Key result
North America, Northern Europe, Western Europe, and Oceania produced 89.7% of papers in top psychiatric journals in 2008, despite representing only 9.8% of the world's population.
Observational (n=2,556)
Absolute Event Rate: 89.7% vs 10.3%
Highly influential psychiatric research continues to be disproportionately produced by a few high-income regions, leaving the vast majority of the global population underrepresented.
Geographic bias in psychiatric research may limit applicability to most populations; leaves open the need for broader global authorship and validation.
To monitor global representation in the psychiatric literature, we compared publication rates in the ten psychiatric journals with the highest impact factors in 1998 and 2008 by world regions. In both 1998 and 2008, North America, Northern Europe, Western Europe and Oceania produced the majority of psychiatric research papers published in these journals, despite representing only a small fraction of the world's population. This suggests that much of the world's population continues to be underrepresented in highly influential psychiatric journals.
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Zhang et al. (2012) conducted an observational in Psychiatric research publications (n=2,556). High-income world regions (North America, Northern Europe, Western Europe, Oceania) vs. Other world regions was evaluated on Proportion of psychiatric research papers published. North America, Northern Europe, Western Europe, and Oceania produced 89.7% of papers in top psychiatric journals in 2008, despite representing only 9.8% of the world's population.
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