Helicopter research: A persistent drawback to equitable collaborative research

Abstract

Collaboration in research has increased over the years with many advances in medical knowledge. With understanding and good faith, many of these partnerships have yielded remarkable results and significantly improved our world. The inequity has resulted in many untoward effects since much of this collaborative research is between persons from richer or high-income countries and poorer or lower-income ones. Helicopter Research or “parachute research” refers to the situation where a more resourced partner in a research collaboration goes into the less resourced partner's location, conducts research, exports the data, and publishes the findings, often with no or very little input from or acknowledgement of the less resourced counterpart. This does not only occur between richer and poorer nations but also even within the same country where the relationship is asymmetrical.