Research waste before research begins: the problem of research-priority mismatch in low- and middle-income countries

Scholarship on research waste has concentrated on what goes wrong after a question has been chosen: flawed design, selective reporting, publication bias, and the slow attrition of findings that never reach the people who could use them. A more upstream loss has drawn far less scrutiny - the commitment of scarce resources to questions poorly matched to the needs of the populations expected to benefit from them. In this viewpoint, I argue that such research-priority mismatch is itself a distinct form of waste, and that its costs fall most heavily on low- and middle-income countries, where research budgets are thin and the opportunity cost of every funded project is correspondingly steep. Drawing on work in meta-research, scientometrics, responsible research assessment, and science policy, I examine how academic incentives can favour internationally visible topics over locally consequential ones, and how publication-based promotion, journal prestige, and bibliometric indicators can quietly entrench that preference. To name priority mismatch as waste is not to reject international collaboration or curiosity-driven inquiry; it is to ask for proportion between global participation and local relevance. I close with a review of ongoing reforms in funding, evaluation, and academic reward that might draw research investment back toward public benefit.