Authors' Response to: Epidemiology and public health research productivity in Africa

We fully agree that the results of bibliometric analysis published in IJE1 may be conservative given that our methodology may not have captured all the existing publications from some countries (e.g. Seychelles). We adopted the ‘absolute country counting’ method, where each country contributing to an article received one paper credit based on the first, last or corresponding author originating from such country. Although we have attempted to eliminate potential flaws in our bibliometric analysis, some limitations were inevitable and are linked to the inherent problems of bibliometric analyses. For example, one possible error that could arise from the indexing process is incorrect citation of origin for the authors. By using the author addresses listed in the bylines of research articles, one can only identify countries and organizations where the authors were employed when the research was done or where the article was written, or both. Whereas our bibliometric analysis results may biased toward underestimation, it is good to know that the true reality may be even more encouraging. Despite this limitation, we strongly believe that our conclusions remain valid and informed by our results. The overall positive trend of manuscripts published over time speaks to the fact that epidemiological and public health publications are on the rise in the WHO/AFRO. However, more capacity building and training initiatives in epidemiology are required to promote research and address the public health challenges facing the African continent.