Clinical course and outcomes of corneal blood staining in open-globe injury: Eye Injury Vitrectomy Study.

A common belief is that knowledge development and innovation in national contexts depend on high-quality research that is both socially relevant and impactful []. Consequently, individuals who have been trained to conduct research, such as PhD holders, play an integral role in national economic development and poverty reduction []. However, globally, early-career academics increasingly encounter unstable conditions that limit their ability to build sustainable careers within academia. Insecure employment situations, closed or informal hiring practices, and weak support structures leave many new PhD holders in uncertain career trajectories []. These dynamics are not uniform, but they reflect broader pressures on higher education systems under conditions of expansion and resource constraints. In many African contexts, these pressures are intensified by chronic underfunding and structural inequalities, resulting in considerable development challenges []. Although doctoral training has expanded on the continent, a plethora of research indicates that African researchers with doctoral degrees struggle to contribute to global knowledge production and progress in research careers, both within and outside of academia [–]. Moreover, the problem of limited collaboration between the higher education sector and industry in Africa, despite many PhD holders working within industry, risks further constraining the broader development impact of advanced research training []. Even though these challenges are recognized, there remains limited systematic evidence of the conditions that affect the research career outcomes of PhD holders in African countries. Several systematic and scoping literature reviews have already been published about the career outcomes of PhD holders [–]. Noticeably absent from these existing reviews is research on the African context, and when publications about the African context have been included, they have been few and not the focus of the review. This is precisely where this proposed scoping review will contribute. This paper outlines a protocol for a scoping review of the existing literature on the career outcomes of PhD holders in Africa. The protocol describes the research design of the planned scoping review, including materials and methods, as well as its anticipated contributions and limitations. The objectives of this scoping review are: (1) To map the conceptual and theoretical frameworks, as well as the methodological approaches, that have been used by researchers to investigate the careers of PhD holders in Africa; (2) To describe the prevalence of research on academic and non-academic careers; and (3) To identify the conditions that shape research career outcomes. In particular, the review will identify what systemic-, institutional-, and individual-level conditions contribute to shaping research careers. Attention to conceptual and theoretical frameworks is necessary since they shape the aspects of careers that researchers examine and how relationships between influencing factors and career outcomes are interpreted. The research questions guiding this scoping review are: