Published: January 2018

The number of researchers in the fields of health and medical sciences (‘health researchers’) is monitored, by country, by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). These numbers are analysed below using the data for the most recent year since 2010. (Note: not all countries have reported data on this indicator).

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What you see | Data sources | Current version

What you see

The data visualization above compares the number of full-time equivalent (FTE)¹ health researchers² per million inhabitants by country and by income group.Weighted averages for FTE health researchers (top chart) and females as a proportion of all FTE health researchers (top right) are provided.

The weighted averages are derived from the 61 Member States for which data are available. Data need to be interpreted cautiously because of the number of missing observations, especially from countries known to develop and publish health research.

Points to note:

• Disparities in scientific capacity between income groups are significant (top left chart).
• The high income group of countries has approximately 40 times more (326 FTE health researchers per million inhabitants) than the low income group of countries (8.7) (top chart), ranging (across the 61 countries) from 1140 in Singapore to 0.2 in Zimbabwe.
• Based on the data from 61 countries, although female researchers account for almost half of the FTE health researchers, the proportion ranges from approximately 51% in high income group to only 27% in the low income group. (Click on a region on the top left chart to see the region-specific % -- top right). 

To explore the data further:

• Select an income group in the top chart to filter countries within that income group ( income group averages are symbolized by the dashed vertical line in the bottom chart).

For example:

-- Selecting the low income group, and then hovering the cursor on the country bar of interest (bottom chart), shows that Senegal has seven times more (60) FTE health researchers per million inhabitants than the average for this income group (8.7).

-- Selecting the high income group shows that five countries exceeded the average for the countries in this group (326), in the top two are Singapore and the Netherlands where 1140 and 727 FTE health researchers per million inhabitants reside, respectively.

• Click "undo" or "reset" (near the bottom of the page) or click the same element again to undo a selection.

Data sources

• Indicator: UNESCO
• Country income classification: The World Bank
• Population: United Nations World Population Prospects

¹ The full-time equivalent (FTE) of R&D personnel is defined as the ratio of working hours actually spent on R&D during a specific reference period (usually a calendar year) divided by the total number of hours conventionally worked in the same period by an individual or by a group.

² Medical and health sciences (for R&D data) include basic medicine; clinical medicine; health sciences; health biotechnology; and other medical sciences.