January 2024 marks the start of the second phase of our ‘Fragmentation of Research’ Campaign with a focus on the sub-theme, ‘siloed knowledge’. We will explore the fragmentation of research from the viewpoint of those areas of research where a lack of integration reveals instances where research findings remain isolated, limiting their broader applicability across the research ecosystem.  We will focus on a number of salient areas which have particular relevance for Digital Science.  For example, Figshare’s recently published eighth State of Open Data 2023 Report offering a snapshot of open research trends year on year, calls attention to, amongst other issues, researchers making their data publicly available and where subject differences reveal that sharing data is not the norm for all researchers – remaining siloed either according to the discipline or the format.

Today’s modern and connected world still retains many aspects of fragmentation across the research lifecycle and amongst the different stakeholder groups from academia to research organisations, research funders, governments and business, each are delicately networked and none are immune to the effects of fragmentation. Looking at the flow of information in the different research environments and the approaches taken to break down silos, thereby improving research outcomes, can differ markedly.  Take, for example, the different platforms used to handle different parts of the research lifecycle, in many cases they do not ‘talk’ to each other, operating in a siloed manner.  An unintended consequence of this is the duplication of effort that ensues

In academia, siloed knowledge is a natural outcome of being expert in a subject area attached to a discipline, and where it is the norm to communicate with others who hold similar views and which often leads to a research collaboration. In this way, and for this reason, academics are often placed in silos.  For example, economists collaborate with other economists, engineers collaborate with other engineers and so on, and they are only unified through interdisciplinary approaches, bringing disparate disciplines together to work towards a common goal of bringing the different disciplines together.  Individual academics staying in their discipline throughout their career or those that change discipline frequently (foxes and hedgehogs, respectively) have an effect on collaborative patterns and interdisciplinarity.

We will also look at the fragmented nature of research knowledge and the gaps that form as a result of silos, as well as the promotion of cross-disciplinary collaboration providing useful insights in how to define research knowledge gaps and how they can be filled. From a methodological perspective we might see gaps in the availability of data, code or full research results to enable the replicability of a research project, or in the declaration of conflicts of interest – all of which fall under the banner of research integrity.

Siloed knowledge will be explored as an aspect of Artificial Intelligence, which we might consider to be one of the most pressing knowledge issues today.  Asking questions such as whether AI can overcome siloed knowledge or whether it does in fact create silos or indeed cement existing silos, and how and if siloed knowledge correlates and interacts with AI. With the advent of chatbots, Large Language Models (LLMs) and supporting tools (writing, analysing, and coding, to name but a few) we will investigate the state of research knowledge underpinning AI and put a lens on potential future areas of diversified knowledge and its use in day-to-day technologies (and use in academic research life cycle).

The post Fragmentation: The divided research world – part two, siloed knowledge appeared first on Digital Science.

It may take a militarily powerful nation to establish a language, but it takes an economically powerful one to maintain and expand it.^[1]”

David Crystal.

A short commentary

In this short opinion piece we look at English as the universal form of communication in science, in fact, the language of both science and technology.

Although many countries still publish journals in their native tongue, English is currently still the ‘best’ way to share research findings with scientists in other parts of the world.^[2] However, from a historical perspective, this has not always been the case. Egyptian philosophers and stargazers told stories in hieroglyphs. Aristotle and Plato wrote books in Greek, which were then translated into Arabic by their followers. Then came the Romans, who wrote in Latin. It was not until the 20th century that English started to dominate.^[3]

English as today’s global ‘lingua franca,’ is the language most widely spoken throughout the world even though the vast majority of English speakers are not ‘native’ speakers of the language. Of approximately 1.5 billion people who speak English, less than 400 million use it as a first language which means that over 1 billion speak it as a second language.

With today’s technological advances, English as the global language of science and innovation could change by reducing the need to learn English as a language for international communication. AI language tools are becoming increasingly sophisticated and AI-powered translation could potentially create more fair access to science.^[4] Moreover, the rise of China’s research productivity and published research output could have a big impact on how we communicate science.^[5] The bias, if it can be called a bias, towards the use of English in the current global scientific landscape, however, can lead to barriers for those who are non-native English speakers and also to important research study outcomes being overlooked because they are not written in English.

With today’s technological advances, English as the global language of science and innovation could change”

The consequences of overlooking non-English science may be more serious than just revealing a lack of access to information written in languages other than English. For example, in a study published in PLOS^[6], it was identified that important papers reporting the infection of pigs with avian influenza viruses in China were initially going unnoticed by international communities, including the World Health Organization and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. This was because they were published in Chinese-language journals^[7]. Likewise, in one of the non-English scientific papers it was reported that “urgent attention should be paid to the pandemic preparedness of these two subtypes of influenza”^[8]. It took 14 years for this finding to be picked up and reported on in the English language.

In a 2021 study, Plos Biology screened 419,679 peer-reviewed papers in 16 languages in the field of biodiversity and found that non-English-language studies can expand the geographical coverage of English-language evidence by 12% to 25%, especially in biodiverse regions. As with the study in the previous paragraph, the authors of this study urge wider disciplines to reassess the untapped potential of non-English-language science in informing decisions to address other global challenges.^[9]

Today the populations of native speakers of other languages are all growing faster than the population of native English speakers. About three times more people are native Chinese speakers as are native English speakers. Languages such as Hindi-Urdu, Arabic, Spanish, to name a few, are about the same as those whose native language is English, all of which are growing faster than native English speakers.

Many scientific papers go unnoticed because of the linguistic gap between the global north and the south. English has become the lingua franca of science to ease collaboration but has it really managed to do so? In fact the dominance of the English language risks excluding some of the global south countries.

Digital Science, as the creator of the world’s largest linked database for research information, Dimensions, is able to search the data it holds to find the language in which research publications are written. This is done using an algorithm to detect the language of publications.^[10] The total number of research publications currently stored in Dimensions is 139,644,299 and the table below highlights the probable numbers and percentages of publications in the top six languages of publication along with the number and percentage of publications where no language is detected. The total number of research publication languages in Dimensions is 148, ranging from a language with one publication to the highest numbers of publications set out in Table 1 below.

We also looked at trends over time (2001-2022) for the the top ten non-English language publications sourced from Dimensions (see Figure 1 below).

The top 10 non-English language publications and the percentage overall, show that a number of the top languages in the 2000s (in particular, French, German, Chinese, and Japanese) have waned in the 2010s; whereas others (Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, and especially Arabic, Turkish, and Indonesian) have increased significantly.  

In terms of non-English language research coverage in Dimensions (at least for the sum of the top ten 10 other languages), there has been a growth within the publications corpus from  circa 6% in 2001 to greater than 9% in 2022. We might conclude here that there is either an effect of more non-English research being indexed by Dimensions or that there are beginning to be signs of researchers publishing in their own language when it is other than English.

Perhaps it is time for the scientific world to acknowledge and embrace work published in all languages to help diversify science thereby enriching research globally.”

Conclusion

As we outlined, the language gap between the Global North and Global South is likely to have excluded much of the research in the lower income countries. As long as English remains the language for scientific communication, many people of other cultural backgrounds will continue to find it increasingly difficult to participate in the scientific process and benefit from its outcomes.^[11] With regard to patterns of non-English publishing over time, we cannot rule out that the increases that we see are not a product of Dimensions amassing more non-English research output, but, at the same time it could be that publication patterns have made shifts to digital and/or open access publications that have affected what is included in the Dimensions database. 

Perhaps it is time for the scientific world to acknowledge and embrace work published in all languages to help diversify science thereby enriching research globally.

Acknowledgement

Thanks to Alex Wade, VP Data Products, Digital Science, for providing time trends data and graph.

References

^[1] https://culturaldiplomacy.org/academy/pdf/research/books/nation_branding/English_As_A_Global_Language_-_David_Crystal.pdf

^[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00899-y

^[3] https://scientific-publishing.webshop.elsevier.com/manuscript-preparation/why-is-english-the-main-language-of-science/

^[4] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01679-6

^[5] https://scientific-publishing.webshop.elsevier.com/manuscript-preparation/why-is-english-the-main-language-of-science/

^[6] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7094971/pdf/41586_2004_Article_BF430955a.pdf

^[7] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7094971/

^[8] https://europepmc.org/article/cba/580966

^[9] https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3001296

^[10] Algorithm available on request.

^[11] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2020.00031/full

The post In the spotlight: English as the lingua franca in science appeared first on Digital Science.

Summary

In this blog we present findings from a bibliometric evaluation of scientific publications that include a contribution from the top ten pharmaceutical companies in the Global North and Global South, which have been indexed in Digital Science’s Dimensions database in the past five years (2018 to 2022). The study maps aspects of the landscape in this area exploring differences in pharmaceutical research practices from different perspectives including funding and collaboration, pharmaceutical research and its association with the SDGs, the impact of the cost of medicines developed by pharma and their accessibility in distinct geographic regions. The results show significant gaps between the two global areas, but also some ways where these gaps are now closing.

Contents

• Introduction
  • The new geography of the pharmaceutical industry
  • The pharmaceutical industry’s commitment to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
• Methodology
• Analysis
  • Global North and Global South
  • Pharmaceutical funding and collaboration with ‘access to medicine’ research publications
  • Pharma funding and collaboration associated with the UN Sustainable Development Goals
  • Funding Sources-Pharmaceutical Partnerships
• Conclusion
• References

Introduction

Access to essential medicines is a serious global concern, regardless of the income level of a country. Medicines are not affordable for those who need them in many low- and middle-income countries (the Global South), and many new medicines are too expensive even for the health systems of middle- and high-income countries (the Global North)^[2].

Staggeringly, an estimated two billion people worldwide still lack access to essential medicines and vaccines that could prevent and treat diseases, relieve suffering, improve quality of life and reduce deaths,^[3] and the majority of these people are living in global south countries. This is a clear example of fragmentation in our society – a disconnect between the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’, where science and medicine could save lives but are unable to overcome the barriers in their way.

Pharmaceutical companies are recognised as being uniquely positioned to remedy this and improve people’s lives by producing innovative and affordable medicines^[4]. However, their products have generally been developed to target more lucrative markets and, as a result, are often poorly matched with the needs of global south countries.

Achieving equitable access to medicines is a key component in the UN’s Sustainable Development Agenda. In particular, one of the targets of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 3 (SDG3) – ‘Good Health and wellbeing’ – is to achieve Universal Health Coverage (UHC) and is a critical driver to realising health equity. Equitable access and resilient health systems are the basis for UHC, by enabling availability, affordability, and acceptability to ensure that people can get the right medicines of the right quality at the right price and at the right place^[5].

Since 2006 the UN’s Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) has provided support and assistance to advance local pharmaceutical production in developing countries where its support contributes effectively to strengthening the health security of the global south countries and as a follow on to attaining SDG3, addressing the need for “access to safe, effective, quality, and affordable essential medicines and vaccines for all”^[6]. However, there remain barriers for many people in the world who have difficulty accessing the healthcare they need for multiple reasons, including:

Even for diseases that affect both the Global North and the Global South alike, research often focuses on products that are best suited for use in the Global North. For example, a lot of pharmaceutical research has been conducted on complex AIDS drugs that are more useful in global north countries, but too expensive and difficult to deliver to much of the population in global south countries.^[9] The lower income countries take the bulk of the global disease burden, yet essential healthcare products are often unaffordable or unavailable to them.

