Imbalances in authorship, geographic and institutional contexts, and funding sources in research on gender approaches to sexual and reproductive health in Africa: a scoping review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
National research leadership is critical for generating locally responsive knowledge, especially grounded in gender approaches, given its engagement with local social contexts. We conducted a focused analysis of a scoping review to examine patterns in authorship, geographic and institutional contexts, and funding sources, in studies that apply gender approaches to sexual and reproductive health (SRH) across Africa. The review examined 45 publications in PubMed and Scopus (2012-2022) and included consultation with African gender and health experts. Our analysis revealed unequal distribution of papers across sub-regions in Africa (48.9% were based in Southern Africa, 37.8% in Eastern Africa, 11.1% in Western Africa, and 2.1% in Northern Africa). The distribution of articles by first and last authors' country of residence depicted disparity between authors in high-income countries and those in Africa, and between authors based in South Africa and those stationed in the rest of Africa (USA 46.7%, Europe 17.8%, Canada 2.2%, South Africa 22.2%, and the rest of Africa 11.1%). Similarly, unequal patterns exist regarding the distribution of last authors (USA 42.9%, Europe 9.5%, Canada 4.8%, South Africa 28.6%, and the rest of Africa 14.3%). One-fifth of the papers feature no local authors. Funding sources show a stark difference, with just 9.4% of the funding coming from Africa, exclusively South Africa, and the rest originating from high-income countries (USA 36.5%, UK 14.1%, Canada 8.2%, and Sweden 5.9%). The authors call for ensuring local ownership and leadership of research in Africa, increasing domestic investment and addressing disparities across sub-regions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.140 | 0.387 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.042 | 0.050 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".