Assistant Professor Gettysburg College Environmental Studies Department, United States
Background/Question/Methods
Science is increasingly collaborative and global, but scientists from the Global North (GN) often fail to collaborate with local scientists when conducting research in Global South (GS) countries. This practice, known as “parachute science” or “helicopter science”, occurs when international scientists conduct scientific research without involving local collaborators and building local scientific capacity. Parachute science undermines efforts to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion in the sciences. We hypothesized that, because research has become increasingly collaborative over time, there would be a decline in parachute science. In addition, we hypothesized that papers that include local authors are more likely to be cited and to be published as open access. Bibliographic data were collected from articles focused on field studies in ecology from the top 25 general ecology journals on Scopus. Using bibliographic data and the abstract for each article, we calculated the proportion of papers on a country’s ecology that included local scientists and examined the relationship between this ratio and a country’s development classification. In addition, we examined how the inclusion of local scientists was related to the level of open access and the number of times a paper was cited.
Results/Conclusions
Despite increased interest in and strides towards decolonizing science, our findings suggest that parachute science remains an issue, with fewer scientists from the GS included in ecological research focused on their countries than those in the GN. Overall, the less economically developed a country is, the less likely that country is to have local authors involved in research on that country (b = 0.98, r2 = 0.1598, p < 0.0001). There is some reason to be optimistic, as the proportion of papers that included local scientists was significantly higher in the 2010s than in previous decades (H = 20.51, p > 0.05). Our results also demonstrate that GN scientists are more likely than GS scientists to have their work published open access and that involving local scientists does not make it more likely that a paper will be published open access. Discouragingly, articles that do not include local scientists as coauthors are more likely to be cited. It is important to note that we relied on author affiliations, which is unlikely to be an appropriate indicator of the home country in many cases. It is crucial for scientists to pursue ethical and equitable research.
