The state of science and technology in Africa (2000–2004): A scientometric assessment

This article reports for first time the state of science and technology in the African Continent on the basis of two scientometric indicators — number of research publications and number of patents awarded. Our analysis shows that Africa produced 68,945 publications over the 2000–2004 period or 1.8% of the World’s publications. In comparison India produced 2.4% and Latin America 3.5% of the World’s research. More detailed analysis reveals that research in Africa is concentrated in just two countries — South Africa and Egypt. These two counties produce just above 50% of the Continent’s publications and the top eight countries produce above 80% of the Continent’s research. Disciplinary analysis reveals that few African countries have the minimum number of scientists required for the functioning of a scientific discipline. Examination of the Continent’s inventive profile, as manifested in patents, indicates that Africa produces less than one thousand of the world’s inventions. Furthermore 88% of the Continent’s inventive activity is concentrated in South Africa. The article recommends that the African Governments should pay particular attention in developing their national research systems.     

Scientometric research in South Africa and successful policy instruments

This document provides an analysis of scientometric research in South Africa and it discusses sources of growth in the country’s research literature in general. South Africa is identified to have limited expertise in the field revealed mainly during the last decade. However, the country is ranked 21st in the world among the countries publishing in the journal Scientometrics and it is the only African country with such a standing in the field. Identification of the forces affecting positively the growth in the number of research publications in the country indicates that the primary incentive fuelling the recent growth is the new funding formula in the country which subsidizes the universities by more than R100 000 for each publication that their staff produces. The increase in the number of journals indexed in the ISI Thomson Reuters database and the incorporation of social sciences at the NRF have also affected the growth of research publications, but to a lesser extent.     

The production of science in Africa: an analysis of publications in the science disciplines, 2000–2015

The importance of science in Africa has been gaining the interest of scholars and policymakers alike who find that the relationship between science and development is getting stronger than ever. Science in Africa continues to find its own place in the global world of science. However, there have not been any attempts in recent years to study the production of science in all African countries taken as a whole. In this bibliometric study, science in Africa is analyzed using the publications African countries have produced in the last 15 years i.e. from 2000 to 2015. It is not only the number of publications but also the research areas which are of great importance. Not many recent studies have examined the publication productivity of all African countries. The analysis undertaken here shows that a few countries, namely, South Africa, Egypt, Tunisia, Nigeria and Algeria are the leading countries. These produced the highest number of publications during 2000–2015. At the same time, some of the weakest countries in Africa have strengths in specific research areas and are thus able to contribute to knowledge production in those areas. The findings presented in the paper suggest the implications for development in Africa and the measures which could be taken.     

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.     

Scientific publishing in Benin as seen from Scopus

2,215 publications covering the period going from 1959 to 2011, with at least one author affiliated to Benin, were searched from Scopus and analyzed. These publications were co-authored by 10,225 scientists that correspond to 5,122 single authors in several disciplines of which the most prolific are Agricultural and biological science, and Medicine. None of the Benin-based journals were indexed in Scopus; approximately 5 % of the publications appeared in African reviews covered by Scopus. Researchers’ home institutions are mainly the University of Abomey-Calavi, its laboratories and some international organizations or cooperation agencies. The private universities were not mentioned in the affiliations list. The yearly percentage of international collaboration is over 80 %; France, the former colonial power is the main research partner whereas the West African region is the main partner at the African continent level; others partners are from Europe and America continents. This study suggests the setting up of a national database to index the domestic scientific literature; it should contribute to the improvement of the national research output.     

Using content analysis to investigate the research paths chosen by scientists over time

We present an application of a clustering technique to a large original dataset of SCI publications which is capable at disentangling the different research lines followed by a scientist, their duration over time and the intensity of effort devoted to each of them. Information is obtained by means of software-assisted content analysis, based on the co-occurrence of words in the full abstract and title of a set of SCI publications authored by 650 American star-physicists across 17 years. We estimated that scientists in our dataset over the time span contributed on average to 16 different research lines lasting on average 3.5 years and published nearly 5 publications in each single line of research. The technique is potentially useful for scholars studying science and the research community, as well as for research agencies, to evaluate if the scientist is new to the topic and for librarians, to collect timely biographic information.     