Achieving greater access for the global south countries who have less access to the most essential of medicines requires pharmaceutical companies to give them a place in their business operations. The 2022 ‘Access to Medicine Index’^[10] evaluates and compares 20 of the world’s leading research-based pharmaceutical companies according to their efforts to improve access to medicine. Data analysed for the 2022 Index found that more companies had stepped up their access efforts – including some companies that were previously less likely to take action.^[11] The data relates to 83 diseases, conditions and pathogens that disproportionately impact people living in the 108 global south countries in scope of the Index, where better access to medicine is most urgently needed. Most recently, Johnston & Johnston has agreed to allow generic versions of the drug bedaquiline in dozens (96) of lower income countries to be made available. It is implementing this by providing the Global Drug Facility (GDF)^[12] with licences enabling the organisation to procure and supply generic forms of the drug countries the organisation supplies.^[13]

The ability to contribute to health equity and, more specifically, facilitate access-to-medicine, has increasingly become a priority for the pharmaceutical industry. However, while steps are being taken to improve access to their products in the global south, many plans and strategies still overlook the poorest countries.

The new geography of the pharmaceutical industry

The geographic concentration of the pharmaceutical industry currently sits in those countries with the fastest growing economies. This concentration is gradually starting to shift and more and more we are seeing that pharmaceutical production in developing countries is increasing. For instance, India is now a more prominent and developing player in the global pharmaceutical industry and their domestic pharmaceutical market’s growth outpaced that of the overall economy by 2-3% a year^[14]. According to China Briefing, the Chinese pharmaceutical market has grown in the past few years, with a 200% increase in market capitalisation between 2016 and 2020.^[15] Thus, although the US pharmaceutical industry still dominates the global market, accounting for roughly 50% of global pharmaceutical sales revenue, we are seeing shifting patterns in the geography of the pharmaceutical industry.

The research-based pharmaceutical industry is also entering a new era in medicines development^[16] and there is fast growth in the market and research environment in emerging economies such as Brazil, China and India, leading to a gradual migration of economic and research activities from Europe to these markets^[17]. That said, of the 40 vaccine manufacturers in 14 nations that are part of The Developing Countries Vaccine Manufacturers Network, currently just one is African: the Biovac Institute based in Cape Town, South Africa, which delivers over 25 million doses of vaccines each year for illnesses such as measles, polio and tuberculosis.^[18]

Consequently there is still a heavy reliance on external sources and the export of medicines to African nations. However, within the next two decades, the African Union member states are aiming for 60% of Africa’s routinely used vaccines to be manufactured on the continent.^[19]  With roughly half the population of Africa lacking regular access to the most essential medicines, according to the WHO,^[20] attempts to reduce this has seen a growing number of healthcare practitioners beginning to build the pharmaceutical manufacturing capacity on the African continent.

Crossing the continents, Bangladesh’s pharmaceutical industry is unique in the Global South. Driven by active government policies, output has grown a thousand times since 1982, to US$2 billion (around 1% of gross domestic product), making it the biggest white collar employer in the country. The industry supplies pharmaceuticals to almost the entire domestic market and more than 100 other countries including the United States.^[21]

The pharmaceutical industry’s commitment to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

The value of translating scientific evidence into action in support of the SDGs and their attainment is of paramount importance. The pharmaceutical industry’s participation in accelerating achievement of the SDGs requires that its roadmap for research and development includes demonstrating its ability to tackle diseases in both global south and global north countries. 

The need to have access to safe and effective essential medicines is so important that it has been designated a basic human right by the World Health Organization.^[22] This importance has been given further weight by its inclusion in the UN’s Sustainable Development Agenda.

Access to medicine is essential for ending epidemics and reducing the mortality in non-communicable diseases and is one of the targets of Sustainable Development Goal 3 – Good Health and well-being (SDG3.4). Of course, living healthy lives is what most people would expect, or at the very least hope for, in the 21st century. However, for millions, this remains an aspiration. The mission of SDG3 is to change this and ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for people of all ages, and the pharmaceutical industry is making inroads in its contribution to SDG3 and beyond.

For example, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) expresses a long-term commitment to improving access to health care across the world. Since 2010, it has capped the prices of patented medicines and vaccines in the “least developed countries” at 25% of those in the EU5 (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the UK) as long as manufacturing costs are covered^[23]. 

We also examine how the UN SDGs influence the pharmaceutical industry to do more good than changing and saving lives. So although the pharmaceutical industry’s primary impact is in SDG3, other Goals such as SDG12 Responsible Consumption and Production and SDG6 Clean Water and Sanitation are also influential.

For example, a number of leading pharmaceutical companies now demonstrate ‘responsible production’ by, for example, reducing animal testing and hazardous chemical use (Bayer), recycling water in the manufacturing process (GSK), or education on vaccination for the community (Pfizer), along with wastewater management, water recycling, and the use of green chemistry aimed to address environmental issues. The above examples focus on targets set out in SDG12 and SDG6.

Methodology

We extracted the top ten pharmaceutical companies by income using GRID IDs (parent GRID), whilst extracting the (child GRID) ID for each company (the top pharmaceutical companies operate worldwide and have subsidiaries across the globe) and this allowed us to split them into those operating in global north countries and those operating in global south countries depending on operation bases, ie, where top ten pharmaceutical companies based in the Global North have operations carrying out pharmaceutical research and development in the Global South. Dimensions allows us to do this using Google Big Query (GBQ) bringing together World Bank data for the Global North and Global South distinction, and the research output from Dimensions, to perform the analyses.  

Next, a simple boolean search string was created: “access medicine”~3 and, along with our search string of top ten pharmaceutical companies, Dimensions retrieved the relevant research outputs for pharmaceutical companies in global north and in global south countries.

Using the set of search results we filtered the research output by Global South (low and lower-middle income countries) and Global North (high and upper-middle income countries).

Analysis

Global North and Global South

In this section we analysed the relevant research that involves the top ten pharmaceutical companies and their contribution to research on ‘access to medicine’ in the Global North and in the Global South.

To get an initial sense of the data, we first analysed ‘access to medicine’ research publications featuring top ten pharmaceutical companies, using Dimensions. This enabled us to ascertain the geographical distribution of the pharmaceutical companies’ participation in this domain (see Figure 1) in global north and global south countries.

Figure 1 details the total volume of research publications associated with ‘access to medicine’ research by country income level..  Of the total volume (3,165 publications), 109 (3.4%) include a contribution from the pharmaceutical industry. 1,473 publications from the dataset did not have the required data to determine country-income group (46%).

Pharmaceutical funding and collaboration with ‘access to medicine’ research publications

Figure 2 outlines the volume of papers across global north and global south countries over time.  We note that a mixed pattern emerges. We also note that numbers are small and might expect this for two reasons.  Firstly, access to medicine research is a particularly niche area of research, and secondly, historically, it has not been common for the pharmaceutical industry to collaborate on academic research. But this is changing with links between academia and the pharmaceutical industry increasing both as funding partners or as collaborators, or both.^[24] The data here would confirm this.  What is apparent is that pharmaceutical companies predominantly collaborate with researchers and fund more research in the high income countries of the Global North. Although there is evidence of pharmaceutical companies funding  and collaborating with research in the global south, it is to a much lesser extent. Figure 3 reveals that collaboration in conjunction with funding by pharma for research associated with ‘access to medicine’ is evident in 2022 for the first time. It would be interesting to see whether this is the starting point for the pharmaceutical industry’s engagement and collaboration with academic researchers in the Global South going forward.

The top ten pharmaceutical industry’s contribution to ‘access to medicine’ relevant research in Global North and Global South countries is displayed in Figure 3 above detailing the extent to which collaboration and funding in this area is focused in the two regions over an eight year period.  Immediately apparent is the stronger commitment to the higher income countries, where, in particular, the pharmaceutical industry’s collaborations with academic research is most pronounced. Funding and/or collaborating with research in the Global South shows data only across three years.

Pharma funding and collaboration associated with the UN Sustainable Development Goals

Figures 4a and 4b above assess the volume of research outputs that are associated with the UN’s SDGs, either funded or in collaboration with, or both, the pharmaceutical industry. Unsurprisingly, the research focus is predominantly with SDG3 – Good health and well-being, however the data would suggest that there are potentially starting to be signs of their focus extending to SDG12 Responsible Production and Consumption (eg, supply chains) and SDG6 Clean Water and Sanitation (eg, management of wastewater). With reference to SDG6, advances in wastewater treatment processes are being made in the industry to prevent the discharge of harmful substances into water resources and the environment. In fact  AstraZeneca has made an 18.7% reduction in water use since 2015 and 100% reduction of active pharmaceutical ingredients discharges from AstraZeneca sites. 92% of discharges from direct suppliers were in compliance with SDG6 target 6.3.^[25] With respect to SDG12 again, AstraZeneca averted 2,129 tonnes of waste in 2022 alone by selling it as a by-product.

The geographical distribution of the top ten pharmaceutical industry’s participation in research associated with ‘access to medicine’ research was examined using a collaborative network visualisation tool (see Figure 5 above), VOSviewer. The tool allows us to see, in this instance, countries participating in research focused on ‘access to medicine’, the collaborative networks between those countries, and where pharmaceutical companies concentrate their collaborations. Understanding geographic patterns can also help to identify potential gaps and highlight areas where more collaborative effort might be valuable. It can also indicate regions where the pharmaceutical industry is more proactive in supporting research on access to medicines.

Funding Sources-Pharmaceutical Partnerships

We present data in Figure 6 to provide an understanding of the financial and/or collaborative support from the pharmaceutical industry behind research focused on ‘access to medicine’ in different sectors. Analysis of the dataset using Dimensions, allowed us to determine the proportion of research funded by pharmaceutical companies, alongside other sources, including government agencies, foundations, and nonprofit organisations. The analysis provides an indication (despite small numbers^[26]) of the extent of the pharmaceutical industry’s financial commitment to ‘access to medicine’ research in the Global North and Global South, and helps to evaluate the diversity of pharmaceutical funding of research in this area.

Conclusion

Exploring a niche area of research as we have done here with our focus on ‘access to medicine’, means that the data retrieved will be small in number, and made smaller by the introduction of a filter which is possible using Dimensions which in this case is the top ten pharmaceutical companies. Lower numbers in an analysis naturally brings with it a number of caveats, and one in particular, the robustness of the data and subsequent outcomes.

Despite this, it is still worthwhile and beneficial to explore the research from this perspective and has provided some useful insights. Insights such as the industries that the pharmaceutical industry supports in this niche area and where we see that it is not just in healthcare but also in education, government, not for profits, etc that science is funded for the development of new pharmaceutical products aimed at transforming lives.

Further, the geography of the pharmaceutical industry’s participation in this area of research indicates perhaps the start of a growing commitment to its involvement in addressing the access to medicine in all areas in the world and evidence of collaboration across the Global North and Global South, however small, shows a level of responsibility being taken by the industry.

