In recent years, staff and students at different Higher Education institutions (HEIs) in the UK and globally have attempted to identify colonial legacies in different interpretations of the term ‘decolonisation’. Though some argue that the term is being appropriated and applied more as metaphor than anything else (Tuck & Yang, 2012) or believe that HEIs reproduce colonial logic, and so no HEI can truly dismantle colonialism (Grewal, 2021), a majority agree that action must be taken, and that there will be no one single approach that on its own constitutes ‘decolonisation’ (de Oliveira Andreotti et al., 2015). Some groups have focused on iconography and buildings named after persons with a colonial history (Chumani Maxwele Ignites the #RhodesMustFall Movement at UCT, 2015; Decolonise UCL, n.d.; #RHODESMUSTFALL, n.d., 2018). Others have focused on the curriculum white?, http://www.dtmh.ucl.ac.uk/videos/curriculum-white/ (UCL 2014) (English Faculty Begins Decolonisation Discussion, 2017; Gishen & Lokugamage, 2018; University of Westminster, 2020). Broadly, these movements can be understood as responses to decolonisation theories of epistemological racism in academia (Kubota, 2020), ‘asymmetric ignorance’ (western academics can afford to not cite non-western academics, without this affecting the perceived quality of their work, but non-western academics are not afforded this) (Chakrabarty, 2000) or a need for cognitive justice within the global academic community where “the norm is [a] plurality of knowledge” (Coimbra, 2007).
Epistemological racism impeding the equitable diffusion of knowledge and research from Low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) to High-income countries (HICs) has been observed in our global public health research (MS & MH). Cases of frugal medical innovations, which can often originate in LMICs, are in many instances met with barriers, including prejudice, when introduced in HIC settings (Harris et al., 2015, 2016). Indeed, we have argued that the non-use of some frugal innovations in HICs, which could be associated with significant cost-savings to systems such as the NHS, amounts to a double-standard (Skopec et al., 2019; Skopec, Fyfe, et al., 2021; Skopec, Grillo, et al., 2021). Additionally, we have found that narratives which aim to promote mutual and reciprocal learning between HICs and LMICs in international health partnerships are frequently underscored by power dynamics that position LMIC partners as recipients of knowledge, rather than as producers, hampering the bi-directional nature of these partnerships (Issa et al., 2017; Kulasabanathan et al., 2017). We draw parallels between resistance to use of frugal innovation developed in LMICs to the country of origin (COO) effect, studied extensively in consumer economics. Consumers evaluate products differently based on their COO and products from LMICs are generally rated less favourably due to the external cue of COO (Adina et al., 2015; Bilkey & Nes, 1982; Srinivasan et al., 2004; Verlegh & Steenkamp, 1999).
While COO effects have been extensively studied for physical products such as cars, wine or electronics (Verlegh & Steenkamp, 1999), they may also extend to intellectual products, such as scientific research. For example, the country in which the research is produced and the institutional affiliation of the authors may be interpreted by consumers as an indicator of the quality of that research by unconscious bias (Harris et al., 2017a) or explicit bias (Harris et al., 2017b). Under controlled conditions, it has been demonstrated that research produced in HICs is evaluated more favourably than the same research produced in LMICs (Harris et al., 2017a, 2017b), adjusted for other characteristics. It is possible that the COO effect thus might also influence selection of texts for curricula.
This claim can be investigated in the context of global research production and consumption markets. One relevant factor in the research production market is the trend of local publishing models such as academic, society or library publications with regional authorship and/or readership commodified or acquired by multinational enterprise (Collyer, 2018). Authors are then faced with the choice of publishing in these commodified journals, perhaps also under pressure to participate in global north-derived indicators of research success such as journal indexing or metrics; or risk invisibility in the remaining local or ‘periphery’ publishing venues (Salager-Meyer, 2008). The publishing monopoly has also led to inflated subscription and publication costs, making participation for scholars in the global south prohibitively expensive (Collyer, 2018). This, in combination with other issues such as English language dominance, contributes to a barrier for global south researchers wishing to penetrate the centralised global north market (Collyer, 2018) as well as disinclining readers from across the world to seek out and read journals published outside of the global north (Salager-Meyer, 2008). Citation networks as indicators of influence also demonstrate a gap in the consumption of global scientific research Cash-Gibson et al., 2018; Gálvez et al., 2000; Keiser et al., 2004; Pan et al., 2012). A 2012 analysis found that North America and Europe receive 42.3% and 35.3% of the world’s citations, respectively, compared to less than 5% by Africa, South America and Oceania combined (Pan et al., 2012). A 2019 analysis found that more than 75% of social science articles indexed in the Web of Science (WoS) database originated in either America or Western Europe, with the combined global south representing less than 10% (Demeter, 2019). Scholars of the global north are self-citing and inward-looking, while their colleagues in the global south primarily also cite research from ‘core countries’ (such as the UK and the US), rather than their own (Collyer, 2018).
