African regional innovation systems: bibliometric analysis of research collaboration patterns 2005–2009

Understanding the nature and dynamics of Africa’s collaborative research networks is critical for building and integrating the African innovation system. This paper investigates the collaborative structure of the African research systems, with focus on regions and integration. Drawing on a bibliometric analysis of co-authorship of African research publications in 2005–2009, we propose an empirically derived grouping of African research community into three distinct research regions: Southern–Eastern, Western, and Northern. The three regions are established and defined in terms of active co-authorship clusters within Africa, as well as through co-authorship links with non-African countries and regions. We examine co-authorship links both at the national and city levels in order to provide a robust and nuanced empirical basis for the three African research regions. The collaboration patterns uncovered cast light on the emerging innovation systems in Africa by pointing out the differing national, regional, and global roles of countries and cities within collaborative research networks. Lack of research capabilities is the primary factor arresting the development of African innovation systems, but our analysis also suggests that Africa’s internal research collaboration suffers from structural weaknesses and uneven integration. We also identify that South Africa, and some emerging new research hubs, hold critical networking function for linking African researchers.     

The role of Chinese universities in enterprise–university research collaboration

In this paper the role of Chinese universities in enterprise–university research collaboration is investigated. This study focuses on a special aspect of the collaboration—co-authored articles. The two cases are analyzed: (1) research collaboration between Baosteel Group Corporation and Chinese universities; (2) research collaboration between China Petroleum & Chemical Corporation and Chinese universities. The co-authorship data over the period 1998–2007 were searched from CNKI database, the largest Chinese publication and citation database. The main findings are as follows: the number of articles co-authored by enterprise and university scientists has been increasing rapidly; the share of co-authored articles has been growing; the authors from universities are more possible to be the first authors; as a whole, enterprise–university co-authored articles tend to receive more citations and get downloaded more frequently; a mathematical orientation emerges in the enterprise–university articles. To reveal and describe such a trend the methods of keywords analysis and co-occurrence analysis are applied. The Chinese government’s policy instruments and substantial supports for pushing and improving enterprise–university research collaboration are introduced and analyzed.     

A Bibliometric Study of the Publication Patterns in the Sciences of South African Scholars 1981–96

The paper is a bibliometric study of the publication patterns and impact of South African scientists 1981–96, with special emphasis on the period 1992–96. The subject fields surveyed are Physics; Chemistry, Plant and Animal Sciences; and Biochemistry/Microbiology. Scientists were selected from the ten universities of the Eastern Cape, Western Cape and KwaZulu Natal, which vary considerably, with respect to standards of education, quantity of publications, development and overall progress. The general purpose is two-fold: 1) to observe the publication and citation trends during 1981–96, a period which covers significant policy changes in the country, in particular the end of apartheid 1994; within this context 2) to investigate the patterns used by scientists 1992–96 from these different institutions in publishing the results of their research in the form of conference papers or (inter)national journals. The study collected two sets of data through a scientometric analysis of Science Citation Index and a questionnaire. With the exception of Physics, the results demonstrate a decreasing South African world share, in particular for Plant & Animal Sc. publications, and a similar decline of citations starting in 1986/87. Further, the citation impact relative to the world, after a substantial drop 1985–93 probably representing the international embargo period, in 1994–96 reaches the same level as observed in 1985–89. Also, the study shows that there is a direct relation between academic position, research experience and productivity among South African Scientists in the four scientific disciplines.     

International collaboration in scientific publishing: the case of West Africa (2001–2010)

Bibliographic data of publications indexed in Web of Science with at least one (co-)author affiliated to any of the 15 West African countries and published from 2001 to 2010 included are downloaded. Analyses focused one collaboration indicators especially intra regional collaboration, intra African collaboration and collaboration with the world. Results showed that the rate of papers with only one author is diminishing whereas the rate of papers with six and more authors is increasing. Nigeria is responsible for more than half the region’s total scientific output. The main African partner countries are South Africa (in the Southern Africa, Cameroon (in the Central Africa), Kenya and Tanzania (in the Eastern Africa). The main non African partner countries are France, USA and United Kingdom, which on their own contributed to over 63 % of the papers with a non West African address. Individual countries have higher international collaboration rate, except Nigeria. West African countries cooperated less with each other and less with African and developing countries than they did with developed ones. The study suggests national authorities to express in actions their commitment to allot at least 1 % of their GDP to science and technology funding. It also suggests regional integration institutions to encourage and fund research activities that involve several institutions from different West African countries in order to increase intra regional scientific cooperation.     

Indicators of research output in the sciences from 5 Central European countries, 1990–1994

Conclusions As usual, more questions are raised by the facts and figures presented in this report than answered. Some general features appear, nevertheless, unquestionable.Austria shows a rather stable, balanced picture either the distribution of research activities by major fields, or the main publication channels, or the extent of international cooperation, or the major cooperating partners are concerned.In the four ex-socialist countries great efforts are made not just to maintain the level of research activities of the previous years but also to conform to the European/world standards. Scientific communities of these countries have had to find some compensations mechanisms to counterbalance the detrimental effects of the countries economic problems. One possible with more developed countries increasing extent of international cooperation with more developed countries (predominantly with Germany and USA). Signs of exhaustion of this source of compensation can be observed in Hungary, and this can be a warning signal for other countries of the area, too.One of the most intriguing questions raised by the results of this study is about the demographic and migrational processes within the scientific community underlying the observed publication trends and patterns. Learning more about these factors may take us closer to find the proper policy implications of the observed phenomena.     

How to improve research quality? Examining the impacts of collaboration intensity and member diversity in collaboration networks

Better research quality not only inspires scholars to continue their research, but also increases the possibility of higher research budgets from sponsors. Given the importance of research quality, this study proposes that utilizing social capital (i.e., research collaboration) might be a promising avenue to achieve better research quality. In addition, as every scholar has his or her own expertise and knowledge, the diversity of collaborating members might be an extra resource for reinforcing research quality. The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of research collaboration and member diversity on research quality, including the number of citations, the impact factor, and the size of the research award. To explore unknown associations, the author adopts two data sources, that is, the Social Science Citation Index database and academic database of a university, to verify the hypotheses. The results show that a higher intensity at which scholars are embedded in a collaboration network, results in higher research quality. However, member diversity does not seem to be a major concern during the organization of a research group. Research quality is not affected, regardless of whether a scholar collaborates with different or the same co-authors.     

Influence of the international collaboration in the field of metric studies of science and technology: the case of Mexico (1971–2018)

Scientometrics - We perform a bibliometric analysis of the research production and impact of Mexican scholars involved in the area of metric studies of science and technology in the period...     

Coopetition between frenemies–interrelations and effects of seven collaboration problems in research clusters

Scientometrics - Principal Investigators in research clusters find themselves in a Janus-faced situation: if they want to achieve their common research goals, fulfil their overarching function of...     

Measuring changes in publication patterns in a context of performance-based research funding systems: the case of educational research in the University of Gothenburg (2005–2014)

Scientometrics - We present a novel way to frame a discussion of changes in publication patterns that occur in a context of performance-based research funding systems (PRFSs). Adopting an approach...     

International collaboration of three ‘giants’ with the G7 countries in emerging nanobiopharmaceuticals

Nanobiopharmaceuticals is a hopeful research domain from recent scientific advances with massive marketable potential. Although some researchers have studied international collaboration from some aspects, few articles are as comprehensive as this article to consider international cooperation from so many different aspects. We lay more emphasis on international collaboration in the field of nanobiopharmaceuticals involving China. Incremental citation impact values show that in order to move forward and improve the overall competitiveness in the field, China requires to carry out more international collaboration in the field, especially with USA, Germany, and England. Startlingly, multinational collaboration does not sway Chinese citation impact as much as we anticipate in the field. China has reached the first rank in the world in terms of publication amount per year in the field in 2009. Few papers about international collaboration compare small world phenomenon. We use small world quotient to find that it is important for Chinese international co-authors to strengthen to cultivate a cooperation networks in which a node’s partners are also buddies to each other.     

