COVID-19 burden, author affiliation and women's well-being: A bibliometric analysis of COVID-19 related publications including focus on low- and middle-income countries.
cross_sectional · Level IV
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 35936025.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1016/j.eclinm.2022.101606 and PMC identifier 9347236.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Published literature documents tremendous gender inequities in the social, economic and health effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, but less evidence has come from low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) and even less from LMIC-based authors. We examine whether a) COVID-19 burden and b) LMIC-based authorship were associated with academic publications related to COVID-19 and women's well-being in LMICs. We reviewed academic articles on COVID-19 and women's well-being in LMICs published between February 2020 and May 2021 (<i>n=</i>1076 articles), using six electronic databases (PubMed, Web of Science, PsycInfo, EconLit, RePeC, NBER). Multilevel, mixed effects linear regressions assessed the relationships between each of our independent variables - a) COVID-19 burden (cases/100 population, deaths/100 population, deaths/cases) and b) author's country of primary affiliation, with publications related to COVID-19 and women's well-being, both overall and stratified by country income group. Eight-eight percent of articles had lead and/or senior authors affiliated with in-country institutions. Linear mixed effect models indicate that COVID-19 cases and case fatality ratios in a country were significantly and positively associated with the number of publications related to COVID-19 and women's well-being, though these relationships were significant only in upper-middle income group countries in stratified analyses. LMIC lead and senior authorship were also significantly and positively associated with our outcome, after adjusting for COVID-19 burden. While the majority of COVID-19 research examining women's well-being in LMICs in the first year and a half of the pandemic included country-affiliated author leadership, there were important gaps in representation. Findings highlight the importance of LMIC-based scholars to build local and gendered research in crises. Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation <i>(</i>INV-018007).