Finally, on a general note, a survey by the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry in 2022 found that ‘industry-academic links were at an all time high and identified several trends pointing to the continued support of the pharmaceutical industry for students training and research all across the UK and worldwide’.^[27]

References

^[1] https://www.gsk.com/en-gb/responsibility/global-health-and-health-security/improving-access-to-healthcare/

^[2] Wirtz VJ, Hogerzeil HV, Gray AL, Bigdeli M, de Joncheere CP, Ewen MA et al. Essential medicines for universal health coverage. Lancet. 2017;389(10067):403–76

^[3] https://cdn.who.int/media/docs/default-source/essential-medicines/fair-price/chapter-medicines.pdf?sfvrsn=adcffc8f_4&download=true

^[4] https://unglobalcompact.org/library/1011

^[5] https://www.gsk.com/en-gb/responsibility/global-health-and-health-security/improving-access-to-healthcare/

^[6] https://www.unido.org/our-focus-advancing-economic-competitiveness-investing-technology-and-innovation-competitiveness-business-environment-and-upgrading/pharmaceutical-production-developing-countries

^[7] https://www.astellas.com/en/sustainability/access-to-medicines

^[8] Pecoul, Bernard et al. 1999. “Access to Essential Drugs in Poor Countries: A Lost Battle?” Journal of the American Medical Association. January 27, 281:4, pp. 361–67

^[9] https://www2.hawaii.edu/~noy/362texts/pharma.pdf

^[10] https://accesstomedicinefoundation.org/medialibrary/2022_access-to-medicine-index-1669982470.pdf

^[11] https://accesstomedicinefoundation.org/medialibrary/2022_access-to-medicine-index-1669982470.pdf

^[12] https://www.stoptb.org/facilitate-access-to-tb-drugs-diagnostics/global-drug-facility-gdf

^[13] https://www.science.org/content/article/major-drug-company-bends-battle-over-access-key-tb-treatment?utm_source=Nature+Briefing%3A+Translational+Research&utm_campaign=89b7cf8e10-briefing-tr-20230726&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_872afe2a9a-89b7cf8e10-47896968

^[14] https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/indias-economic-ambitions-pharmaceutical-industry

^[15] https://www.china-briefing.com/news/china-booming-biopharmaceuticals-market-innovation-investment-opportunities/

^[16] https://www.efpia.eu/media/637143/the-pharmaceutical-industry-in-figures-2022.pdf

^[17] https://aijourn.com/press_release/pharmaceutical-glass-packaging-global-market-report-2023-growth-of-pharmaceutical-industry-in-emerging-economies-drives-sector-researchandmarkets-com/

^[18] https://unctad.org/news/covid-19-heightens-need-pharmaceutical-production-poor-countries

^[19] Saied, AbdulRahman A.a,b,*. Africa is going to develop their own health capabilities for future challenges – Correspondence. International Journal of Surgery 99():p 106585, March 2022. | DOI: 10.1016/j.ijsu.2022.106585

^[20] https://www.who.int/news/item/13-12-2017-world-bank-and-who-half-the-world-lacks-access-to-essential-health-services-100-million-still-pushed-into-extreme-poverty-because-of-health-expenses

^[21] https://www.un.org/ldcportal/content/what-ldc-graduation-will-mean-bangladesh%E2%80%99s-drugs-industry

^[22] https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/255355/9789241512442-eng.pdf

^[23] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6316355/

^[24] https://www.abpi.org.uk/media/news/2022/september/new-survey-shows-collaboration-between-pharmaceutical-industry-and-uk-academia-is-growing/#:~:text=This%20year’s%20survey%20shows%20that,3%2Dfold%20increase%20since%202015.

^[25] https://www.astrazeneca.com/content/dam/az/Sustainability/2023/pdf/Sustainability_Report_2022.pdf

^[26] The small numbers in part might be the result of the pharmaceutical industry being less eager to publish their funded research in this area, though the topic of the search for “access to medicine’ is less ‘confidential’ in comparison to research published on a potentially new pharmaceutical ingredients etc.

^[27] https://www.abpi.org.uk/facts-figures-and-industry-data/industry-and-academia-links-survey-2022/

The post A tale of two pharmas – Global North and Global South appeared first on Digital Science.

This title for a campaign might seem unexpected, and the reader may wonder what the drivers and scope are for such a theme of seemingly unlimited reach. This article sets out what we mean by fragmentation in the context of research, and how we will explore the topic through a variety of lenses during the campaign.

A connected yet fragmented world

Undoubtedly, we live in an ever more connected yet fragmented world affecting all walks of life, and the entire research ecosystem is no exception to this. Keeping up with developments in and around research is extremely challenging – be it about the literature and keeping abreast of the latest technologies and methodologies, or applying new tools and software that are capable of analysing the exploding number and size of datasets churning out information. With these developments comes the risk of disruption, inequalities and more uncertainties in a fragmented research ecosystem today.

One of the first questions that comes to mind is, if fragmentation can relate to components of the research system, does this mean there is a fragmentation of research itself? Or, to perhaps put it more simply: is research fragmented, and if so, how? This raises a series of further questions which we aim to address in a number of themes within our campaign, where we will focus on relevant topics, their relationship with fragmentation, and how to tackle them. We will highlight structural features of fragmentation, analytical approaches and consolidating concepts. We do this by focusing on those Digital Science tools which are relevant to the work we are doing throughout the campaign.

What is fragmentation?

The term fragmentation, defined as “the process or state of breaking or being broken into fragments” (link), in itself doesn’t lend itself as a particularly enticing concept. Neither is it particularly mysterious or perhaps, of great interest. However, on further examination of the term, there is something intriguing when looking at ‘fragmentation’ that is perhaps well worth exploring.

We can start by looking simply at the common use of the word in a Google search (statistics here) and how often ‘fragmentation’ was entered into the search bar and used as a first point interest (here). When compared to other phrases e.g. ‘consolidation’, the use of ‘fragmentation’ reveals an uninspiring baseline (link) confirming the rather mundane, infrequent use of the word (Fig 1a).

However, the frequency of ‘fragmentation’ as a term in a research context can be seen to be consistently on the rise as evidenced by a Dimensions database search of the scientific literature. (Fig 1b)

Fragmentation in a research context

What does fragmentation represent in the research world? Humankind developed and applied technologies in order to make things better and to solve big issues, however looking at it retrospectively, our problems haven’t been solved at all, if anything we can hardly keep pace with this ever changing fragmented research world. 

So, could fragmentation be about pieces (or fragments as per dictionary definition) or is it about fragmented processes? Meanings can be plentiful and diverse. What, for example, does it mean in the context of research and the corporate world? Is it about business based on geography (Global North vs Global South)? These are interesting questions which we aim to explore across the campaign and we highlight a number of specific items in the context of ‘Fragmentation: The pieces and the processes’.

We will look at how businesses in the corporate world react and make use of fragmentation in the context of their research and development endeavours. Corporates thrive in a fragmented research world in particular and we will highlight examples on how they engage with ‘fragmentation’ using the modern technologies they have at their disposal. One such example is modern drug discovery in pharmaceutical and agrochemical industry – both suffered over the last decades by exuberant costs for no real new results (measurable by active ingredients for new medicines and pesticides) – starting with high throughput screens and chemical compound libraries until in the early 2000s, screening for new drugs and Mode of Action detection got a new life by using fragment based drug design. Even more recent technical advances make use of fragments or fragmented states and to this end we will look at particular new trends in Pharmaceutical Research & Development and how Digital Science contributes to this by applying its state of the art technologies to gather insights.

Fragmentation as a research topic across time

Equipped with our Dimensions database, we are able to consider the emergence of ‘fragmentation’ in the research literature, and its distribution across the disciplinary ‘fields of research’ (FoRs) where we can see that, for example, from the 1960’s to the 1980’s research looking at fragmentation was predominately a domain of the Chemical Sciences, but in the last 20 to 30 years the Biological Sciences and Biomedical & Clinical Sciences both focus on the term along with Chemical Sciences.

Zooming in on what researchers might find intriguing about fragmentation we can take the concepts which are included in more recent research on fragmentation. Using a Dimensions tool (Landscape and Discovery) we can focus on the concepts (keywords) of research and their networks), in this case research including ’fragmentation’ to see the chemical (chain transfer polymerization, mass spectrometry) and biological concepts ( habitat, genetic diversity) – where interestingly a cluster of concepts focussing on human rights and sustainable development emerge too. 

This reveals that fragmentation (the pieces) as a research topic is alive and thriving in a number of disciplinary areas and which will be explored during this campaign.

Fragmentation: The divided research world

The processes aligned with fragmentation are more difficult to capture. However, we will shed light on these through an understanding of the processes in research, including its contributors, segments and the tools making up the research ecosystem; these will form the basis of our analysis. This campaign is also tied closely into one of Digital Science’s key missions: “Advancing the research ecosystem — together, we make open, collaborative and inclusive research possible“, and we look forward to working with the community throughout this work.

We start our campaign with a focus on global divides, where we explore some of the geographic aspects of a fragmented world, for example in the Global North and Global South countries where we know there are many disparities. We also examine global challenges though the lens of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and evaluate global issues including big data for sustainable development.

The campaign then moves into the domain of siloed knowledge, where we concentrate our attention on areas of research where a lack of integration can result in research findings remaining isolated, limiting their broader applicability across the research ecosystem. Bridging the fragmented nature of research knowledge gaps and promoting cross-disciplinary collaboration is another area where we provide insights. 

As outlined in our sub-themes above, fragmentation applies to many aspects of the research lifecycle across different contributors from academia, organisations, research funders, governments and businesses. Each are delicately networked, and none are immune to the effects of fragmentation.

Is there a solution to fragmentation? Is one needed?

Thinking about an end to (or overcoming of) fragmentation in the research ecosystem, one may think about processes in the research ecosystem such as interdisciplinarity & collaboration, inclusion, fusion or assimilation, which, in a corporate Research & Development context can be exemplified by looking at the merger and acquisition activities in the agrochemical industry in late nineties and early 2000s that led to a consolidation in this area of the corporate world (reviewed for ‘Mode of Action’ detection here or global seed companies here).

But what about the academic research world? We highlight one important area of the research ecosystem that is concerned with the communication of the results of research. Scholarly communication is by definition “ the ​process of academics, scholars and researchers sharing and publishing their research findings so that they are available to the wider academic community and beyond”. 

The traditional way of communicating results is via a publishing process that is very well established. However that got challenged in recent years by a number of developments and pressures from outside for which the core wasn’t any longer suitable. New developments required new solutions hence a plethora of innovative tools and solutions found their way into the researchers daily life to cope with new demands & expectations (e.g. OA) and challenges (the rise of social media). These developments were very neatly captured by a chart from the University of Utrecht – see here presented on Figshare – clearly showing the fragmented state of the art when it comes to tools and innovation in the space of scholarly communications.

Immediately the question arises if there is a need for consolidation analogous to the merger and acquisition in the corporate R&D world? We’d argue that there isn’t a need for consolidation, however, under the caveat that any change in workflow is an improvement and accepted by the community. And the stream of communication is not negatively affected in any way or format that would undermine the purpose of the communication of the results of research.

So, in this and in any other context then, is fragmentation in any aspect of the research ecosystem a good or a bad thing? Clearly a diversity of approaches and tools are necessary and vital to progress in the strive for research and development to overcome the divides that arise and we touch upon in our themes for this campaign -be it the geography, the discipline, the segment or any other player in the research ecosystem. 

We have seen unstructured, big fragmentations, particularly in the corporate world, with the result of consolidation of markets and (number of) companies in a particular space – see the example of seed companies and MoA detection to the benefit of better streamlined and more cohesive R&D approaches.

Digital Science was originally conceived of to provide new solutions in the fragmented space with its broad portfolio of companies covering various aspects of the day-to-day research life and its necessities. We understand the fragmented state of research affairs, offering bespoke solutions for individual niches.

This campaign is about analysing and telling stories of the fragmented research world, shedding a light on places where fragmentation occurs (be it, for example, silos of knowledge or global divides) and demonstrating how we can better understand the diversity of research to future-proof—and provide solid foundations for—the global research endeavour.

The post Exploring fragmentation: A divided research world appeared first on Digital Science.

Is a fragmented research ecosystem slowing global progress?

Research has the power to change lives, break down barriers and create unity & equity. When the research community solves problems together extraordinary breakthroughs can happen.

But post-pandemic, fragmentation in the research ecosystem remains one of the biggest challenges to the ability of researchers to make a real-world difference. We want to challenge the status quo, highlight the issues, and share positive ways to create better synergy and collaboration, helping to unite a divided research world.  

A new campaign

Today, 25th September 2023, we at Digital Science are launching a new campaign focusing on ‘Fragmentation – A divided research world?’.

We live in an ever more connected yet fragmented world, and the research ecosystem is no exception to this. An important question comes to mind: if components of the research ecosystem are fragmented, does this mean there is fragmentation of research itself? Or, to perhaps put it more simply: is research fragmented, and if so, how?