There are also factors of practical accessibility of texts to libraries and readers such as book and journal pricing, translation availability and import/export availability for different purchasing markets or consortiums that might affect representation in reading lists. Librarians at the London School of Economics found that 98.38% of all books and chapters of all course reading lists for the academic year 2019–20 were published by publishing houses based in global north countries, with 87.77% of this represented by the UK and US (Wilson, 2019). A 2019 analysis of two module reading lists at another UK university suggested that reading lists were dominated by white, male, Eurocentric authors (Schucan Bird & Pitman, 2019). Another study found that the reading lists of one University of Sussex faculty’s reading lists comprised 39.36% and 31.97% of material published by publishers in the USA and UK respectively (Taylor et al., 2021).
Our study is in reference to decolonisation theory, but we use the term ‘geographic bias’ as we do not wish to claim that this work in isolation can ‘decolonise’ a reading list or an institution. Firstly, the analysis we present is purely descriptive, and cannot determine the cause of any skew or imbalance. Secondly, the analysis is at country-level affiliation and excludes race as a factor. The country-level analysis is derived from our research question’s origin in COO effect and reverse innovation studied at country-level. This perspective excludes the role of race in forming identities and the wider modern world. We acknowledge that excluding race as a factor could be understood as ‘methodological whiteness’ (Bhambra, 2017). Additionally, whilst we propose a quantitative method as a unique and valuable contribution to the wider decolonisation debate, particularly for STEM disciplines and institutions (Skopec, Grillo, et al., 2021) we strongly advocate it should not guide educator choice, rather it can be helpful to have data to for understand distribution and changes over time. If the data is applied with intention to use for decolonisation purposes—however they are defined—it should only be supplementary to qualitative and experience-led methods such as reflection toolkits, discussion groups, surveys and more that are already being deployed by some HEIs.
Quantitative analysis of reading lists is not yet widely used by course leaders, librarians or HEIs for diversity or decolonisation efforts. Open Syllabus aggregates publicly-available reading lists to indicate the most frequently assigned titles and trends in institutional and national level reading list title selection, but it does not, at present, display data on author affiliation geography (Open Syllabus, 2020). Our method was created due to the lack of pre-existing alternative end-to-end reading list analysis tools available to us. Institutions wishing to perform their own analysis are effectively left to use manual search and coding methods to retrieve data and analyse it. Manual methods were used by ourselves prior to the creation of this method, and by the LSE and UCL-authored studies of reading lists, in which the latter concluded that “Universities need to invest in research to develop and trial methods for interrogating diversity in module reading lists” (Schucan Bird & Pitman, 2019). A study of gender bias in curricula at Washington University in St Louis produced a method of coding based on Application Programme Interfaces (APIs) (Harris et al., 2020) that, whilst advancing on resource-intensive manual methods deployed by previous studies (Phull et al., 2019), also call for “Development of more sophisticated technological tools for automating the examination of syllabi might be a longer-term and more resource intensive solution” (Harris et al., 2020).
We have devised a computational method that permits semi-automated analysis of the geographical distribution of reading list authors. The method generates a quantitative indicator that facilitates time-specific and evidence-based interpretations of the data that can be used to supplement experience and theory-led decolonisation work. In this article, we describe the methods used to convert reading lists of the Imperial College London Masters in Public Health (MPH) programme over two time periods (2017–18 and 2019–20) into machine readable code from which bibliographic and author region data is retrieved from the WoS and country socioeconomic status is retrieved from the World Bank. Using 1,200 citations we describe the shift in geographic bias of reading list sources and relate this to interventions to decolonise the curriculum at Imperial College London during that period.