Bioethics Journals Ignore the Developing World

In a short correspondence piece in this week's New England Journal of Medicine, Borry, Schtsman and Dirickx analyzed the country of residence of first authors in articles published in nine bioethics journals (AJOB was not included) between 1990 and 2003. The results?

A total of 4029 research articles were retrieved from the nine journals under study (Table 1). Investigators from high-income economies contributed to 3873 of the publications (96.1 percent), and those from developing economies contributed to 156 (3.9 percent).

In addition, the findings suggest that there has been no significant upward trend in the number of publications from developing countries.

[thanks Al Yarinsky (AMC)]