Our campaign aims to highlight the structural features of fragmentation, by consolidating concepts and by demonstrating a number of analytical approaches through the use of Digital Science tools such as Dimensions.

There is also something intriguing about ‘fragmentation’ that we think is worth exploring in the context of the research ecosystem, and we asked ourselves what fragmentation represents in the world of research. What does it mean in academia?  What does it mean in the corporate sector? 

The processes aligned with fragmentation are difficult to capture. However, we will shed light on these through an understanding of the processes in research, including its contributors, segments and the tools making up the research ecosystem; these will form the basis of our analysis. This campaign is also tied closely into one of Digital Science’s key missions: “Advancing the research ecosystem — together, we make open, collaborative and inclusive research possible“, and we look forward to working with the community throughout this work.

Global divides and siloed knowledge

We start our campaign with a focus on global divides, where we explore some of the geographic aspects of a fragmented world, for example in the Global North and Global South countries where we know there are many disparities.  We also examine global challenges though the lens of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and evaluate global issues including big data for sustainable development.  

The campaign then moves into the domain of siloed knowledge, where we concentrate our attention on areas of research where a lack of integration can result in research findings remaining isolated, limiting their broader applicability across the research ecosystem. Bridging the fragmented nature of research knowledge gaps and promoting cross-disciplinary collaboration is another area where we provide insights. 

Bridging the divides in research

Fragmentation applies to many aspects of the research lifecycle across different contributors from academia, organisations, research funders, governments and businesses. Each are delicately networked, and none are immune to the effects of fragmentation. 

Digital Science was originally conceived of to provide new solutions in the fragmented space with its broad portfolio of companies covering various aspects of the day-to-day research life and its necessities. We understand the fragmented state of research affairs, offering bespoke solutions for individual niches.

This campaign is about analysing and telling stories of the fragmented research world, shedding a light on places where fragmentation occurs (be it, for example, silos of knowledge or global divides) and demonstrating how we can better understand the diversity of research to future-proof—and provide solid foundations for—the global research endeavour.

Featured articles

Rank Outsiders

Can a new ranking reverse fragmentation in higher education?

A tale of two pharmas – Global North and Global South

Perspectives on funding & collaboration, and the localisation of SDGs in the pharmaceutical industry, via a bibliometric evaluation of scientific publications.

Exploring fragmentation: a divided research world.

This article sets out what we mean by fragmentation in the context of research, and how we will explore the topic through a variety of lenses during the campaign.

A multi-dimensional approach to assessing the impact of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

In this short interview, Dr Briony Fane and Dr Juergen Wastl explain the methods behind their work on assessing how global research ties into the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.

SDGs: A level playing field?

A new white paper on the UN SDGs shows more can be done to raise up funding and research recognition for the developing world.

Reaching out

If you’d like to find out more about what Digital Science does, or have an idea for and article or a topic we should cover during this campaign, please get in touch.

You can also meet our colleagues from across Digital Science at events & webinars throughout the year, including our recently relaunched Speaker Series and #FuturePub community events.

The post Fragmentation: a divided research world? appeared first on Digital Science.

If you’re new to SDGs and want to get a quick idea of how to look at them through a number of different lenses, this is the introduction for you.

Quick links

What are the SDGs and FoRs?

Briony:

The United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs, came into effect in January 2016. The 17 SDGs, are a call for action by all countries – developed and developing – in a global partnership. They recognise that ending poverty and other deprivations must go hand-in-hand with strategies that improve health and education, reduce inequality, and spur economic growth – all while tackling climate change and working to preserve our oceans and forests. And importantly, leaving no one behind. Every year, the UN Secretary General presents an annual SDG Progress Report, which is developed in cooperation with the UN System, and based on the global indicator framework, data produced by national statistical systems and information collected at the regional level. 

The Fields of Research (FoR) classification is a component of the 2020 Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classification (ANZSRC) system, developed in 2008 and updated in 2020. It categorises all research and development (R&D) activity using a single system. The system is hierarchical, with major fields subdivided into minor fields (FoRs).

SDGs and research impact assessment

Juergen:

My overarching motivation is that I like to unearth interesting details about research, and how it connects to other things, and in particular those details and connections that aren’t necessarily obvious at first glance.

What does this mean in practice? Well, I usually like to start by thinking in two dimensions. For the first dimension we usually look at the different fields of research (FoR), but when we’re doing research assessment, having a simple uni-dimensional view like this can be somewhat limiting. So I like to open up a matrix / heatmap and spread whatever we look at into different corners to see what picture emerges, to see if hotspots emerge. Effectively doing a breadth-first rather than a depth-first search is a 2-dimensional data visualisation technique that represents the magnitude of individual values within a dataset as a colour.

At any point in time there is always a focus on a particular discipline or disciplines — nowadays an obvious one is computer science and AI — but there may be other characteristics to the particular pieces of research in that area. So by adding a second layer, a second dimension, you get a heatmap and can dive deeper into those areas that look interesting when seen through that perspective.

As an example, consider the field of engineering (FoR40). Engineering is very broad, so how do you narrow it down? You could start by choosing a particular branch of engineering, but in doing so you might miss some really interesting things. But if you look at it from the point of view of societal impact with SDGs, then you get a different, more interesting picture. We could, for example, then say: “Oh, we’ve looked at automotive engineering, what will it do in the future? Is e-fuels a thing? Is there already research? When did it start? Did it kick off in 2016 with the launch of the SDGs?” 

So SDGs are, for me, the second axis to open up another dimension in order to do a deep dive into existing research and to highlight it from a new angle. 

Briony:

To add my perspective, I would describe it as follows: using whichever SDGs are relevant, we can look at the associated research in a much more nuanced and detailed fashion. 

To me it is important we look at the sustainability side of research in ways that others might not.

For example, researchers might not look at the Global North – Global South divide — this is the high- and middle-income countries vs the low- and lower-middle-income countries, respectively — from the perspective of, let’s say, climate change, and putting the two together, like we did in our recent piece on Zoonotic diseases. So, whilst we’re not doing a meta analysis, what we do helps to see things from what you might call a meta viewpoint; it helps us to narrow it down in one axis whilst keeping it broad in others.

Finding the needle in the haystack

Briony:

It’s a way of taking what would otherwise be a really big, intractable topic and giving us a particular angle to look at it from, or a particular filter or lens to look at it through.

It also enables us to showcase how much research has been labelled as being associated with one or more SDGs. The fact that we can identify and tag the research of academics helps showcase how much is being carried out that connects with the sustainability agenda. It’s a viewpoint we have because of the SDG coverage in Dimensions. Other databases don’t attach SDG labels to funding and policy documents, but Dimensions does. It enables this meta viewpoint which is really exciting, and allows us to look at the data in a more nuanced and thorough manner.

Juergen:

Yes, exactly! One of the things that we have done, particularly with our early SDG work, is to look at the potential citation advantage of SDG papers that underpin impact case studies, to determine whether there is an advantage or not. We also looked into how SDGs feature in a UK REF submission, as well as SDGs and impact case studies, using the narrative of a REF impact case study, classifying it externally via our classifier in Dimensions, and then carrying out different analyses. 

So it’s all about opening up new avenues, and looking at research from different angles. 

But we still have to be careful with SDGs. They are not as broadly available as FoRs are — FoRs capture 80% of publications in Dimensions. With SDGs that goes down to about 20-25%, because not all research is published in the context of an SDG. So in a way the SDGs are a good classification system, but not as broad as sometimes people think they might be. From a policy stakeholder point of view, and from a funder point of view it is a hot topic. So we like to look at any analysis that we have on FoRs and, where appropriate, map SDGs onto these.

The benefits for decision makers

Juergen: 

The flexibility of the classification systems in Dimensions and in this case, the SDG classification system, means we could in theory produce an infinite number of reports of course. However, I always try to focus on uncovering results that will be interesting and useful from a decision-making perspective.

In that sense, I’m particularly proud of the ways in which we link SDGs to Dimensions’ dashboards — for example, it took quite a lot of effort to include SDG-type functionality in the P&I dashboard.

It’s also worth pointing out that, unlike in many products and services where the dashboards that are provided only give you a visualisation of something without the ability to drill into the data behind it, with ours you can actually get right to the data. And however you slice and dice or filter your graphs, you can download the data for whatever is in that particular graph that you’re interested in. 

So that’s an important difference, and we’ve had feedback from our development partners that it’s really well received.

Briony:

I’d echo that, and add that we are also driven and inspired by the conversations we have with people — whether it be colleagues here at Digital Science or the researchers or research administrators in academia and industry. For example, I get approached by colleagues wanting to know more about the topic. Digital Science is full of curious and interesting people, and I love that!

Conversations like this often lead to ideas for an analysis that might be relevant to a particular sector or industry, and if we can align these with our internal priorities, and find a good narrative then that’s even better. But even with this approach, for me the subject matter is as important as the underpinning motivation for the reports. It does not seem advantageous to just put an analysis on our website for the sake of it — there has to be a clear rationale for what we’re doing that ties the work to sustainable development goals or some broader related global challenge — and if that’s not there we will park it and focus on something else.

What lies ahead?

Briony:

Our early work was very UK-centric — related to the REF — but our recent reports, blogs and conference contributions have been much more globally relevant. I see this continuing; we’re now in a rather unique position (given the Dimensions data) to look at the global trends and impact of research. Through our work with the wider research community, we are keen to ensure this impact analysis is as available and accessible as possible, for instance through the dashboards Juergen mentioned.

Juergen:

Yes, as Briony says, in addition to the dashboards our initial SDG reports have already led to a number of notable publications with a global focus – most recently we presented jointly with the Prince Sultan University and the Times Higher Education an SDG analysis on all aspects on research in the context of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals in the Developed and Developing World – with a particular focus on the Global South, which we have listed in the following section.

Our key findings

Below is a selection of our recent works covering SDGs, from their appearance in UK academic research assessments, to revealing disparities in efforts to combat the spread of zoonotic diseases amid climate change.

• Contextualizing Sustainable Development Research
  In the report we ask, if we are to have an impact agenda for research, should it not be one that is informed by the SDGs? And if so, should we not be actively measuring sustainable development as part of research evaluation?
• UK Academic Research Contributions to the SDGs Observed Through National Assessment Submissions
  Higher education institutions have a uniquely important role to play in delivering solutions to the SDGs.
• In search of SDGs in REF Impact Case Studies
  This post focuses on the impact of the UK’s research excellence framework (REF) submissions in relation to the UN SDGs.
• How is UK funding Allocated to Support Sustainability Research?
  Dr Juergen Wastl, Dr Briony Fane and Bo Alroe take a look at the distribution of UKRI grant funding supporting sustainability research.
• When economy meets environment: Sustainable development and the case of wastewater pollution in textile manufacturing
  A new analysis of research on wastewater pollution and textile manufacturing reveals the impact of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
• Zooming in on zoonotic diseases
  An analysis has revealed disparities in the research effort to combat the growing risk of animal-borne diseases amid climate change.
• SDGs: A level playing field?
  A new white paper on the UN SDGs shows more can be done to raise up funding and research recognition for the developing world.
• Vaccine Hesitancy and the importance of Trust
  With trust in research a critical issue, our team takes a detailed look at a key ‘trust marker’ in research publications on vaccine hesitancy.

We are continuing to conduct further analysis, and will update this article with additional links as we publish our new findings. If you’d like to discuss potential collaboration opportunities, or to find out more about our use of Dimensions, we’d love to hear from you — please get in touch ✉

The post A multi-dimensional approach to assessing the impact of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) appeared first on Digital Science.

“Research has integrity when it is carried out in a way that is trustworthy, ethical, and responsible”

UK Committee on Research Integrity

There is growing interest in ensuring the transparency and reproducibility of published scientific research to ensure trust. Although there have been improvements in the last few years in aspects of reproducibility and transparency (eg, data and code availability), further improvements to make research fully reproducible across disciplines. In particular, features that highlight the integrity of research should be made more prominent are still required.¹ In this blog we primarily focus on data availability as a marker of trust, to understand the practice of data sharing and also to see how this is changing over time.

