02 November 2019

Feature: OA Articles by UNHCR staff

When I was conducting searches in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) recently, I noticed several articles that included a UNHCR staff member as an author. While the institutional affiliations of authors are typically indicated in articles, they are not always immediately visible; sometimes one has to click on the author name or elsewhere in order to view these details. However, in DOAJ records, the affiliations are generally noted in parentheses immediately following the author's name. Which means that this information is also searchable, since it is included directly in the record.

UNHCR is a prolific producer of reports, most of which are posted on its web site (which makes them findable but first one has to know that they exist - a topic for another blog post!) However, I was curious to see what academic studies had been undertaken by UNHCR staff members, as these are not generally made available through the central UNHCR gateway. After various searches, I located the following studies published in 2019:

"The Boundaries of Religious Persecution: Refugee Law and the Limits of Permissible Restrictions on Religion," Human Rights: The Journal of Human Rights, vol. 13, no. 2 (Fall 2018/Winter 2019) [open access]
- Samuel Cheung; at the time of writing, Senior Protection Cluster Coordinator, UNHCR Geneva.

"Considering Culture, Context and Community in mhGAP Implementation and Training: Challenges and Recommendations from the Field," International Journal of Mental Health Systems, 13:58 (Aug. 2019) [open access]
- Peter Ventevogel (one of 5 authors); Senior Mental Health Officer at UNHCR Geneva. Maintains profiles on ResearchGate and Google Scholar.

"Developing an Integrated Intervention to Address Intimate Partner Violence and Psychological Distress in Congolese Refugee Women in Tanzania," Conflict and Health, 13:38 (Aug. 2019) [open access]
- Peter Ventevogel (one of 12 authors); Senior Mental Health Officer at UNHCR Geneva. Maintains active profiles on ResearchGate and Google Scholar.

"Functional Impairment as a Proxy Measure Indicating High Rates of Trauma Exposure, Post-migration Living Difficulties, Common Mental Disorders, and Poor Health amongst Rohingya Refugees in Malaysia," Translational Psychiatry, 9:213 (Sept. 2019) [open access] [DOAJ record]
- Susheela Balasundaram (one of 9 authors); Associate Public Health Officer at UNHCR Kuala Lumpur. Maintains a ResearchGate profile, although it's not current.

"Health Shocks, Care-seeking Behaviour and Coping Strategies of Extreme Poor Households in Bangladesh’s Chittagong Hill Tracts," BMC Public Health, 19:1008 (July 2019) [open access]
- Rupa Datta (one of 4 authors); UNHCR Dhaka.

"Health System Responses to the Health Needs of Refugees and Asylum-seekers in Malaysia: A Qualitative Study," International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, vol. 16, no. 9 (May 2019) [open access]
- Jason Yeo (one of 4 authors); Programme Associate, Health at UNHCR Kuala Lumpur.

"'The more children you have, the more praise you get from the community': Exploring the Role of Sociocultural Context and Perceptions of Care on Maternal and Newborn Health among Somali Refugees in UNHCR Supported Camps in Kenya," Conflict and Health, 13:11 (March 2019) [open access]
- Stephanie Gee (one of 3 authors); UNHCR Geneva.
- Josep Vargas (one of 3 authors); Senior Reproductive Health & HIV Officer, UNHCR Geneva.

These are just a handful of undoubtedly many more academic studies that UNHCR staffers have  contributed to. How does one find out what else has been written? While UNHCR makes most of its publications freely available on its web site, the content there does not represent the sum of its research activities -- for example, none of the a/m studies can be found there, although some journal articles have been posted (see, e.g., this, this, and this).

One outcome of the open access movement has been the growth in academic institutional repositories, which organize and archive the research and intellectual output of a university's faculty and students. In the IGO context, the World Bank, FAO and UNESCO have also established open access repositories. UNHCR should follow suit! This would greatly facilitate access to its institutional output in a structured way, ensure that it reaches a global audience, and preserve it over the long-term.

In the interim, it looks like ResearchGate offers a very partial solution!

Tagged Publications.


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