A New Critical Lens to Examine Factors Influencing Differences in Global Scholarly Communication Experiences
If scholars’ research outputs are high quality and add to knowledge in a field of scientific study, why should their geographical location or any aspect of their identity matter? Evidence demonstrates that cognitive and ideological differences are beneficial to research. Unfortunately, experience and the literature show differences between scholars’ geographical locations or their identities and their ability to obtain, produce, and distribute research outputs. The disparities can be described by focusing on geopolitical positions, such as low- and middle-income countries compared to high-income countries, or differences can be examined through a racial or ethnic lens, or any number of ways we identify individuals or groups of people. However, the discrepancies go beyond country location, GDP, or R & D, and the differences go beyond racial or ethnic make-up or the like. Come along with us on this journey as we discuss what is known and what is not known about the variations in research outputs and how we might better explore these discrepancies in publication numbers in the mainstream literature.
We dove into the literature about global scholarly communication and found many scholars have examined discrepancies in research outputs for decades. However, we began to see this as an epistemic or social justice issue, as those who are published are viewed as having a voice and perspective that is valued and credible and those who do not publish or feel forced to publish in lesser-known journals, often feel silenced and not valued. We also examined the metrics being used to show country-level publication numbers. Our findings show that scholars from low- and middle-income countries are not producing scholarly outputs at equal rates or numbers to their counterparts in high-income countries. However, after diving even deeper, it became less clear whether the numbers we were looking at accurately displayed the complete picture of research outputs or just those indexed and picked up by well-known search engine algorithms.
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