Digital Science’s Dimensions has recently integrated a research integrity dashboard to provide access to data for trust markers in research publications, which are hallmarks of research integrity and open science. These include statements regarding data availability, code availability, competing interests, conflict of interest, and ethics approval, all of which are the markers of trustworthiness and reproducibility.

We take a detailed look at trust markers in a particular research area, vaccine hesitancy, and evaluate the proportion of scientific research publications that report on one of the sources of trust markers. Vaccine hesitancy is defined as “a delay in acceptance, or refusal of vaccination despite availability of vaccination services”², and is driven by a number of factors. It is a global phenomenon supported by anti-vaccination groups, fake news, and misinformation spread through social media.³

In 2019 the World Health Organization (WHO) identified vaccine hesitancy as a top global health threat.⁴ According to WHO, it threatens to reverse the historic global efforts to stop vaccine-preventable diseases. Vaccine hesitancy was chosen as a subject with which to explore issues concerning trust because of the nature of the research and its potential to include trust markers.⁵ Markers such as ethics approval, data availability, data availability status eg, supplementary files providing access to data, are likely to be a requirement from a funder and/or journal to ensure the integrity of research including its reproducibility and transparency.

Vaccine hesitancy is closely linked to the clinical sciences as a research area. However, this topic is relevant in a societal context, from a public health perspective and in understanding why there is hesitancy. We might also expect that developing effective health communications and campaigns to correct vaccine misinformation, for example, would link to the social sciences. In this context, we will also look for interdisciplinarity within the vaccine hesitancy research output and compare the coverage of data availability in the social sciences with the clinical sciences, while at the same time assessing any crossover, providing evidence of interdisciplinarity.

Research questions

1. Vaccine hesitancy and its representation in research publications based on research classifications:

2. Do Trust markers play a role in vaccine hesitancy research?

3. Do patterns emerge amongst the data?

Methodology

1. A ‘vaccine hesitancy’ search string was sourced and adapted from a recent paper on vaccine hesitancy and Covid-19.⁶ The search string is included below as an Appendix.

2. Relevant research publications were used to pull out data from GBQ relating to:

3. The Dimensions Research Integrity dataset was used in conjunction with Google Big Query (GBQ) to access data relating to trust markers in research associated with vaccine hesitancy. These data feed into the Dimensions Research Integrity dashboard that is accessible in Dimensions.

4. Python programming was used to analyse the data.

Results

To get an initial sense of the data, we first analysed the vaccine hesitancy research publications from Dimensions to ascertain the distribution of subject areas within which the research in this area is aligned. We looked at the top five RCDC areas which provide the bulk of research in this area. We then use these data to unpick the inclusion of data availability statements alongside research outputs.

Table 1 below demonstrates the acceleration in data availability statements in the last five years.

Year	Number of vaccine hesitancy research publications	No. of vaccine hesitancy research papers including a data availability statement	Percentage of vaccine hesitancy research papers including a data availability statement
2018	41	4	9.8 %
2019	59	6	10.2 %
2020	107	15	14 %
2021	269	75	27.9 %
2022	302	99	32.8 %

To provide an example of research integrity available in the Dimensions Research Integrity dataset we explored one trust marker – data availability statements – and extracted the data attached to each of the categories of data availability. Figure 3 below displays the percentage for each category over a seven-year time period. Although there is an overall increase in data files made available on request from authors (peacock blue), the same increase has not translated to the inclusion of data made available as a file attached to the research publication. Other categories of data availability (online repository, not publicly available, etc) are small in number and show no pattern.

Figure 4 highlights the transformation in the uptake of data availability statements in published research as categorised by the RCDC classification systems available in Dimensions. We evidence an extremely small proportion of publications acknowledging a data available statement in 2011 (the year Dimensions established its reporting on trust markers) increasing to an 82% uptake in 2022. This rise in data availability is very marked and almost certainly related to the speed with which the research community responded to the Covid-19 pandemic. The arrival of Covid established a repositioning in data availability statements, either acknowledged or physically attached to vaccine hesitancy research publications.

The word clouds below set out a representation of the most included concepts in research publications associated with vaccine hesitancy. What is noticeable is that the focus for this research is associated with a number of vaccines pre-Covid but shifts to a predominance of Covid vaccine research during the post-Covid years.

What is also of note is that out of 147 vaccine hesitancy research publications published pre-Covid (2017-2019) 12 (8.1%) include a data availability statement, however, for research publications published post-Covid (2020-2022) we note that out of 725 vaccine hesitancy publications,190 (26%) include data availability statements. Although vaccine research turned around to respond to the Covid pandemic, and likely accounted for the marked increase in data availability, there are still signs of vaccine research generally for infectious diseases (see Figures 5 & 6).

Identifying and understanding the social basis of vaccine hesitancy is important for matters such as future public health policy planning and developing and implementing methods to spread accurate information about the safety and effectiveness of vaccination. This would be  important for reducing or eliminating vaccine hesitancy.

Figure 7 displays four distinct clusters showing the connections within and between each topic area. The four clusters can be further visualised within two distinct clusters: i) two clinical/health research clusters (HPV and, more recently, a Covid related domain) and, ii) two social research clusters (religious exemption and conscientious objection – connected by the concept of ‘law’). The topic network visualisation gives us a sense of the multi- and interdisciplinary nature of vaccine related research.

Conclusions

The scientific research community is aware that the integrity and trustworthiness of their published research is of increasing importance, and research integrity practices are changing rapidly in response to this. Data transparency has played a key role in research conducted to develop a Covid vaccine. This blog demonstrates the considerable increase in the adoption of just one trust marker, data availability statements, as we move towards an era where open and trustworthy science are crucial. The more that data is made publicly available the more transparency, accountability, and democratisation of the research process is enabled.

Dimensions Research Integrity

To learn more about Dimensions Research Integrity and to request a demo or a free quote, click here: https://www.dimensions.ai/request-a-demo-or-quote/

Footnotes

1. https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.2006930

2. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25896383/

3. https://doi.org/10.29333/ejgm/13186

4. World Health Organization. Ten Threats to Global Health in 2019; WHO: Geneva, Switzerland, 2019.

5. Trust markers are explicit statements on a research publication such as funding, data availability, conflict of interest, author contributions, and ethical approval and represent a contract between authors and readers that proper research practices have been observed. Trust markers highlight a level of transparency within a publication and reduce the reputational risks of allowing non-compliance to research integrity policies to go unobserved.

6. https://www.ejgm.co.uk/article/analyzing-research-trends-and-patterns-on-covid-19-vaccine-hesitancy-a-bibliometric-study-from-2021-13186

7. The Research, Condition, and Disease Categorization (RCDC) is a classification scheme used by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) for reporting required by the US Congress. The implementation of this system used automated allocation of RCDC codes to documents in Dimensions based on category definitions defined by machine learning.

Appendix

Vaccine hesitancy search string:

"vaccin* hesitan*" OR "hesitan* to vaccine*" OR "vaccin* refusal" OR "refusal to vaccine*" OR "vaccin* opposition" OR "opposit* to vaccin*" OR "antivacc* group*" OR "antivax" OR antivaxx OR antivaccination OR "object* to vaccin*" OR "resilience to vaccin*" OR "debate against vaccin*" OR "vaccin* *compliance" OR "vaccine* *adherence" OR "resist* to vaccin*" OR "incomplete vaccin*" OR "misinformation about vaccine*" OR "vaccin* misinformation" OR "vaccin* criticism*" OR "delaying vaccin*" OR "anxiety from vaccin*" OR "criticism to vaccin*" OR "barrier* to vaccin*" OR "lack of intent to vaccin*" OR "poor completion of vaccin*" OR "compulsory vaccin*" OR "negative perception about vaccin*" OR "engagement in vaccin*" OR "choice to vaccin*" OR "awareness about vaccin*" OR "knowledge about vaccin*" OR "behavi* toward vaccin*" OR "poor vaccin* uptake" OR "vaccin* uptake rate" OR "doubts about vaccine*" OR "acceptance of vaccine*" OR "acceptability of vaccine*" OR "contravers* about vaccine*" OR "fear from vaccin*" OR "belief in vaccin*" OR "mandatory vaccin*" OR "compulsory vaccin*" OR "willingness to accept vaccin*" OR "willing to accept a vaccin*" OR "parental control of child* vaccin*" OR "willingness to vaccinate" OR "willingness to accept vaccin*" OR ("religious exemption" AND vaccin*) OR "vaccin* accept*" OR "vaccin* resist*" OR "vaccin* conspiracy" OR "vaccin* skepticism" OR "accept* of the vaccin*" OR "intent* to vaccin*" OR "intent* to get vaccin*" OR "attitude* toward* vaccin*"

The post Vaccine hesitancy and the importance of trust: An investigation using Digital Science’s Dimensions Research Integrity (DRI) appeared first on Digital Science.

]]> https://www.digital-science.com/blog/2023/04/our-new-avenue-for-interesting-things/ Thu, 27 Apr 2023 18:25:36 +0000 https://www.digital-science.com/?post_type=tldr_article&p=62313 Welcome to Digital Science TL;DR, our new avenue for interesting things!
We bring you short, sharp insights into what’s going on across the Digital Science group; both through our in-house experts and in conversation with amazing people from the community. And we’ll keep it brief!

The post Our new avenue for interesting things appeared first on Digital Science.

]]> Welcome to Digital Science TL;DR, our new avenue for interesting things!

We bring you short, sharp insights into what’s going on across the Digital Science group; both through our in-house experts and in conversation with amazing people from the community. And we’ll keep it brief!

Why TL;DR? Because we’ve all experienced the “Too long; didn’t read” feeling at times, and by explicitly calling this out we’re making sure we provide a short summary at the top of every article here. 🙂

Introducing our core team

We have a core team of five (at present!) who will be the primary authors of new content on the site, often working in collaboration with our in-house experts and those in the scientific and research community.

You can think of it like our core team acting as the lightning rods ⚡ attracting cool, exciting, and sometimes provocative content from across the Digital Science group and our wider community of partners, end users, customers and friends.

And so without further ado, please say hello to: Briony, John, Leslie, Simon and Suze!

Briony Fane

Briony Fane is Director of Researcher Engagement, Data, at Digital Science. She gained a PhD from City, University of London, and has worked both as a funded researcher and a research manager in the university sector. Briony plays a major role in investigating and contextualising data for clients and stakeholders. She identifies and documents her findings, trends and insights through the curation of customised in-depth reports. Briony has extensive knowledge of the UN Sustainable Development Goals and regularly publishes blogs on the subject, exploring and contextualising data from Dimensions.

John Hammersley

John Hammersley has always been fascinated by science, space, exploration and technology. After completing a PhD in Mathematical Physics at Durham University in 2008, he went on to help launch the world’s first driverless taxi system now operating at London’s Heathrow Airport.

John and his co-founder John Lees-Miller then created Overleaf, the hugely popular online collaborative writing platform with over eleven million users worldwide. Building on this success, John is now championing researcher and community engagement at Digital Science.

He was named as one of The Bookseller’s Rising Stars of 2015, is a mentor and alumni of the Bethnal Green Ventures start-up accelerator in London, and in his spare time (when not looking after two little ones!) likes to dance West Coast Swing and build things out of wood!

Leslie McIntosh

Leslie McIntosh is the VP of Research Integrity at Digital Science and dedicates her work to improving research and investigating and reducing mis- and disinformation in science.

