[Nairobi, August 12, 2024] — Today, we are excited to launch the Missing Majority dashboard, a tool to highlight and track disparities in who does behavioral science research. This dashboard draws on data from the OpenAlex database, offering interactive, automatically updating charts and tables that expose significant disparities in the first authors of behavioral science papers.
“Behavioral science aims to improve lives globally, but it falls short when it neglects large swathes of the global population, like those from the Global South,” said Patrick Forscher, co-creator of the dashboard. “Our tool shines a light on this issue and provides a means to monitor the impact of efforts to diversify who does behavioral science.”
Historically, the field has focused primarily on research samples from the Global North, using ideas conceived by people from the Global North. The bias in who is sampled means that the applicability of most behavioral science to the Global South is unknown. The bias in who does behavioral science creates “unknown unknowns”, things that we don’t even realize we don’t know because we don’t know what behavioral science would look like if its pool of researchers were more diverse. The Missing Majority dashboard reveals these gaps in who does behavioral science, where they are larger and smaller, and how they change over time.
Key features of the dashboard include:
- Interactive charts showing disparities in first authorship
- Automatic updates to enable the tracking of trends over time
- Data breakdowns by journal and discipline
“We hope this dashboard will galvanize efforts to include the missing majority and foster a more globally representative behavioral science,” added Rémi Thériault, co-creator of the dashboard.
For more information and to explore the Missing Majority dashboard, visit https://remi-theriault.com/dashboards/missing_majority
Busara is a non-profit research and advisory organization with headquarters in Nairobi, Kenya, with offices in India, Uganda, Tanzania, Nigeria, and Mexico. Our mission is to advance and apply behavioral science in pursuit of poverty alleviation. Since our beginning in 2013, we have built the largest standing behavioral science lab in the Global South, and created applied research portfolios in agriculture, health, inclusive finance, governance, and more. The Missing Majority dashboard is part of Busara’s research improvement, or meta-research, portfolio, which is dedicated to improving how research is used in development.