Health researchers (in full-time equivalent), as a proportion of all researchers

Published: August 2025

The number of researchers in the fields of health and medical sciences (‘health researchers’) are collected, by country, from the statistical office of the European Union (Eurostat), the Ibero-American and Inter-American Network of Science and Technology Indicators (RICYT), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the UNESCO's (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) Institute for Statistics (UIS)¹.

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).

What you see

The data visualization above compares the weighted average of full time equivalent (FTE) health researchers^2,3 as a percentage of all researchers by WHO region (Chart A) and by income group (Chart B). Chart C provides the percentage by country (regional group averages are symbolized by the dashed vertical line in Chart C). A new Chart D has been added to visualise the year from which the data is sourced.

The data are derived from 83 Member States for which data are available. They need to be interpreted cautiously because of the number of missing observations.
21 countries have updated their data since 2022 following very minimal new data 2019-2021 (9 in total) – 1 new country, Dominican Republic
The weighted average of all researchers who are health researchers (in FTE) varies from 15% (Africa region) to 6% (South-East Asia region).
Differences are smaller between income groups with the weighted average of health researchers (in FTE) as a percentage of all researchers, highest in the low-income group (14%) than in the other income groups (11%-13%).
Africa continues to have the most % of health researchers compared to overall researchers with over 1/3 of all researchers being health researchers in Gambia, Burkina Faso and Eswatini, however no African countries have updated researcher data since before the COVID-19 pandemic (Chart C).
Only countries in Europe and the Americas have updated health researcher data since 2021 (n=24) although these countries do vary in income status for HIC to LMIC indicating that it isn’t only income status which predicts whether countries perform these benchmarking measures.
In Europe, North Macedonia increased from 15 to 17%, becoming third most dense for health researchers, Hungary increased from 9% to 12%.
Low and lower middle income countries continue to prioritise health researchers

To explore the data further

Select a WHO region (Chart A) and/or income group (Chart B) to filter countries within that region and/or income group in the bottom chart: regional averages are symbolized by the dashed vertical line. ( note: the country bars in Chart C are colour coded according to WHO region).
Hover the cursor on a bar in a graphic to see more information (e.g. country, year, total FTE health researchers, health researchers as a % of all researchers, regional average) in a popup window.
Click "undo" or "reset" (near the bottom of the visualization) or click the same element again to undo a selection.

For example:

Selecting only Eastern Mediterranean, then hovering the cursor on the country bar of interest (Chart C), shows that Egypt and Oman (30% and 24% respectively) both have a higher proportion of health researchers as a percentage of all researchers than the regional average (14%).
After selecting a region, you can select an income group (in chart B) which will filter the countries belonging to this income group within this region. For example:
-- selecting lower middle income countries within the Eastern Mediterranean region shows that Egypt (30%) is the only country (among three countries in that income group) exceeding the regional average (14%).
Selecting the low-income group displays the relevant countries with available data, and shows that most of the selected countries are from the African region.

Data sources

¹ Data from the UIS was last updated by the source in March 2021

²The 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.

³ Medical and health sciences (for R&D data) include basic medicine; clinical medicine; health sciences; health biotechnology; and other medical sciences.

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