As an academic turned entrepreneur, she founded Ripeta in 2017 to improve research quality and integrity. Now part of Digital Science, the Ripeta algorithms lead in detecting trust markers of research manuscripts. She works around the globe with governments, publishers, institutions, and companies to improve research and scientific decision-making. She has given hundreds of talks including to the US-NIH, NASA, and World Congress on Research Integrity, and consulted with the US, Canadian, and European governments.

Simon Porter

Simon Porter is VP of Research Futures at Digital Science. He has forged a career transforming university practices in how data about research is used, both from administrative and eResearch perspectives. As well as making key contributions to research information visualization, he is well known for his advocacy of Research Profiling Systems and their capability to create new opportunities for researchers.

Simon came to Digital Science from the University of Melbourne, where he worked for 15 years in roles spanning the Library, Research Administration, and Information Technology.

Suze Kundu

Suze Kundu (pronouns she/her) is a nanochemist and a science communicator. Suze is Director of Researcher and Community Engagement at Digital Science and a Trustee of the Royal Institution. Prior to her move to DS in 2018, Suze was an academic for six years, teaching at Imperial College London and the University of Surrey, having completed her undergraduate degree and PhD in Chemistry at University College London.

Suze is a presenter on many shows on the Discovery Channel, National Geographic and Curiosity Stream, a science expert on TV and radio, and a science writer for Forbes. Suze is also a public speaker, having performed demo lectures and scientific stand-up comedy at events all over the world, on topics ranging from Cocktail Chemistry to the Science of Superheroes.

Suze collects degrees like Pokémon, the latest being a Masters from Imperial College London that focused on outreach initiatives and their impact on the retention of women engineering graduates within the profession.

Suze is a catmamma and in her spare time loves dance and Disney, moshing and musical theatre.

Introducing our core topics

We are focusing our content around a set of core topics which are critical not just to the research community but to the world as a whole; at Digital Science we believe research is the single most powerful transformational force for the long-term improvement of society, and our vision is a future where a trusted, frictionless, collaborative research ecosystem helps to drives progress for all.

With this vision in mind, our five core topics at launch are: Global Challenges, Research Integrity, The Future of Research, Open Research, and Community Engagement.

These topics will no doubt continue to evolve over time, but that gives us a lot to get started with! Here’s the short summary of what those topics mean to us:

Global challenges

Most of the world’s technical and medical innovations begin with a scientific paper. It has been said that the faster science moves, the faster the world moves.

But perhaps more importantly, society increasingly looks to science for solutions to today’s most pressing social and environmental challenges. If we’re going to face up to complex health issues, an ageing population, and the digital transformation of the world, we need science and research that is faster, more trustworthy, and more transparent.

With this in mind, we explore how science and research, and its communication, is evolving to meet the needs of our rapidly changing world.

Research integrity

Research integrity will be a dominant theme in scholarly communications over the next decade. Challenges around ChatGPT, papermills, and fake science will only get thornier and more complex. We expect all stakeholders – research institutions, publishers, journalists, funding agencies, and many others – will need to dedicate more resources to fortify trust in science.

Even faced with these challenges, taking the idea of making research better from infancy to integration is exciting. Past and present, our team has built novel and faster ways to establish trust in research. We are happy to have grown a diverse group that will continue to develop the technical pieces needed to assess trust markers.

The future of research

Since its inception, Digital Science has always concerned itself with the future of research tools and infrastructure, with many of our products playing a transformative role in the way research is collaborated on, organised, described and analysed. Within this topic, we explore how Digital Science capabilities can continue to contribute to research future discussions, as well as highlighting interesting developments and initiatives that capture our imagination.

Open research

At Digital Science, we build tools that help the researchers who will change the world. Information wants to be free and since the dawn of the web, funders have been innovating their policies to ensure that all research will become open.

Digital Science believes that Open Research will help level the playing fields and allow anyone anywhere to contribute to the advancement of knowledge. It also helps with other areas that pre-web academia struggled with. These include, reproducibility, transparency, accessibility and inclusivity.

These posts will cover the why and the how of open research, as it becomes just “research”.

Community engagement

One of Digital Science’s founding missions was to invest in and nurture small, fledging start-ups to transform scholarly research and communication. Those founding teams now form the heart of Digital Science, and the desire to make, build, and change things for the better is at the core of what we do.

But we’ve never done that in isolation; Digital Science is a success because it’s always worked with the community, and most of us came from the world of research in one form or another!

In these community engagement posts we highlight and showcase some of the brilliant new ideas and start-ups in the wider science, research and tech communities.

What’s up next?

That’s all for this welcome post, but stay tuned for a whole batch of launch content being written as we speak! We’ll also have regular weekly posts from the team, and would love to hear from you if you have an idea for a subject we should cover, or simply if you’d like to say hello! 

You can contact us via the button in the top bar or footer, or via the social media links for our individual authors. 

Ciao for now!  

The post Our new avenue for interesting things appeared first on Digital Science.

]]> https://www.digital-science.com/blog/2023/03/zooming-in-on-zoonotic-diseases/ Thu, 23 Mar 2023 09:00:00 +0000 https://www.digital-science.com/?p=61626 An analysis has revealed disparities in the research effort to combat the growing risk of animal-borne diseases amid climate change.

The post Zooming in on zoonotic diseases appeared first on Digital Science.

]]> Analysis reveals disparities in funding to combat global impacts of climate change on health

Climate change is one of the biggest threats to health.”

<strong>Dr Beth Thompson</strong>

Interim Director of Strategy, Wellcome Trust (7 February 2023)

This blog addresses the impact of climate change on infectious diseases, in particular infectious diseases with the potential to transmit from animals to humans, also known as zoonotic diseases. To set the scene for this, we first consider the wider context of how global warming has far-reaching consequences for humans and the planet. The global changes that we are currently experiencing have never happened before, with climate change representing one of the principal environmental and health challenges. We use Dimensions to explore published research, research funding, policy documents and citation data. To help us perform a deeper analysis of the data, we access the Dimensions data through its Google BigQuery (GBQ) provision. This allows us to integrate data from Dimensions with one of the  publicly available World Bank datasets on GBQ.  

We also look at the research in conjunction with two United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – SDG3 Good Health and Well-being and SDG13 Climate Action – and assess how they add to the narrative. Many of the health impacts associated with climate change are a particular threat to the poorest people in low- and middle-income countries where the burden of climate sensitive diseases is the greatest. This also suggests that the impact in these regions, based on the UN SDGs, may reach beyond climate (SDG13) and health (SDG3) to affect those who live in extreme poverty (SDG1) and/or those who experience food insecurity (SDG2).

“The climate crisis is a health crisis”

Introduction

1. Climate change and zoonotic diseases

Climate change has far-reaching implications for human health in the 21st century, with significant increases in temperature extremes, heavy precipitation, and severe droughts.¹ It directly impacts health through long-term changes in rainfall and temperature, climatic extremes (heatwaves, hurricanes, and flash floods), air quality, sea-level rise in low-land coastal regions, and many different influences on food production systems and water resources.²

In terms of human health, climate change has an important impact on the transmission of vector-borne diseases (human illnesses caused by parasites), in particular zoonotic infectious diseases (infections transmitted from animal to humans by the bite of infected arthropod species, such as mosquitoes and bats), and has a particular relevance due to the most recent COVID-19 and Zika virus outbreaks. Arthropods are of major significance due to their abundance, adaptability, and coevolution to different kinds of pathogens.³ 

Zoonotic infectious diseases are a global threat because they can become pandemics, as we have seen in the case of COVID-19, and are currently considered one of the most important threats for public health globally. The COVID pathogen spread worldwide, recording 255,324,963 cases with 5,127,696 deaths as of November 2021.⁴

One reason for this turnaround could be related to the widespread adoption of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and in particular SDG6, which sets out to “ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all”.⁹ The achievement of this Goal, even if partially, would greatly benefit people and the planet, given the importance of clean water for socio-economic development and quality of life, including health and environmental protection. SDG6 considers improvement of water quality by reducing by half the amount of wastewater that is not treated by 2030.

The changes in climatic conditions have forced many pathogens and vectors to develop adaptation mechanisms. For example, in the case of African Ebola, climate change is a factor in the rise in cases over the past two decades, with bats and other animal hosts of the virus being driven into new areas when temperatures change, potentially bringing them into closer contact with humans.  

Examples highlighting how the acceleration of zoonotic pathogens is attributable to changes in climate and ecology due to human impact are common. According to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), almost six out of every 10 infectious diseases can be spread from animals to humans; three out of every four emerging infectious diseases in humans originate from animals.⁵ Zoonotic diseases, such as those spread by mosquitoes and other related vectors, have increased in recent years. This is because the rise in global temperatures has created favourable conditions for breeding specific pathogens, especially in poorly developed countries predominantly in the Global South.⁶ Further, climate change is causing people’s general health to deteriorate, making it easier for zoonotic infections to spread, as seen with the Zika and dengue viruses.⁷

The changes in climatic conditions have forced pathogens and vectors to develop adaptation mechanisms. Such development has resulted in these diseases becoming resistant to conventional treatments due to their augmented resilience and survival techniques, thus further favouring the spread of infection.

2. Exploring links between climate change and zoonotic diseases as evidenced by mentions in policy documents

Developments in policy are generally rooted in academic research. Applying research to policy relevant questions is increasingly important to address potential problems and can often identify what has been successful or not successful elsewhere. Citations to the research that underpins policy documents is known to be an important (proxy) indicator of the quality of the research carried out. Awareness and the course of action taken by governments, NGOs and other health-focused institutions is evident by their activity in this area. For example, in the UK the government has recently allocated £200 million to fight zoonotic diseases.⁹ Actions that are taken relevant to this are communicated by, for example, relevant policy documents which mention the research influencing public policy decision making in this area. Policy documents provide us with a different perspective for analysis, allowing a closer proximity to ‘real world’, society-facing issues. 

3. The SDG3 and SDG13 crossover: research outputs associated with zoonotic diseases and climate change

The UN launched the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development to address an ongoing crisis: human pressure leading to unprecedented environmental degradation, climatic change, social inequality, and other negative planet-wide consequences.¹⁰ There is growing evidence that environmental change and infectious disease emergence are causally linked and there is an increased recognition that SDGs are linked to one another. Thus, understanding their dynamics is central to achieving the vision of the UN 2030 Agenda. But environmental change also has direct human health outcomes via infectious disease emergence, and this link is not customarily integrated into planning for sustainable development.¹¹

Two of the 17 UN SDGs of most relevance to zoonotic diseases and climate change are SDG3 and SDG13.

Looking specifically at SDG3, reducing global infectious disease risk is one of the targets for the Goal (Target 3.3), alongside strengthening prevention strategies to identify early warning signals (Target 3.d).¹² Given the direct connection between environmental change and infectious disease risk, actions taken to achieve other SDGs also have an impact on the achievement of SDG3. Moreover, strengthening resilience and adaptive capacity to climate-related hazards and natural disasters is one of the targets for SDG13 (Target 13.1).¹³ The two SDGs perhaps highlight two sides of the same coin – SDG3 focusing on preventing and reducing disease risks and SDG13 focusing on strengthening resilience of climate-related hazards (infectious disease being an obvious hazard).

Exploring the crossover between SDG3 and SDG13 using Dimensions, reveals interlinkages with other SDGs – SDG1 No Poverty and SDG2 Zero Hunger. We know that living in poverty has negative impacts on health, and in respect of climate change, economic loss attributed to climate-related disasters is now a reality. Experiencing hunger can be a consequence of vulnerable agricultural practices that negatively impact food productivity and production. In 2020, between 720 and 811 million persons worldwide were suffering from hunger, as many as 161 million more than in 2019.¹⁴ Moreover, climate change, extreme weather, drought, flooding and other disasters progressively deteriorate land and soil quality, severely affecting the cost of food items.

