Bung the gap: narrowing Global North –Global South bias inmeasuring academic excellence by weighting with academic capital

Abstract

This paper presents an analysis of three modes of assessing academic scholars’ productivity, based on their education history and their publication output. The sample consists of the career paths of 231 authors from the Global South that includes the places of their BA, MA and Ph.D. education and their production in terms of the number of their Scopus-indexed articles. The analysis found that there is no general rule determines that Global North education would result in higher productivity, and the paper will argue that favoring productive authors without Global North education would be not just ethical but also deliberately reasonable in the restricted sense of instrumental reason.