When using non-publicly available data, some people argue the use of such information must recognise those who own/collected/designed it in the original country. This seems to happen with data from Low and Middle-Income countries.
Sometimes, local authors use an address from a High-Income country instead of their original country. All bibliometric information is based on authors affiliations and it is difficult to get information from the original country from abstract/title.
What are your views about it?
Usually, authors indicate their current affiliation. Data can be collected in another country - a widespread praxis in biology, history, archaeology, astronomy and other fields. I am sure that the author's addresses cannot be used to find out the data country. For this, one has to read the publication.
Some journals make mandatory to have an author from the country of the origin of the data to minimise the risk of stolen data. Would that be fair?
I guess you have in mind medical data (public health etc.), and your proposal may work for this field. However, it will not work for many other fields of research. In global geodesy and meteorology, the data are collected in many countries by instruments placed there, sometimes by an institution of the country itself, sometimes by a foreign institution. The data are collected in central data repositories and can be used by any researcher in the world. Several sciences (astronomy, geosciences etc.) collect their data by satellites. Not in all biological, geological, archaeological etc. expeditions a local researcher takes part - so whom to include as author from that country? What about data collected in or above the oceans or in antarctica? And what about studies with medical data from many countries, e.g. about the distribution of certain viruses over the world?
Yes, I am referring to non-public data, in public health many surveys (NHANES for instance) can be downloaded freely. We are working with data from 40 countries and we asked permission to get microdata and one person responsible for data in each country will be included as an author.
I see. This is an interesting solution. How do you select the person responsible for data in each country?
The question of whom to include as authors is often rather difficult. In most cases the originators of the data are neglected. Contrary, in high-energy physics, there are papers with thousands of of authors, working at an accelerator and creating the data.
We identified the institutional owners and formally asked them to appoint one person.
Hi Dear may be this help you Roger Keller Celeste
In bibliometrics, the issue of whether authors' addresses should match the country of the data used in their research is complex and multi-faceted. Here are some points to consider:
In conclusion, while matching the authors' address with the data country can enhance transparency and fairness in research representation, it is not always feasible. The key is to ensure that the origins of data are clearly acknowledged and credited, particularly when involving data from LMICs.
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