4. Funding of research associated with SDG3 and SDG13 – increases in SDG research funding

Scientific advances reveal empirical observations of the association between climate change and shifts in infectious diseases. Using Dimensions we can examine the scientific evidence for this by looking at the impact of climate change on zoonotic diseases. We can also track the science, through the lens of research outputs associated with both SDG3 and SDG13.  

Being able to assess publishing and funding behaviours by comparing the Global North and Global South countries provides us with an insight into where research is both funded and ultimately published. Moreover, one question we might ask is, given that the Global South is currently hardest hit by the consequences of climate change from an infectious disease perspective, will we see changes in publishing and funding practices in the future?

Furthermore, climate change has exacerbated many influencing factors. It has generated habitat loss, pushed wild animals from hotter to cooler climates where they can mix with new animals and more people, and it has lengthened the breeding season and expanded the habitats of disease-spreading mosquitoes, ticks, etc.,¹⁵ and so we could potentially see more zoonotic infectious disease spreading to countries in the Global North. Given these factors, and the capability of Dimensions, we can make comparisons over time and geolocation to track where changes are occurring.

Dimensions search strategy and data investigation

i. Search strategies

Research data were retrieved using Digital Science’s Dimensions database and Google BigQuery (GBQ). For initial searches we created a specific search term to identify publications associated with zoonotic/infectious diseases and climate change. Two sets of terms were used to define the searching keywords. The first was made up of keywords associated with zoonotic and infectious diseases, and the second was simply one word, ‘Climate’, as follows:

Zoonoses OR "zoonotic diseases" OR "parasitic diseases" OR "zoonotic pathogens" OR "vector borne diseases" OR "climate-sensitive infectious diseases" OR "infectious disease risk" OR "infectious diseases" AND Climate.

Dimensions’ inbuilt SDG classification system allowed for the linking of research outputs associated with SDGs both individually and in combination. On this basis we were able to include SDG3 Good Health and Well-being and SDG13 Climate Action to the search, allowing us to include outputs associated with both Goals. The main focus of the search carried out was on peer-reviewed articles and government policy documents between 2010 and 2022. A set of 1,436 research publications were retrieved and entered into further analyses separately. The research outputs retrieved shared a focus on the impact of climate change on pathogen, host and transmission of human zoonotic/infectious diseases.

A dataset based on the research outputs retrieved from Dimensions was created within GBQ. This allowed integration with publicly available datasets from the World Bank to ascertain low and high income countries and regions. The Dimensions GBQ provision also facilitates in-depth targeted analyses. This allowed us to look solely at the publications resulting from our search in order to identify trends in concepts, citations, policy documents and collaborations by geographic region.

ii. Findings

a) Publication timeline trends for research outputs tagged in Dimensions jointly with SDG3 and SDG13 and associated with zoonotic/infectious diseases and climate change were plotted.

Figure 3 highlights the trajectory over a 13-year time period for publications associated with both SDG3 and SDG13 in Dimensions. Of note, following implementation of the UN SDGs in January 2016, the upward trend in numbers of publications begins to rise sharply until the end of 2021, with a dip in 2022.

b) Co-authorship analysis: Collaboration by geographic region

Figure 4a reveals that for every 40 publications authored in a high-income country, one publication was in collaboration with a low-income country-based researcher. Figure 4b reveals that two in three publications authored by low-income country based researchers have been in collaboration with high-income country based researchers. We conclude from this that it is proportionately more likely for low-income country researchers to collaborate with researchers in the Global North than for researchers in the Global North to collaborate with researchers in the Global South. However, it is important to note here that numbers of research outputs are disproportionate between the global regions (see Table 1 below). 

2010-2022	Number and percentage of authors publishing climate change and infectious (zoonotic) diseases research	Number of authors publishing research outputs associated with SDG13	Number of authors publishing research outputs associated with SDG3	Total number of authors publishing in each geographic income region
Global South
Low-income countries	52 (0.11%)	2,818 (6.22%)	26,649 (58.85%)	45,285 (100%)
Lower-middle-income countries	468 (0.03%)	85,931 (6.07%)	409,355 (28.93%)	1,415,019 (100%)
Global North
High-income countries	618 (0.01%)	365,917 (4.73%)	2,337,971 (30.22%)	7,736,160 (100%)
Upper-middle-income countries	2,419 (0.06%)	194,187 (4.56%)	850,954 (19.97%)	4,260,966 (100%)

Table 1 outlines the combined total number of authors of published research in the Global South and Global North, including the proportion of researchers against the total number of researchers in each of these regions. The figures in the table reveal that proportionally the number of researchers publishing research on zoonotic diseases and climate change is higher than that of higher-income countries. We argue here that this research focus is not necessarily a niche area for Global South countries (even though their number of research outputs and activity is low in real terms). Consideration of the number of authors publishing zoonotic diseases and climate change research papers against numbers of authors publishing in areas associated more generally with SDG3 and SDG13 provides a glimpse of the breadth of sustainable development research of which our topic area is just one component. 

Despite the crossover with SDG3 and SDG13 not being high, it shows that the engagement of researchers in low-income countries with zoonotic diseases research is notable and contributes to research progress in this area. However, the research is better represented if we look proportionally. For example, 52 researchers in low-income countries represent 8% of the number of zoonotic disease researchers in high-income countries (618), but the total number of researchers publishing overall in low-income countries (45,285) represents just 0.5% of all researchers in high-income countries (7.7 million) making the proportional contribution by low-income country researchers 40 times greater than high-income country researchers in this research area.

c) Research publications by geographic region

Figure 5 above reveals a total of 1,419 research publications pre- and post-SDG period from 2010-2022 by country income group have been captured by Dimensions. The numbers represented in the chart reveal that publications have at least one author in the country income groupings outlined. In order to incorporate collaborations, a publication is included twice if it includes an author within each income group. This only applies for the analysis of country income groups. It allows us to see any increases/decreases in collaborative behaviour. In this respect, we note the contribution (either through collaborating or writing their own publications) from low/low-medium-income (Global South) countries has risen both in number and as a proportion of the outputs from 2010.

d) Citation analysis by geographic regions

The data in Figure 6a and 6b above reveal that:

1. South-East Asia as a producer of this research is dominant in the Global South (see Fig. 6b).

2. In the Global South, South-East Asia both publishes research and favourably cites research from the same region (see Fig. 6a).

3. Research output in South-East Asia is not as highly cited by the Global North (see Fig. 6b). What is notable however, is the overall dominance of the Global North for both research output and citation counts. We conjecture one reason for why this might be the case is that the Global South may not have access to the same level of funding or collaboration opportunities. Moreover, differences in research focus could account for the distinction. Moreover, interest in these areas by high-income country research(ers) may be less pronounced than those research areas elsewhere in the Global South (eg, Africa) where there is more collaboration, or more ‘gain’ for Global North countries (Ebola, Zika etc). For example, if India’s research focus was local to aspects of zoonotic diseases that only affect this country, then it might be less likely that higher income countries would cite the research. This warrants a deeper dive into the data to uncover such findings but is outside the scope of the blog.

In conclusion, it is perhaps the case that areas which are most affected by climate change and zoonotic diseases have become publication ‘hotspots’ which are not yet attractive to researchers in Global North countries.

e) Funding – by income/geography; Funder type

The general trend seen in Fig. 7 above reveals government funding to be the major driving force in zoonotic diseases and climate change research in all of the country groupings.  What Dimensions reveals in this respect is that governments in the Global North provide 100% of the government funding that is held in the Dimensions database for research on these topics in the Global South. This would explain perhaps why low-income countries in the Global South, where research infrastructure isn’t as well funded, receives less government funding as it is awarded by the Global North. Looking at funding from non-profit sources, which includes organisations such as Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Wellcome Trust and the Science and Technology Development Fund, we note that such organisations provide nearly a quarter of all research funding held in Dimensions, in the Global South. As with government funding, 98% of all non-profit research funding in both regions comes from non-profit organisations in the Global North. It is interesting to note, given the focus of the research, that only a very small proportion of funding is received across all funder types from the healthcare sector. All other funders included in Fig. 7 92.5% of funding comes from the Global North (healthcare funding is included in this figure).¹⁶

f) Policy documents and their citing publications

In Dimensions, policy sources and document types range from government guidelines, reports or white papers; independent policy institute publications; advisory committees on specific topics; research institutes; and international development organisations. The top 12 policy publishers that are outlined in Fig. 8 above represent those publishers of policies citing research outputs associated with climate change and zoonotic diseases. It is perhaps not unexpected that the number of publications cited by the World Health Organization would be high given its global vision to eliminate the disease burden globally and to reverse climate change. Zoonotic diseases are very much on the radar of the global agencies concerned with global health which, given climate change, means that spread of these diseases in the Global North is more likely.

Takeaway findings

Using Dimensions’ capability to take a deep dive into research exploring zoonotic diseases and climate change in the context of SDGs has enabled us to uncover a number of interesting findings that are illuminating in the context of a world view.

Our investigations have revealed several interesting findings, including:

• Research publications in this area have increased more than two-fold since the implementation of the SDGs.  
• Collaboration patterns in the Global North and Global South reveal that researchers in Global South countries are more likely to collaborate with researchers in the Global North than vice versa.
• The total number of authors publishing research on zoonotic diseases and climate change in the lowest-income countries represents 8% of the total number of zoonotic disease researchers in high-income countries (see Table 1). Expanding this out across all research publications, the total number of researchers publishing in low-income countries represents just 0.5% of all researchers in high-income countries, making the proportional representation of low-income country researchers 40 times greater than high-income country researchers. Although actual numbers would reveal a different story, we believe that depicting the data in this way provides a balanced representation of the research output.
• Research carried out on zoonotic diseases and climate change in the lower income countries is less well cited by higher income countries.
• The data in Dimensions highlights that government organisations in the Global North award much of the funding for research in the Global South, and likewise for funding from non-profit agencies. What we might consider here as an explanation is that numerous organisations in the Global North such as Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the SCI Foundation, along with governments, are committed to the elimination of zoonotic diseases and in helping reduce carbon emissions to reverse climate change at a global level.

Conclusion

What is apparent is that governments around the world are investing large sums of money as part of the global mission to halt the spread of animal diseases and to protect the public against zoonotic disease outbreaks before they become pandemics that pose a risk globally.

Digital Science’s Dimensions database provided us with enormous opportunities for the interrogation of data to gather insights on zoonotic diseases and climate change (much more than could be included in this blog). The comprehensiveness of the database in terms of its coverage of publications, policy documents, grant funding and SDG-associated output (among others) in the Global North and Global South allows for creating the most value. As a linked research database, the possibilities for generating downstream link- and flow- analyses across geographies means it is an invaluable tool for the widest possible discovery across the research ecosystem.

¹ https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s40121-022-00647-3.pdf

² Field, C.B., V.R. Barros, D.J. Dokken,et al. 2014. Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. Part A: Global and Sectoral Aspects.Working Group II Contribution to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge, UK and New York,NY: Cambridge University Press.

³ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4459090/pdf/fpubh-03-00157.pdf

⁴ Ajuwon BI, Roper K, Richardson A, Lidbury BA. One Health Approach: A Data-Driven Priority for Mitigating Outbreaks of Emerging and Re-Emerging Zoonotic Infectious Diseases. Trop Med Infect Dis. 2021 Dec 29;7(1):4. doi: 10.3390/tropicalmed7010004. PMID: 35051120; PMCID: PMC8780196

⁵ Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2022, 19(2), 893; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph19020893

⁶ We use the terms Global North/Global South and High- high middle income and low- low middle income countries interchangeably.

