• DOI:10.13039/501100000269
• Corpus ID: 11720845

Under-Reporting Research Relevant to Local Needs in The Global South. Database Biases in the Representation of Knowledge on Rice

@inproceedings{Rafols2020UnderReportingRR,
  title={Under-Reporting Research Relevant to Local Needs in The Global South. Database Biases in the Representation of Knowledge on Rice},
  author={Ismael Rafols and Tommaso Ciarli and Diego Chavarro},
  booktitle={International Conference on Scientometrics and Informetrics},
  year={2020}
}

• Ismael Rafols, Tommaso Ciarli, Diego Chavarro
• Published in
  International Conference on…
  4 October 2020
• Computer Science

Although the main bibliometric databases (Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus) claim to includejournals on the basis of scientific and publication standards, there have long been concerns thatits coverage is biased in favour of journals from industrialised countries and towards topicsrelevant to these countries. In this article, we investigate this claim for research on rice,comparing the database CAB Abstracts with the mainstream databases. We find clear evidencethat for a field such as rice, statistics based on WoS and Scopus strongly under-represent thescientific production by developing countries, and over-represent production by industrialisedcountries. More importantly, we also find a substantial bias in coverage of different researchtopics. WoS and Scopus have a ~75% coverage of publications in molecular biology and issuesrelated to consumption, but a much lower coverage (20-30% in WoS and 30-50% in Scopus) forresearch more directly related to rice production such as plant nutrition, diseases andcharacteristics. CAB Abstracts coverage is above 80% for all topics except consumption. Thestudy suggests that statistics based on mainstream databases provide a significantly distortedview of the amount of research and diversity of agendas in most countries. Given thatbibliometric statistics are often used for benchmarking and evaluation purposes, the databasebiases may translate into policy framings that undervalue domestic capabilities and researchagendas more attuned to local needs in the global south.