In September, Johannes Urpelainen, a professor at Johns Hopkins University in the United States, tweeted about his new co-authored paper on...
In September, Johannes Urpelainen, a professor at Johns Hopkins University in the United States, tweeted about his new co-authored paper on cross-state air pollution in India. Other than Urpelainen, the co-authors of the paper are based in various US universities and in Fudan University in Shanghai. Their paper argues that a significant proportion of the country’s air pollution load, especially via industrial and energy emissions, crossed state borders and therefore required more centralised interventions than is the case presently.
Like many scientific papers on the issue that we have encountered, this one too hopped from science to policy and politics without commensurate historical contextualisation. But that is not the point here.
A few hours later, Shahzad Gani, a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Atmospheric and Earth Systems Research in Finland retweeted the original post, adding that it was yet another paper from this research group “with not even a single author from India and incredibly sparse references”. This comment stoked controversy. Urpelainen responded by asking if in Gani’s view “every paper on India must have a local author”?
The conversation soon received the attention of other air pollution scientists, including Pallavi Pant and R Subramanian, who wondered if any effort was made to include...
