Global South researchers keep ‘shapeshifting’ – Study

Global South researchers struggle to publish their works in journals dedicated to research on health profession education (HPE) in the Global North because Western perspectives and values dominate the international academic landscape of these journals, a new study suggests.

The authors said Global South authors are bound to publication-related work beyond coping with rejection, interpreting feedback from editors, and managing publication strategy. “Additional work included imagining and speculating how foreign gatekeepers would understand and evaluate their work without the benefit of being part of those networks, having not trained and worked within them; and negotiating unfamiliar spaces and inferring how their research would be relevant in the Global North.”

In the study, ‘Shapeshifters: Global South scholars and their tensions in border-crossing to Global North journals’, published in BMJ Global Health recently, the researchers say: “Tensions and negotiations encountered by Global South authors who publish in top HPE journals are reminiscent of tensions experienced by people who are compelled to exist simultaneously between two worlds. Migrants, immigrants, people of non-dominant sexual, gender, racial, ethnic, linguistic and ‘othered’ identities described in various contexts by many equity-seeking theorists have similar experiences.”

They added that, “Such an existence demands that people stand astride the ‘borders’ of two or more worlds inhabiting a state of flux, ready to step into one world or the other as the situations call for, without belonging fully to either.”

Living between two worlds

Dr Thirusha Naidu, an associate professor in behavioural medicine at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa and a co-author, said ‘shapeshifting’ refers to how Southern authors have to “change how they act and write as researchers in the Global North. So, they have to mimic what is going on in the Global North when they write for Global North journals.

“And then they have to shift to doing something different when they write for their own journals in the Global South where they can write whatever they want to, however, they want to.”

Global South authors must invest additional emotion and intellectual labour to publish in the same journals as their Global North counterparts as they consider collaboration with Global North scholars and manage resource constraints, the study says.

Intellectual labour incurred in understanding foreign epistemic frameworks and producing scholarly work in academic-level English impacts on researchers’ confidence, creativity, identity and emotional integrity.

Dominant countries control access

Naidu explained publication borders as “the same kind of borders that apply to visa access for people from the Global South”.

“A very similar kind of access barrier applies in publication. So, for instance, if you, as Global South researchers, are trying to go to a conference, there are a lot more barriers to go through in terms of having your papers checked, making sure the topic is correct, paying publication fees, and access to the journals.

“So, there are distinct borders that can, metaphorically, be the same as country borders, and the barriers are the same as they are to visa access in a way, although they are not physically the same. Metaphorically, it is the same countries that control access. The dominant countries – for instance, in medical education, the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Australia – and access to journals of those countries is almost barred for researchers from the Global South. So, the border is a distinct north-south border,” Naidu added.

She said the motivation for the study was a common occurrence among researchers, especially in the area of medical education research, that authors from the Global South have great difficulty in publishing because the topics do not interest the Global North.

“In addition, if you are not known, people do not really pay attention to your work. And so, in doing that, these researchers have difficulty with promotion, and getting their research out there. We wanted to interview these authors to find out what the specific issues were that they had, and what their experiences were, to be able to shift things, if I can call it that.”

Resources, academics and transformation hindrances

The authors say they applied a hermeneutic phenomenological perspective (focusing on the lived experiences of participants) to understand Global South scholars’ motivations and experiences regarding publishing health-related research in journals in the North.

Participants were identified through a bibliometric study of Global South authors who published papers in five high-profile HPE research journals between 2012 and 2021. First and last authors based at Global South universities who published in globally recognised HPE journals between 2017 and 2018 were contacted via the e-mail address provided for the corresponding author and invited to participate.

They focused on authors who had published between 2017 and 2018 because the bibliometric study was in progress at the time of study recruitment, and later years had not yet been coded for the geographic origins of first and last authors. They did not contact authors from earlier years as they wanted to ensure that they would be able to recollect their experiences of publishing within the HPE literature.

Naidu said their key findings were that there are three levels of barriers, namely resources, transformation and academic boundaries. There are also three tensions the participants experienced, which also include practical boundaries, practical tensions that relate to resources, the kind of available resources in the Global South, and the demands that are placed on them.

Collaboration helps with access

“The second practical boundary is the fact that research needs to include international collaboration. So, if they have international collaboration, they are more likely to be published, and they have to decide whether they accept international collaborations or reject them,” Naidu said.

She said academic English as the dominant global language is a boundary because many people from Global South countries speak other languages and have to write in their second or third language.

The third boundary was epistemic, referring to how the ideas of the Global North and how they see the world dominate the literature. Ideas from the Global South are often seen as primitive or outside the norm.

“So, if a Global South researcher wants to study something like, say, acupuncture, which is very common, or teach acupuncture, it’s very unlikely that it will be published in a Global North journal as there will be hundreds of papers on acupuncture in Chinese journals because it is a legitimate method based on Chinese medicine and ideas.”

She suggested more representation from the Global South on editorial boards or as journal editors. In addition, journals could run internship programmes and equity programmes for Global South authors on how journals work.