Epistemic injustice in global health knowledge creation: bibliometric analysis of the universal health coverage/global health security intersection English-language literature

Global health scholarship has long been a contested space, defined by historical lines of socio-economic and political inequity reflected in authorship representation in academic practice. Through a case study of an emerging area of theorisation, this work investigates the geographic distribution of authorship and, by extension, the localisation of academic credibility in authorship networks contributing to evolving fields of global health knowledge. This paper presents bibliometric data analysis of 222 peer-reviewed English-language articles published before and after the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, related to a new area of knowledge generation in Global Health scholarship—theoretical intersections of the Global Health agendas of Universal Health Coverage and Global Health Security. Despite representing only 33.8% of listed institutional affiliations, countries in the Global North were associated with 61.7% of all author affiliations. Although a modest diversification of authorship patterns was observed between the pre- and post-2020 periods, a consistent pattern of disproportionate representation favouring authors affiliated with institutions of the Global North remains in the English-language peer-reviewed literature. Addressing epistemic injustice within global health academia will require dedicated efforts to address the imbalanced localisation of academic credibility in global health. Efforts to increase author representation alone are necessary but may not be sufficient to provide space for diverse perspectives to be included in the knowledge production process if imbalances in perceived academic credibility persist.