Gulzar Natarajan points us towards an excellent paper written by Jacob Greenspon and Dani Rodrik, on who is writing papers in top tier journals today.
Developing country representation has risen fastest at journals rated 100th or lower, while it has barely increased in journals rated 25th or higher.
Click to access a_note_on_the_global_distribution_of_authorship_102521.pdf
Take a look at the table below, and note how developing country authorship has barely budged from 3.5% to 4.4% across the two time periods the authors have chosen to work with.
What is the problem being addressed here? The fact that there isn’t enough representation in the very top tier journals of authors from developing nations.
How might this problem be resolved? In one of two ways: either the current top tier journals figure out a way to have more representation from developing countries, or developing countries start on the (rather long) journey of creating journals that will replace the ones currently at the top.
In his blogpost, Gulzar Natarajan points out nine ways in which both of these solutions might be implemented:
- Hire more local Principal Investigators, both for its own sake, but also because of the large positive externalities they will generate
- Develop academic consortium(s) such as NBER in developing countries. Gulzar Natarajan uses the example of India, but this could of course be done in many other countries as well
- Give more personalized, contextualized lectures in Indian universities
- More mentorships
- More referees from India in top tier publications, at least for “India” papers. (Note again that Gulzar Natarajan is writing this for an Indian audience, the same applies for other countries)
- Create and share data repositories.
- Build out better conferences.
- Build out more university level tie-ups on an international basis
- Build out better Institutional Review Board certifications for local Indian universities.
The author is kind enough to mention the place at which I currently work (the Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics) as an Institute which may be able to play a role in furthering this initiative.
We’ve tried to do work on some of the initiatives he has outlined, including building out on mentorships, trying to build out better (and more) university level tie-ups, and one of the few silver linings to the last eighteen months has been the fact that it has never been easier to get professors from the world over to “come” and speak via video conference. But much more – much, much more! – remains to be done.
In an ideal world, each university in India would have a faculty member whose sole full time job it would be to figure out how each university is working on each of these nine points, with some sort of a coordinating agency working with (and across) each participating university. This is, of course, easier said than done.
Its necessity, if you ask me, is indisputable.