⁷ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31196187/

⁸ https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s11356-020-08896-w

⁹ https://www.gov.uk/government/news/200-million-investment-to-fight-zoonotic-diseases#:~:text=The%20%C2%A3200%20million%20funding,Capability%20in%20Animal%20Health%20programme

¹⁰ https://news.un.org/en/search/Sustainable%20development%20goals

¹¹ https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.2001655117

¹² https://sdgs.un.org/goals/goal3

¹³ https://sdgs.un.org/goals/goal13

¹⁴ https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/hunger/

¹⁵ https://www.foreignaffairs.com/world/inevitable-outbreaks-spillovers-pandemics

¹⁶ It is important to note here that Dimensions funding data is skewed towards the Global North.

The post Zooming in on zoonotic diseases appeared first on Digital Science.

]]> https://www.digital-science.com/blog/2022/04/sdgs-wastewater-pollution-in-textile-manufacturing/ Wed, 20 Apr 2022 09:53:58 +0000 https://www.digital-science.com/?p=57655 A new analysis of research on wastewater pollution and textile manufacturing reveals the impact of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The post When economy meets environment: Sustainable development and the case of wastewater pollution in textile manufacturing appeared first on Digital Science.

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“Good water quality is essential to human health, social and economic development, and the ecosystem. However, as populations grow and natural environments become degraded, ensuring there are sufficient and safe water supplies for everyone is becoming increasingly challenging. A major part of the solution is to produce less pollution and improve the way we manage wastewater.” ¹

The increase in water contamination and pollution due to human activity has resulted in one of today’s most critical environmental challenges, with worsening water pollution affecting both developed and developing countries. In the latter, it is mostly due to rapid population growth and urbanisation, increased industrial and other economic activities, as well as political and public apathy to improve and maintain water and wastewater management processes in the long-term.²

Untreated wastewater has a severely detrimental impact on the environment, and the rapid industrialisation that has been evident during the last few decades has significantly increased the amount of pollutants in the environment. Improper treatment of some hazardous industrial wastes released into bodies of water has had toxic effects on all types of life forms, both directly and indirectly.³ Textile dyeing is the second-largest polluter of water worldwide, with the fashion industry producing 20% of the world’s wastewater alone. This is because textile manufacturers use large amounts of water and the resulting wastewater produces highly polluted discharge.

Research has shown that the social and economic development in China has led to a significant deterioration in the water environment, which has limited sustainable regional development.⁴  The textile industry in China is one of the country’s most important industries. Its biggest impact on the environment is related to primary water consumption and wastewater discharge. The manufacturing of textiles has created serious challenges for water sustainability, characterised by intensive chemical consumption and waterborne pollution.⁵

Understanding the factors that impact on the water environment is vital for future water conservation efforts. With the acceleration of industrialisation, China’s water quality has deteriorated to become one of the world’s worst,⁶ and it has the fourth largest freshwater reserves in the world alongside one fifth of the world’s population. Due to increasing demands over water use, such resources are being increasingly and extensively exploited for economic purposes.⁷ However, in recent years, the Chinese government has implemented more stringent environmental regulations in an attempt to change the situation.⁸

One reason for this turnaround could be related to the widespread adoption of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and in particular SDG6, which sets out to “ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all”.⁹ The achievement of this Goal, even if partially, would greatly benefit people and the planet, given the importance of clean water for socio-economic development and quality of life, including health and environmental protection. SDG6 considers improvement of water quality by reducing by half the amount of wastewater that is not treated by 2030.

Digital Science’s goal is to try to change the scientific ecosystem by challenging the way things are done and act To interrogate the research being done on this important topic, we used Dimensions to identify research publications associated with wastewater and the textile manufacturing industry with the intention of seeing each country’s – in particular China’s – contribution to research in this space.  An initial search looked at wastewater and water pollution to clarify the extent of research output in this area, and to identify the countries where there appeared to be a significant research focus.The extent of research being undertaken across these domains highlighted the countries with the greatest number of publications in wastewater pollution, and showed that China, the United States and India in particular, had the greatest research output.

Delving deeper into the data from DImensions, we developed a more specific search focusing on wastewater and water pollution while also introducing terms related to the textile industry, thus creating a narrower search focus.¹⁰  We also used keywords sourced following an extensive literature search – the full search string can be found at the end of this blog. Using the detailed search we investigated this area of research in the context of a number of domains including the UN SDGs, Fields of Research (FoRs), and also looked at the top research producing countries to explore research outputs in more detail (see Fig.2 below).

The detailed search resulted in 4,446 publications identified in Dimensions across a 10-year time period (see Fig. 3 below). An increased upward trend from 2017 to 2021 is evident, which is suggestive that the years following implementation of the UN SDGs in 2016, highlights the increased importance of research in this domain. Looking at the percentage differences (see Table 1) where the pre-SDG has been compared with post-SDG, time periods, the difference is clearly evident, with a threefold increase in published research after the implementation of the SDGs, again potentially indicative of this influence and the 2030 Agenda.

Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), wastewater and textile manufacturing, in Dimensions

Academic institutions play a crucial role in ensuring the success of the SDGs, and scientific research is one of the most relevant dimensions for the achievement of the 2030 SDG Agenda.¹¹ It addresses real-world problems, societal needs, and innovative technologies necessary to break new ground for sustainable development.

Taking the research outputs following the detailed search, we filtered for those publications that have been classified as relating to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (using the Dimensions SDG classification system – see Fig. 4 below).

In total, Dimensions generated 572 SDG associated outputs. Of this total, 272 were related to SDG6 ‘Clean Water and Sanitation’, revealing it as one of the main SDG drivers for sustainable development research. Within SDG6 there are eight outcome targets, the third of which -Target 6.3 – is especially relevant here. It demands that: “By 2030, improve water quality by reducing pollution, eliminating dumping and minimising release of hazardous chemicals and materials, halving the proportion of untreated wastewater and substantially increasing recycling and safe reuse globally”.

Looking at the FoR categories associated with the outputs we note that the 272 SDG6 outputs are predominantly associated with Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Chemical Engineering and Chemical Sciences. It is understood that realising SDG6 includes overcoming numerous challenges, one of which is water pollution from the release of hazardous materials by the textile industry, and the fields of research highlighted above fit well with publications that might address overcoming such challenges.

We also found that SDG7 (‘Affordable and Green Energy’ – 232 outputs) has a similar trajectory to that of SDG6 with a sharper increase of publications year on year from 2017, following the implementation of the UN SDGs (See Fig. 4).  It is also an SDG where one might expect a considerable overlap with SDG6. To investigate this, we looked at the FoR categories associated with SDG7 and found that they were the same as for SDG6, predominantly in the fields of Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Chemical Sciences and Chemical Engineering. 

Fields of Research (FoRs) categories, wastewater, water pollution and textile manufacturing

Table 2 below outlines the top six research producing countries as evidenced by the highest number of publications in the five dominant FoR categories – the research focus direction.   What is apparent here is that China is the top research producing country with approximately 50% of its published research identified as being in the FoRs of Engineering and Chemical Sciences categories, whereas for India and Turkey it is in the FoRs Engineering and Environmental Engineering categories. For all of the six countries identified, Engineering is the top FoR category.¹²

Keyword co-occurrence analysis

A keyword co-occurrence analysis of all the keywords attached to the published research in the specified search was carried out using VOSviewer¹³ (See Fig, 6 below). The VOSviewer tool allows the evaluation of all keywords attached to the publications and assesses the strength of the links between them. It attaches a relevance score providing an indication of the strength of the links to the topic of the publication. The colours of the nodes refer to their average relevance amongst the links that have been counted (tenuous links are not counted as relevant) and the higher co-occurrence amongst items is represented by the size of the nodes.

Following an interrogation of the keyword co-occurrences involved in the network visualisation outlined below, their links to FoRs becomes evident: 

• The blue and lime green clusters connect and centre around the dyeing process and chemicals involved in this, and are chiefly associated with the Chemical Sciences FoR category.  
• The red cluster mainly overlaps with the purple cluster and relates to components of wastewater and treatment technologies and is associated with the Engineering FoR. 
• The green cluster and the lime green cluster are also connected and relate to treatment efficiencies and conditions centred around dyeing, and associate with Engineering, Chemical Sciences and Physical Chemistry FoR categories.

These observations allow for a different perspective on the association amongst fields of research and we are able to see more comprehensive relationships revealing their multidisciplinary nature. 

Conclusions

The main focus of this blog was to look at wastewater and water pollution in textile manufacturing and to explore the association between the scientific literature within two of Dimensions’ classification systems – SDGs and FoRs. The article has set out a descriptive analysis of features of the research on wastewater pollution in the textile industry.

We carried out an initial search using Dimensions to assess how much of the research literature could be associated with wastewater and water pollution.  Having established that Dimensions yielded a substantial number of publications (256,967 outputs), we narrowed down the focus of the search by increasing the number of search terms to create a search string that focused more specifically on wastewater and water pollution within the textile industry. The rationale for this was that textile manufacturing has developed rapidly in recent years which has led to increasing concerns regarding textile wastewater pollution. This search yielded 4,475 publications. We were particularly interested in looking at how much textile manufacturing wastewater research underpinned the SDGs, in particular SDG6 Clean Water and Sanitation, as well as looking at timelines to ascertain any potential trends, such as those that might be evident pre- and post-SDG implementation. The results indicated that the number of research publications did sharply increase post-SDG implementation and that SDG6, as well as SDG7, Affordable and Green Energy, were the main SDG drivers of this research. Given the overlapping nature of these two SDGs, it makes sense that they both would feature highly. 

A further layer of interest was our investigation of the Fields of Research classifications underpinning the outputs from the Dimensions search, which revealed, not unexpectedly, that wastewater pollution in textile manufacturing has been studied in a number of different FoR categories, with publications in Engineering, Environmental Engineering and Chemical Sciences being the most published areas, followed by Chemical Sciences.  In an attempt to understand potential differences in research focus in different countries we looked at the top six research producing countries and FoR categories, which revealed that China came top with 608 publications, followed by India with 533 and Turkey with 279 publications.

Finally, using VOSviewer to create a network co-occurrence analysis, we confirmed our findings highlighting those areas of research focusing on the environment, on the chemistry involved, on water, and its treatment in the urban environment, as well as textile dyes and their removal.

For more information about how Dimensions can provide detailed insights into the research ecosystem, please visit the Dimensions website.

¹ https://www.unwater.org/water-facts/quality-and-wastewater/

² https://www.nature.com/articles/s41545-020-0069-3

³ https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/chapterhtml/2021/bk9781839162794-00001?isbn=978-1-83916-279-4&sercode=bk

⁴ https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/feart.2021.744224/full

⁵ https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0043135421008502?via%3Dihub

⁶ https://dx.doi.org/10.3390/su12197841

⁷ https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-319-32845-4_9

⁸ https://www.iea.org/reports/an-energy-sector-roadmap-to-carbon-neutrality-in-china

⁹ https://sdgs.un.org/goals/goal6

¹⁰ Detailed search string
((“textile production” AND “water pollution”) OR (“garment dyes” AND pollution) OR (“textile manufacturing” AND wastewater) OR (“textile processes” AND pollution) OR (“wastewater discharge” AND “textile industry”) OR (“water eutrophication” AND textiles) OR (“Water Ten Plan”) OR (“untreated wastewater” AND “textile production”) OR (“wastewater treatment” AND textiles) OR (“garment dye” AND “water pollution”) OR (“garment dyes” AND “water pollution”) OR (“textile manufacturing” AND water pollution) OR (“textile pollutants AND wastewater”) OR (“wastewater chemical pollutants” AND “textile production”) OR (“wastewater chemical pollutants” AND “textile manufacturing”) OR (“water pollutant discharge” AND “textile production”) OR (“textiles wastewater”) OR (“industrial water pollution”))

¹¹ https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frsus.2021.620743/full

¹² It is important to caveat here that given the narrow focus, numbers are small and relative and differences are not substantial.

¹³ van Eck, N. J.; Waltman, L. (2010) VOSViewer: Visualizing Scientific Landscapes [Software]. Available from https://www.vosviewer.com

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