Out of Africa: The underrepresentation of African authors in high-impact geoscience literature

Abstract

Several studies have highlighted the persistent lack of impact that African researchers have in international science. To examine this in the geosciences, we reviewed the representation and contribution of African authors using a bibliometric study of international high-impact geoscience journals. Detailed metadata from all articles (n = 182,996) published in these journals (n = 21), and from two Africa-based journals, were extracted from the Web of Science™. We then assembled information related to the research to track how frequently African authors and studies appear, relative to their international peers. The results show that, on average, 3573 high-impact geoscience articles are published each year, and 3.9% of these articles are on an African topic. Only 30% of these African articles contain an African author. In terms of authorship, the continent of Africa has produced 2.3% of the geoscience literature surveyed, which is comparable to the Netherlands (2.2%), a country 70 times smaller than Africa by population. Geoscience output from Africa over time shows concerning trends, in that it persistently lags behind global output, especially in comparison with high-income countries. For example, the five years of most prolific output from Africa occurred more than 25 years ago (1978, 1979, 1982, 1983, 1990). In terms of academic impact, the 25 most highly cited geoscience articles for each of the journals surveyed were found to be written by 2744 authors, of which only 13 are African. There is also an intra-Africa imbalance in authorship, given that more than 80% of African authorships stem from only five countries (South Africa, Egypt, Morocco, Ethiopia, Algeria, and Cameroon). Lastly, we show that most countries produce 60–80% of their own geoscience articles (i.e., by in-country authors), while this number for Africa is 30%. This is clear evidence of ‘parachute’ geoscience in Africa, a practise that marginalises the prospects of in-country researchers. Such practises may have also developed because the next generation of researchers in Africa is not developing, a problem caused by the lowest tertiary education enrolment rate in the world, and the well-documented ‘brain-drain’ of scientists from the continent. There is also a strong parallelism between research expenditure per capita and research output globally: high-income countries, which produce most of the geoscience research, spent US$1064 per capita on research in 2017, while Africa spent only US$42. Such low expenditure results not only from difficulties in raising research funds, but also from weak institutional support for African researchers, except in South Africa. For those researchers who are productive, they are reluctant to submit work to high-impact journals, for fear of rejection, and many do not become involved in international collaborations because of high teaching loads and lack of incentive. Indeed, there is even a distinct lack of intra-Africa collaboration—only 6 countries collaborate internally, mostly with South Africa. However, there are positive international collaborations being developed in the earth and environmental sciences in Africa, such as the UNESCO-supported online training program (GEOLOOC), the West African Exploration Initiative, the Africa Array program, and other programs initiated by the British Geological Survey in East Africa.