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ESSAYS ON RESEARCH -- WHERE THERE IS NO HEALTH RESEARCH

Wednesday, 19th of June 2013

• ESSAYS ON RESEARCH -- WHERE THERE IS NO HEALTH RESEARCH

Citation: McKee M, Stuckler D, Basu S (2012) Where There Is No Health Research: What Can Be Done to Fill the Global Gaps in Health Research? PLoS Med 9(4): e1001209. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1001209

Published: April 24, 2012

Copyright: © 2012 McKee et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Funding: No specific funding was received for writing this article.

Competing interests: MM is chair of the Global Health Advisory Committee of the Open Society Foundations and has served on advisory boards for Merck & Co. (1999–2006), Johnson & Johnson (2006–2009) and a funding panel of the Wellcome Trust. He is chair of WHOs European Advisory Committee on Health Research. He has received research funding from, among others, the Rockefeller Foundation, European Commission, and Wellcome Trust. LSHTM receives funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. All other authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Provenance: Commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

Summary Points below; full text is at http://www.ploscollections.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.1001209

Efforts to strengthen capacity in health research have, so far, concentrated on countries where there is existing capacity rather than those where it is almost completely lacking.

Judged by absolute numbers of scientific papers, those with the fewest are mainly small islands and a few countries that are politically isolated.

Judged by papers per capita, the lowest include countries in the former Soviet Union and Africa, both regions experiencing declines in life expectancy in recent years, and states experiencing conflict.

Although there is a positive association between economic development and research output, some relatively wealthy countries seriously underperform.

There are many examples of good practice, including regional networks and international partnerships.

There is a strong argument for donors to look to the long term and consider how best to build health research capacity where it is virtually absent.