Global surgery broadly refers to the multidisciplinary field concerned with providing better and equitable surgical care across international health systems, with a focus on capacity building, advocacy, education, research, and policy development in low-income (LIC) and middle-income (MIC) countries. With inclusive governance and quality improvement, it may help to prevent over 16 million deaths each year resulting from inadequate surgical, anaesthetic, and obstetric care^1,2. A substantial onus lies on the global surgery researchers who play a key role in providing objective analysis to steer future policy development, especially if they are from a LIC or MIC with first-hand experience. This study explored sociodemographic trends among global surgery researchers and highlighted corresponding inequities.

The authors identified the top 1000 most published researchers by total number of publications for the search query ‘Global Surgery’ using Dimensions (https://www.dimensions.ai/), which has been studied as a comprehensive data source of the scientific literature. It was noted that several articles had the search term ‘global surgery’ in their discussion for comparisons but were not related to global surgery. Therefore, only publications that had this search term in their title or abstract rather than in the full text were included in the present analysis to increase the reliability and specificity of the findings. No language, time period, or geographical restrictions were set. The country of practice of researchers was identified from their affiliation in the associated research papers and/or ORCID, and then classified into HIC, upper MIC, lower MIC, or LIC according to the 2022 World Bank report. The gender of researchers was also identified using Namsor (https://namsor.app/).

Although the total annual number of publications on global surgery has been increasing since 2015, only 14 of the top 1000 researchers were from LICs and none of the top 100 researchers was from a LIC. Of the 763 researchers whose gender could be established with 95 per cent probability, 618 (80.9 per cent) were male and 145 (19.0 per cent) were female. Figure 1 highlights the countries of researchers, which spanned 31 of the 81 HICs (38.3 per cent), 27 of the 108 MICs (25.0 per cent), and 7 of the 28 LICs (25 per cent). The G-7 countries (USA, UK, Canada, France, Italy, Germany, and Japan) constituted 66.3 per cent of the total researchers and only 5.1 per cent were from the African continent. On average, a HIC researcher had a similar number of publications (mean 9.48 versus 7.87; P = 0.249) but a statistically higher total number of citations (424.24 versus 208.25; P < 0.001), and mean number of citations per publication (42.35 versus 30.74; P < 0.001) than researchers from LICs and MICs. In absolute terms, 866 HIC researchers had 8208 total publications with 367 388 citations, compared with 1055 publications with 27 905 citations among 134 researchers from LICs and MICs.