Meta-analysis of Global Participation in Biomaterials Publications and Editorial Boards

Introduction:: Biomaterials science and innovation could provide solutions to some of the biggest global challenges including antimicrobial resistance, food insecurity, and climate change. The generation of solutions applicable to a variety of global settings requires the participation of scientists from both the Global North and South. Existing literature from the business and scientific fields highlight the importance of geographic diversity for innovation. The 11 past editions of the World Congress of Biomaterials suggest the discipline does in fact value global perspectives. However, there is currently no data available to quantitatively assess representation in the field from a comprehensive international perspective. Thus, we sought to evaluate global participation in biomaterials science through a meta-analysis of editorial boards and publications in the last 5 years.

Materials and Methods:: We identified the world’s “top 30” journals in the Scimago Journal & Country Rank in the Biomaterials subject category. Metadata from these journals was obtained from Scimago. After identifying the journals that exclusively publish biomaterials research, we also extracted publication data (e.g. authors, affiliations) from the Web of Science database for all research articles and reviews published in these journals over the last 5 years. The publication data was then processed using the refsplitr R package created by Prof. Emilio Bruna’s lab at the University of Florida. This package allowed us to georeference author locations, visualize participation by country, and generate global collaboration networks. To expand on that analysis, we manually extracted editorial board composition and geolocation from individual journal websites.


Results, Conclusions, and Discussions:: The Scimago Journal Rankings identified both journals that primarily publish biomaterials research (e.g. Biomaterials, Biomaterials Research, and Acta Biomaterialia) and journals with a wider materials focus (e.g. Nature Reviews Materials and Advanced Functional Materials). The publishers of these 30 journals are based in 9 countries with most located in North America & Europe and only 3 publishers located outside of those regions. Among those journals, we identified those that exclusively publish biomaterials research. In total we extracted data from 22,218 papers with a total of 161, 319 authors. At the time of submission, these authors worked in institutions based in 114 different countries, at the time of submission with China and the United States represented in high proportion (Figure 1A). Visualization of author locations demonstrate that most authors were georeferenced to institutions in North America, East Asia, and Europe (Figure 1B) with just 2.1% and 0.15% of authors located in Latin America & the Caribbean, and Sub-Saharan Africa, respectively. Similar trends are observed when we map co-authorship networks from individual journals, as is the case for Biomaterials (Figure 1C). We then sought to identify potential explanations for this uneven distribution beyond lack of funding for research. Analysis of the editorial boards of these biomaterials journals revealed most members are based in Europe, North America, and East Asia with virtually no representation from Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa (Figure 1D).

These results confirm there is unequal global representation in the world’s leading biomaterials publications with scientists in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa being particularly underrepresented in authorship lists and networks. As could be expected, most authors are based in Europe, North America, and East Asia. A possible explanation for this observation is the lack of geographic diversity in the Editorial Boards of these journals with scientists based in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa being almost absent from these spaces. We will initiate discussions with collaborators in the Global South to better understand the barriers that prevent them from publishing in these leading journals. Exploring strategies to broaden equitable participation in biomaterials is crucial for sustained scientific innovation in our discipline.




Acknowledgements (Optional): : We would like to thank Prof. Emilio Bruna for his advice and insights on this project.

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