Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

Publication bias towards Western populations harms humanity

Nature Human Behaviour volume 3, pages 1026–1027 (2019)Cite this article

Priti Mulimani, a health-care professional and PhD student, highlights how pressure to publish in high-impact journals that are biased towards research on Western populations obstructs pivotal research on the majority of the world’s population.

Case in point: a 2001 study found that only 6% of the published literature is from regions of the world that account for over 90% of global population (https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/the-british-journal-of-psychiatry/article/international-representation-in-psychiatric-literature/27607051460CEEE4F47654D296324A1A/core-reader). As resource-deficient, low- and middle-income countries struggle to bear the heaviest global burden of disease, the need for research data on these populations is grave; for example, in India, the first dental college was established under the British imperial rule in 1920. This marked the beginning of a dental education system, the theory and practice of which was based exclusively on Western academia, unaccompanied by parallel efforts to lay the foundation for a robust, locally rooted research culture and infrastructure in India. This created dependence among dental professionals in India on research generated by Western academics.

Your institute does not have access to this article

Relevant articles

Open Access articles citing this article.

Access options

Buy article

Get time limited or full article access on ReadCube.

$32.00

Buy

All prices are NET prices.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Senior Fellow Trainee and Doctoral student, School of Dentistry, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

    Priti Mulimani

Authors
  1. Priti Mulimani
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Priti Mulimani.

Ethics declarations

Competing interests

The author declares no competing interests.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and Permissions

About this article

Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Mulimani, P. Publication bias towards Western populations harms humanity. Nat Hum Behav 3, 1026–1027 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-019-0720-5

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-019-0720-5

Further reading

Search

Advanced search

Quick links

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing