Universities seeking to establish or expand their research missions in developed countries have at their disposal well-established literature on strategies to foster research capacity in universities. On the contrary, the literature on these processes in the context of developing countries is quite recent and scarce. We offer a descriptive, narrative review of the literature on research capacity building in universities in developing countries, both in terms of the conceptual models or theoretical frameworks used and of strategies reported. We also compare this corpus with recent literature on this set of issues coming from developed countries, covering 40 papers overall. On the theoretical side, we find substantial differences in density and content across both sets of papers. The empirical dimension suggests universities in developing countries tackle the problems of fostering research capacity piecemeal and idiosyncratically without the benefit of an overall conceptual model or blueprint to guide them.