BMJ  2004;329:110-111 (10 July), doi:10.1136/bmj.329.7457.110-b

Letter

Representation of authors and editors from poor countries

Quality medical research from poor countries could be privileged in high impact journals

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

EDITOR—Keiser et al highlight the obvious under-representation of authors and editors from countries with low human development indexes in prestigious tropical medicine journals.¹ This shows the paradox of the greater burden of tropical disease afflicting people living in the underdeveloped world being studied, then published, by researchers in countries with a high development index.

Great obstacles confront researchers who live and work in countries that are poor in resources, and where diseases are prevalent, in conducting and publishing medical research into diseases of poverty.² These inequities are exacerbated by poor dissemination of and reduced access to quality medical research among clinicians in countries where these diseases are endemic.³ This may be ameliorated by allowing duplicate publication in local journals or forums of difficult to access articles from prestigious journals with high local relevance, for a lesser cost or for free.⁴ Journal space in high impact journals could be . . . [Full text of this article]

Department of Emergency Medicine, Mater Public Hospitals, South Brisbane, QLD 4101, Australia jysting@uq.edu.au

CiteULike    Complore    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    StumbleUpon    Technorati    What's this?

Relevant Articles

Representation of authors and editors from countries with different human development indexes in the leading literature on tropical medicine: survey of current evidence

Jennifer Keiser, Jürg Utzinger, Marcel Tanner, and Burton H Singer
BMJ 2004 328: 1229-1232. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

New equities of information in an electronic age

Christopher Zielinski
BMJ 1995 310: 1480-1481. [Extract] [Full Text]

Online poll

Find out more on doc2doc >>