Direction Déléguée à la Science, Institut de Recherche pour le Développement, Marseille, France.
Laboratoire d'Analyse des Sociétés et Pouvoirs/Afrique-Diaspora, Université Gaston Berger, Saint-Louis, Sénégal.
PLoS One. 2022 Sep 1;17(9):e0273083. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0273083. eCollection 2022.
The creation of global research partnerships is critical to produce shared knowledge for the implementation of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Sustainability science promotes the coproduction of inter- and transdisciplinary knowledge, with the expectation that studies will be carried out through groups and truly collaborative networks. As a consequence, sustainability research, in particular that published in high impact journals, should lead the way in terms of ethical partnership in scientific collaboration. Here, we examined this issue through a quantitative analysis of the articles published in Nature Sustainability (300 papers by 2135 authors) and Nature (2994 papers by 46,817 authors) from January 2018 to February 2021. Focusing on these journals allowed us to test whether research published under the banner of sustainability science favoured a more equitable involvement of authors from countries belonging to different income categories, by using the journal Nature as a control. While the findings provide evidence of still insufficient involvement of Low-and-Low-Middle-Income-Countries (LLMICs) in Nature Sustainability publications, they also point to promising improvements in the involvement of such authors. Proportionally, there were 4.6 times more authors from LLMICs in Nature Sustainability than in Nature articles, and 68.8-100% of local Global South studies were conducted with host country scientists (reflecting the discouragement of parachute research practices), with local scientists participating in key research steps. We therefore provide evidence of the promising, yet still insufficient, involvement of low-income countries in top sustainability science publications and discuss ongoing initiatives to improve this.
创建全球研究伙伴关系对于为实施联合国 2030 年可持续发展议程产生共享知识至关重要。可持续性科学促进跨学科和跨学科知识的共同产生，期望通过小组和真正的合作网络开展研究。因此，可持续性研究，特别是在高影响力期刊上发表的研究，应该在科学合作中的道德伙伴关系方面发挥带头作用。在这里，我们通过对《自然可持续性》（2135 位作者的 300 篇文章）和《自然》（46817 位作者的 2994 篇文章）2018 年 1 月至 2021 年 2 月期间发表的文章进行定量分析来研究这个问题。关注这些期刊使我们能够检验在可持续性科学旗帜下发表的研究是否有利于不同收入类别的国家的作者更公平地参与，方法是将《自然》期刊作为对照。虽然研究结果表明，低中等收入国家在《自然可持续性》出版物中的参与仍然不足，但它们也表明此类作者的参与有了有希望的改善。与《自然》文章相比，《自然可持续性》中来自低中等收入国家的作者比例高出 4.6 倍，68.8-100%的本地全球南方研究是与东道国科学家合作进行的（反映了对空降研究做法的抑制），当地科学家参与了关键的研究步骤。因此，我们提供了低收入国家在顶级可持续性科学出版物中参与度有希望但仍不足的证据，并讨论了正在采取的措施来改善这一情况。
