Who leads Marburg virus research?

2026-11-03

Explorer · Marburg virus research · 2008–Feb 2023

Women held one in five senior-author positions in Marburg virus research

Who leads research on Marburg virus, who pays for it, and does it cover what WHO now asks for? Explore 684 papers from Web of Science, published before the 2023–2025 outbreaks.

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of last (senior) authors were women

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of papers about an African country had a first author from that country

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of funded papers acknowledged a US funder

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of papers covered each WHO priority on care, trials, social science and capacity

1 · Gender

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Share of women among first, last and all authors, by year. Hover for the 95% confidence interval and the number of authors.

2 · Local leadership

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Papers that name an African country in the title, abstract or keywords. Black marks: benchmark for infectious-disease research in Africa.

1b · Gender by topic, all years

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Share of women among last authors in each research topic, 2008–Feb 2023.

3 · Funding

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Funded papers by funder country (rows) and the last author's region (columns). A paper with funders from two countries counts in both rows.

4 · WHO research priorities

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Share of papers tagged with each WHO 2025 Marburg priority. Compare a group with all papers.

How to read this explorer

Last author is usually the senior researcher who leads the work. First author usually did most of the work.
Gender is inferred from first names with Gender-API (96.4% of authorships classified). It is binary and may be wrong for some names, especially East Asian names. It does not record how people identify. The share of women last authors stays between 17.7% and 21.8% across four checks.
“From that country” means the author's address is in a country the paper names. African-led means the first or last author has an African address.
Funding comes from Web of Science acknowledgements, which are indexed well only from 2008. That is why the data start in 2008.
WHO priorities are tagged with a keyword list. This is transparent but approximate, and one paper can match several priorities.
Small groups give unstable numbers. When fewer than 10 papers match your filters, we show the count but not a percentage.
These are patterns, not causes. The data stop in February 2023, before the outbreaks in Equatorial Guinea, Tanzania, Rwanda and Ethiopia.

Download the data

Aggregate counts only. No names and no author-level data. CC BY 4.0.

Cite this work

Mbogning Fonkou MD, Bain LE, Bragazzi NL, Kong JD. Who leads Marburg virus research? Gender, geography and funding in authorship, 2008–2023. Preprint, 2026 (link coming soon).

Data: aggregate tables on this page (dataset DOI coming soon)
Code: github.com/descartesmbogning/marburg-equity

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