Marburg virus research leadership stayed concentrated far from outbreak settings
Before the 2023-2025 Marburg virus outbreaks reached Equatorial Guinea, Tanzania, Rwanda, and Ethiopia, the research record already reflected a familiar pattern in global infectious-disease science: authorship and leadership were concentrated in a narrow set of institutions, countries, and funding streams. In a bibliometric analysis of 684 English-language Marburg virus papers published from 2008 through February 2023, senior authorship was dominated by men, and most papers were led by researchers outside Africa despite the disease’s recurrent threat on the continent.
The paper assembled 5,700 authorships and used first-name-based gender inference, country extraction from article text, funder harmonization by country and type, and thematic mapping to World Health Organization research priorities. The design does not measure scientific quality in the clinical sense, but it does expose who had the power to define the field before the newest outbreaks forced a fresh round of attention. For a pathogen with high-consequence outbreak potential, authorship patterns are not an academic side issue; they influence which questions get asked, which settings are studied, and which interventions are built for deployment when cases appear.
One finding stands out immediately: women accounted for 35.1% of all authorships, but only 19.6% of last-author positions.
Senior authorship remained the steepest gender gap
The gender gradient widened as authorship moved toward positions that usually signal laboratory leadership, funding control, or final accountability for the study. Women held 41.6% of first-author slots, yet their share of last-author positions lagged well behind at 19.6%. That pattern is consistent with a broader scientific hierarchy in which early-career and project-execution roles are more accessible than senior decision-making posts.
There was some movement over time. Women occupied 15.1% of last-author positions in 2008-2012, rising to 23.2% in 2018-2023. The direction is encouraging, but the absolute level still leaves senior authorship heavily male-dominated. In outbreak science, the last author often shapes the study agenda, the network of collaborators, and the institutions that gain visibility when a pathogen resurfaces.
The study’s regression work did not turn this into speculation; it simply anchored the pattern in the paper-level counts. Women were present across the literature, but the senior tier remained narrower than the first-author tier, suggesting that participation alone does not equal leadership.
African leadership was rare even in Africa-focused papers
Only 14.6% of all papers had an author based in Africa. Among the 102 papers focused on an African country, just 25.5% had a first author from that country and 23.5% had a last author from that country. Those proportions fall below benchmarks previously described for infectious-disease research in Africa, and they raise a practical question about agenda control: who decides what gets studied when the pathogen is circulating locally?
The imbalance was even sharper for women based in Africa. Women from Africa served as last author on only two papers. In epidemiologic terms, this is not just underrepresentation; it is a very small footprint in the part of the literature most closely connected to outbreak settings, local hospitals, field surveillance, and regional research capacity. When leadership is external, local priorities can be displaced by the methods, timelines, and publishability constraints of distant institutions.
Marburg virus research has long depended on collaborations across continents, but collaboration does not automatically mean shared authority. If the country most affected by a paper is also the country least represented in senior authorship, the field risks reproducing the same extractive structure that has shaped many areas of global health research.
Funding flowed mainly through the United States
The financing profile pointed in the same direction. Of funded papers, 69.0% acknowledged a US funder, and 24.0% cited a US defense agency. Only 3.2% acknowledged an African funder. That funding mix helps explain why the intellectual center of gravity sat outside the outbreak regions: research capacity tends to follow grants, and grants tend to follow institutions already positioned to write them, host them, and administer them.
This is not a comment on scientific merit. It is a structural observation about who can sustain a publication pipeline over time. Research on high-risk pathogens often requires laboratories with biosafety infrastructure, access to stored specimens, field partners, and regulatory support. Those resources are unevenly distributed, and the authorship record shows the result.
The thematic distribution of the literature was equally revealing. WHO priorities on clinical care, outbreak trials, social science, and capacity strengthening each appeared in fewer than 8% of papers. In practical terms, the field was thin in the very areas that matter most during an outbreak: bedside management, trial readiness, social response, and local research independence. Basic virology and descriptive epidemiology clearly mattered, but the portfolio was not yet balanced toward the operational needs of communities facing transmission events.
Citation patterns did not rescue the imbalance
The analysis also assessed whether funded papers were advantaged in citation performance. An apparent citation penalty for funded papers disappeared after adjustment, with a rate ratio of 1.07 and a 95% confidence interval of 0.87 to 1.33. In other words, funding status alone did not explain citation differences once the model accounted for other factors. The more durable story in this dataset is not citation bias; it is leadership concentration.
That matters because bibliometrics often get used as a proxy for influence. Here, the more informative signal is who appears in the senior slot and where that senior slot sits geographically. If the field is going to measure progress after the 2023-2025 outbreaks, it will need a baseline like this one to determine whether new collaborations are changing the authorship hierarchy or simply adding more papers to the same structure.
The preprint is clear about its own boundaries. It is limited to English-language Web of Science papers and uses inferred gender rather than self-reported identity. It also stops in early 2023, just before the newest outbreak era began. Even so, the dataset offers a concrete starting point for evaluating whether the recent African-led responses to Marburg virus disease translate into more African first authors, more African last authors, and a broader spread of leadership in the years ahead.