Bibliometric analysis of diabetes mellitus research output from Middle Eastern Arab countries during the period (1996–2012)

The main objective of this study was to analyze research productivity originating from Middle East Arab (MEA) countries in the field of diabetes mellitus (DM). Data from January 1, 1996 till December 31, 2012 were searched for documents with specific words in diabetes as a “source title” and a list of 13 MEA countries as affiliation country. Research productivity was evaluated based on number of publications, citation analysis, indexing in Institute for Scientific Information and impact factor (IF). The 13 MEA countries published a total of 479 documents in 41 diabetes journals. This number represents 0.75 % of the total documents produced globally in the field of DM. The number of published documents increased by around fivefold from early 2000 to 2012. Of the 41 journal titles retrieved, 24 (58.5 %) had their IF listed in the journal citation reports 2012. Forty-two documents (14.5 %) were published in journals that had no official IF. The total number of citations for documents published from MEA countries in the field of DM, at the time of data analysis, was 5,565 with an h index of 35. The median (inter-quartile range) citation for documents from the 13 MEA countries was 4 (1–11). The top productive institution in the field of DM was United Arab Emirates University with 51 documents (10.6 %). Authors from MEA countries collaborated mostly with authors in countries like United Kingdom, USA, and Germany. The present data show promising and relatively good diabetes research productivity in MEA countries especially after 2008.     

Characteristics of the research on reverse logistics (1995–2005)

This paper aims to describe and analyse the main characteristics of articles on reverse logistics published in the production and operations management field, in order to determine the evolution of this current research over recent years and improve our understanding of this issue. We built up a database with the articles on reverse logistics published in the most relevant journals within the period 1995–2005, and we have explored the topic, the methodology and the techniques of analysis, as well as other relevant aspects of the research. We have evaluated the first decade of research on reverse logistics, observing what has been done and how, where and by whom it has been carried out. The result is an extensive review of the research works that have created and developed the reverse logistics concept, outlining some directions of research for the near future and offering practical help to those who begin to research on this topic.     

Overview of trends in global epigenetic research (2009–2017)

Scientometrics - Epigenetics, one of the most rapidly intensifying fields of biological research, explores inheritable gene expression not governed by alterations in the DNA sequence. This article...     

Benefit distribution mechanism in the team members’ scientific research collaboration network

Scientific research collaboration networks are well-established research topics, which can be divided into two kinds of research paradigms: (1) The topological features of the whole scientific collaboration networks and the collaboration representations in some given fields. (2) The individual nodes’ characteristics in the collaboration networks and their endorsements in the networks. However, in the above studies, all the nodes’ roles in the scientific collaboration network are the same, all of whom are called collaborators, thus the relationships among all the nodes in the scientific collaboration network are symmetric, and the scientific collaboration network is undirected. Such symmetric roles and relationships in the undirected networks have no incentive effects on the members’ participations and efforts in the team’s scientific research. In this paper, the roles of team members in the scientific research collaborations are defined, including the scientific research pioneers and contributors, their collaboration relationships are considered from the viewpoint of principal-agent theory, and then the directed scientific collaboration network is built. Then the benefit distribution mechanism in the team members’ networked scientific research collaborations is presented, which will encourage the team members with different roles to make their efforts in their scientific research collaborations and improve the quality of scientific research outputs. An example is used to test the above ideas and conclude that the individual member’s real outputs not only lie in his/her real scientific research efforts, but also rest with his/her contributions to other members’ scientific research.     

‘Uphi?’ ICTs and the mitigation of distance in a South African township

Langa Township, located in Cape Town, South Africa is home to many internal South African migrants and external African immigrants. As a mobile population, many Langa residents have embraced the mobile phone as a means of securing relationships with family members living elsewhere, while also maintaining relationships forged within the township and South Africa in general. Addressing the role of technology in a historical perspective, this article addresses the various ways that mobile phones have both mitigated and exacerbated distance for residents while also acknowledging the advantages and disadvantages of mobile phones for different generations of migrants in the township.     

Mapping research collaborations in different countries and regions: 1980–2019

Scientometrics - Most previous studies on research collaboration focus on only one particular indicator or several specific countries. The intention of this work is to examine and compare research...     

Mapping the dynamics of research networks in ecology and evolution using co-citation analysis (1975–2014)

Scientometrics - In this paper we used a co-citation network analysis to quantify and illustrate the dynamic patterns of research in ecology and evolution over 40 years (1975–2014)....