African neuroscience on the global stage: Nigeria as a model

Maina, Mahmoud Bukar; Mohammed, Yunusa Garba; Bukar, Ali Maina; Ahmad, Umar; Salihu, Abubakar Tijjani; Ibrahim, Harun A.; Abdurrazak, M; Hamidu, Suleiman Kwairanga; Yaro, Aisha Umar; Awadelkareem, Mosab Ali; Nasr, Fayza Eid; Baden, Tom

doi:10.1111/ejn.14372

Cited by 16 publications

(25 citation statements)

References 18 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Under the caveat of using such metrics 20, 21 , West Africa seems to lag behind among all the regions. For example, the region's giant -Nigeria, published only one Neuroscience paper in a 'top-tier' journal in the 21-year period 15 . The lack of visibility, especially in citations, may be part-explained by choices over where work is submitted for publication.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The lack of visibility, especially in citations, may be part-explained by choices over where work is submitted for publication. Many Nigerian Neuroscience papers are published in African journals, which generally offer poor visibility beyond the continent's borders 15 . Moreover, many African journals are not PubMed indexed (and therefore excluded from our study) 33 .…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Of these publications, almost 70% have non-African based authors 6 . While on the one hand this may be indicative of important collaborative links between Africa and the rest of the world, it leaves it unclear which studies were truly African-led, and carried out in African labsand which were rather led by researchers elsewhere 6,15 . Indeed, a previous estimate suggested that as much as 80% of published health research with African authors was not African led 16 .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For example, PubMed data mining identifies 1,247 Nigerian neuroscience papers between 1996 and 2017. However, manual curation revealed that of those, 54% were led by non-Nigerian laboratories 15 . The remaining 46% Nigerian-led studies generally had low visibility, with the majority being published in African journals that attract few non-African citations.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The remaining 46% Nigerian-led studies generally had low visibility, with the majority being published in African journals that attract few non-African citations. This was complemented by a general absence of genetically modified model systems in these publications, and only occasional use of basic modern techniques such as fluorescence microscopy or western blotting 15 .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 4 more Smart Citations

20 years of African Neuroscience: Waking a sleeping giant

Maina

Ahmad

Ibrahim

et al. 2020

Preprint

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Understanding the function and dysfunction of the brain remains one of the key challenges of our time. However, an overwhelming majority of brain research is carried out in the Global North, by a minority of well-funded and intimately interconnected labs. In contrast, with an estimated one neuroscientist per million people in Africa, news about neuroscience research from the Global South remains sparse. Clearly, devising new policies to boost Africa’s neuroscience landscape is imperative. However, the policy must be based on accurate data, which is largely lacking. Such data must reflect the extreme heterogeneity of research outputs across the continent’s 54 countries distributed over an area larger than USA, Europe and China combined. Here, we analysed all of Africa’s Neuroscience output over the past 21 years. Uniquely, we individually verified in each of 12,326 publications that the work was indeed performed in Africa and led by African-based researchers. This step is critical: previous estimates grossly inflated figures, because many of Africa’s high-visibility publications are in fact the result of internationally led collaborations, with most work done outside of Africa. The remaining number of African-led Neuroscience publications was 5,219, on average only ~5 per country and year. From here, we extracted metrics such as the journal and citations, as well as detailed information on funding, international collaborations and the techniques and model systems used. We link these metrics to demographic data and indicators of mobility and economy. For reference, we also extracted the same metrics from 220 randomly selected publications each from the UK, USA, Australia, Japan and Brazil. Our unique dataset allows us to gain accurate and in-depth information on the current state of African Neuroscience research, and to put it into a global context. This in turn allows us to make actionable recommendations on how African research might best be supported in the future.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%