the years (p = 0.3). Developing countries are disproportionately under-represented in two influential IR journals. Further study is needed to determine reasons for this low representation and to develop strategies to increase the number of IR publications from parts of the world where the disease burden is greatest.