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The editor's dilemma: assessing papers from low-income countries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Peter Tyrer*
Affiliation:
British Journal of Psychiatry; Department of Psychological Medicine, Imperial College (Charing Cross Campus), London W6 8RP, UK
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Most scientists are now aware of what has been called the 10:90 divide (Saxena et al, 2006): the fact that 90% of the published scientific activity in the world comes from the richest 10% of countries. Many would like to brush off this simple fact as unimportant, but at another level it could be regarded as a scandalous disequilibrium of the planet's resources. One small way of reversing this is for editors to publish more papers from low-income countries and counter what can be described somewhat strongly as editorial racism (Horton, 2003). We have tried to do so in the British Journal of Psychiatry (Tyrer, 2005); this paper describes some of the difficulties.

Type
Guest Editorial
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits noncommercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists 2008

References

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Saxena, S., Paraje, G., Sharan, P., et al (2006) The 10/90 divide in mental health research: trends over a 10-year period. British Journal of Psychiatry, 188, 8182.Google Scholar
Tyrer, P. (2005) Combating editorial racism in psychiatric publications. British Journal of Psychiatry, 186, 13.Google Scholar
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