How authorship position, journal prestige and author processing charges impact inequalities in COVID-19 research with authors from Sub-Saharan African Countries

Abstract

COVID-19 has exacerbated research inequality because of the changes in workplace settings. This study presents an insight into the extent of inequalities during the first year of COVID-19 using Sub-Saharan African countries’ COVID-19 publication data from Web of Science, MEDLINE and Scopus. The analysis included the publisher’s address, CiteScore of the journals and author processing charges (APC) of open access journal articles. Only 13.4% of the journal publishers were in Sub-Saharan African countries, and 21.14% of the articles were published in Sub-Saharan African journals. Publishers from the Netherlands (30.72%), the UK (24.23%) and USA (14.81%) published the highest number of journals. Authors from the Sub-Saharan African region were underrepresented in the first and last author positions. Mega journals published outside Sub- Saharan Africa were twenty-five times more prestigious than those published in the region. Sub-Saharan Africa paid more author processing fees than it received. More equitable global research practices may reduce the imbalances as observed in this study.