Under-reporting research relevant to local needs in the global south. Database biases in the representation of knowledge on rice

Although the main bibliometric databases (Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus) claim to include journals on the basis of scientific and publication standards, there have long been concerns that its coverage is biased in favour of journals from industrialised countries and towards topics relevant to these countries. In this article, we investigate this claim for research on rice, comparing the database CAB Abstracts with the mainstream databases. We find clear evidence that for a field such as rice, statistics based on WoS and Scopus strongly under-represent the scientific production by developing countries, and over-represent production by industrialised countries. More importantly, we also find a substantial bias in coverage of different research topics. WoS and Scopus have a ~75% coverage of publications in molecular biology and issues related to consumption, but a much lower coverage (20-30% in WoS and 30-50% in Scopus) for research more directly related to rice production such as plant nutrition, diseases and characteristics. CAB Abstracts coverage is above 80% for all topics except consumption. The study suggests that statistics based on mainstream databases provide a significantly distorted view of the amount of research and diversity of agendas in most countries. Given that bibliometric statistics are often used for benchmarking and evaluation purposes, the database biases may translate into policy framings that undervalue domestic capabilities and research agendas more attuned to local needs in the global south.