key: cord-0078368-600uel6h
authors: Elango, Bakthavachalam
title: COVID-19: GLOBAL INEQUALITY IN SCIENCE
date: 2022-05-19
journal: Therapie
DOI: 10.1016/j.therap.2022.05.004
sha: 4938bfc8843b5943c78d3457d74c5eb8f198a858
doc_id: 78368
cord_uid: 600uel6h

nan

A country's progress in scientific research and technological innovation is measured by the number of papers and patents it produces each year [1] . Scientists responded quickly to the COVID-19 epidemic in terms of publications, publishing a huge number of papers for the first time [2] . According The Gini coefficient is the most extensively used indicator of inequality [3] . Even though it was first used to measure income and wealth distribution [4] [5] , it is now being used to measure inequality in publication output [6] [7] [8] as well as in citation distribution [9] [10] . This is the first study to look into whether there is a disparity between countries that contributed to COVID-19-related research in terms of the number of publications.

We used Clarivate's Web of Science (WoS) Core Collections to find the papers linked to COVID-19 across all three indexes: Science Citation Index-Expanded (SCI-E), Social Science Citation Index (SSCI), and Arts & Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI). The following set of keywords has been used to search: "COVID-19" OR "coronavirus disease 2019" OR "coronavirus 2019" OR "SARS-COV-2" OR "2019-nCov" All the publications related to the above keywords have been considered without any limitations, such as vaccines, document type, language, subject area, geographical location, etc. On the date of search (January 04, 2022), there were 184,229 records on COVID-19 and analyse results tool of the Web of Science has been employed to retrieve the data on contributing countries. Of the 184,229 records, 8,429 records (4.48%) do not contain the country information. Accordingly, the data has been downloaded in csv format and exported to MS-Excel for further analysis. 

The results have been presented in Table 1 . The global COVID-19 research included authors from

All the contributing countries were divided into three categories based on the number of publications and related rankings. By doing so, countries are ranked by the number of publications they have published, in ascending order. Countries with similar numbers of publications have been given the same rank, while the most productive country has been given the number 149. The percentile rank is calculated by dividing a country's rank by 149. Accordingly, the countries are divided into three categories based on their percentile scores: low (0 -0.33), medium (0.34 -0.66) and high (0.67 -1).

Of the 202 contributing countries, almost 50% of countries belong to the low productivity group, and the remaining countries are equally spread across medium and high productivity. The average number of publications is 22 for low productive countries, 243 (almost 11 times of low productivity) for medium productive countries, and 4936 (more than 20 times of medium productivity and 224 times of low productivity) for high productive countries. In the case of inequality, the medium productive country group has received the lowest Gini value, whereas the other two groups received more than 0.5, which denotes that the countries in the medium productive group have relatively equal contributions.

The highest number (n = 66) of countries are grouped under high income economies, lower-middle and upper-middle income economics, with each 53 countries. Only 13% of countries are grouped under low income economies, which has the highest-minimum number of publications (n = 2) whereas it is one for all other groups. There is no difference in the Gini value except that low income economies and middle income economies groups received lower Gini values than the average of the data set. The average number of publications is 75 for low-income economies, 468 (6 times higher than low income economies) for lower-middle income economies, 884 (10 times higher than low income economies) for upper-middle income economies and 2852 (almost 40 times higher than low income economies) for high-income economies. Africa has the lowest. In terms of equality, the Americas received a higher Gini value than the average of the data set, while all other regions received lower than the average. Among the regions, the Eastern Mediterranean region received the lowest Gini value.

The BRICS and G7 country groups have the lowest Gini values of less than 0.5, whereas all other groups have more than 0.5. The SAARC group has the highest Gini coefficient. The G3 group has the lowest average number of publications, whilst the G7 group has the highest. The G7 group has the highest minimum number of publications, while the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) group has the lowest. In a similar vein, the G7 and OECD groups have the highestmaximum number of publications, while the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) group has the lowest.

A total of 184,229 publications were contributed by 202 countries, with perfect inequality (Gini = 0.865) between them, which is equal to the number of fatalities (Gini = 0.862), but somewhat greater than the number of cases affected (Gini = 0.856). With only 22 publications per country, nearly half of the countries fall into the low productivity group. When it comes to inequality, the medium productivity group has the lowest Gini coefficient, which is less than 0.4. The Americas had a higher Gini value than the average. The Gini coefficient for all the significant groups is lower than the average, especially two of them (BRICS and G7) having less than 0.5. In concluding remarks, the value of Gini shows that only a few countries dominate the research activities in COVID-19 related research. Since this is the first of its kind, similar research could be conducted on other diseases such as cancer, hepatitis, dengue fever, zika virus, and so on. The findings may differ if the fractional-count approach is used. (2) The country's groupings into region have been followed by the WHO classification. There will be some differences if different categories are chosen.

Not applicable.

Authors have no conflict of interest to declare.

The data used in this study was collected from the Web of Science. 

The trend of concentration in scientific research and technological innovation: A reduction of the predominant role of the US in world research & technology

Scientists are drowning in COVID-19 papers. Can new tools keep them afloat

Variance estimation of the Gini index: revisiting a result several times published

Citations, research topics and active countries in software engineering: A bibliometrics study

A simple method for measuring inequality

Inequality and scientific productivity

Research productivity of faculty at 30 leading marketing departments

The ascent of bitcoin: bibliometric analysis of bitcoin research

Global citation inequality is on the rise

Analysis of citation inequality in Finland and Nigeria using the Lorenz curve