Discovering cross-topic collaborations among researchers by exploiting weighted association rules

Identifying the most relevant scientific publications on a given topic is a well-known research problem. The Author-Topic Model (ATM) is a generative model that represents the relationships between research topics and publication authors. It allows us to identify the most influential authors on a particular topic. However, since most research works are co-authored by many researchers the information provided by ATM can be complemented by the study of the most fruitful collaborations among multiple authors. This paper addresses the discovery of research collaborations among multiple authors on single or multiple topics. Specifically, it exploits an exploratory data mining technique, i.e., weighted association rule mining, to analyze publication data and to discover correlations between ATM topics and combinations of authors. The mined rules characterize groups of researchers with fairly high scientific productivity by indicating (1) the research topics covered by their most cited publications and the relevance of their scientific production separately for each topic, (2) the nature of the collaboration (topic-specific or cross-topic), (3) the name of the external authors who have (occasionally) collaborated with the group either on a specific topic or on multiple topics, and (4) the underlying correlations between the addressed topics. The applicability of the proposed approach was validated on real data acquired from the Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man catalog of genetic disorders and from the PubMed digital library. The results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed strategy.

     

Bibliometrics as a tool for measuring gender-specific research performance: an example from South African invasion ecology

Citations to published work are gaining increasing prominence in evaluations of the research performance of scientists. Considering the importance accorded to gender issues in South African science, it is surprising that (to our knowledge) no research has as yet ascertained the extent of sex differences in citations to the published work of scientists in this country. Our literature study shows that studies that have been conducted elsewhere tend to neglect in their analyses important gender-related and other factors, such as the sex composition of multi-authored papers and the extent of foreign co-authorship. Against this background, we illustrate the difficulties inherent in measuring the quality aspect of sex-specific research performance by means of an analysis of a dataset of articles (n = 229) that were published between 1990 and 2002 in the field of invasion ecology and in journals included in the Thomson Reuters Web of Science. Each article has at least one South African author address. The results indicate that foreign co-authorship is a better correlate of high citations than the sex of South African authors, and this is true irrespective of whether the annual citation rate or window period is used, whether or not self-citations are excluded, and whether or not the number of authors is controlled for by calculating fractional counts. The paper highlights these and other considerations that are relevant for future gender-focused bibliometric research, both in South Africa and beyond.     

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.     

Productivity, impact and publication habits by gender in the area of Materials Science

Summary A comparative analysis of the scientific performance of male and female scientists in the area of Materials Science at the Spanish Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) is presented. Publications of 333 scientists during 1996-2000 are downloaded from the international database Science Citation Index and the national one ICYT. Scientific performance of scientists is studied through different indicators of productivity (number of SCI and ICYT publications), international visibility (average impact factor of publications, percentage of documents in “top journals”) and publication practices (%international publications, signing order of authors in the documents and different collaboration measures). Inter-gender differences in the research performance of scientists are studied. Influence of professional category and age are analysed. Although women are less productive than men, no significant differences in productivity are found within each professional category. However, a different life-cycle of productivity is found for men and woman and the most important inter-gender differences in productivity occur at the ages of 40-59.     

Academic tenure,risk-taking and the diversification of scientific research

We discuss two competing hypotheses linking the relative job security granted by tenure in academic employment to scientists’ choices between diversifying vs. specialising their research portfolio. To test our hypotheses, we develop a new methodology, using an algorithm of semantic analysis that partitions scientists’ publications into research themes, and we compute the Blau’s diversification index for 562 scientists observed over 15 years. The results of a Fractional Probit Model with fixed effects show that tenure is associated to more diversification of research interests. We discuss the implications for policy-makers and granting agencies wishing to incentivise explorative research.     

A quantitative exploration on reasons for citing articles from the perspective of cited authors

Citation is regarded as one of the “norms of science” (Merton in Am Sociol Rev 22(6):635–659, 1957) and is deeply researched by the field of scientometrics. The motivations authors have for citing one another are considered significant and have been the subject of extensive qualitative research such as content analysis, questionnaires, and interviews of citing authors. However, the existing qualitative studies have covered a limited number of samples. To expand the dataset, this paper proposes a quantitative method applied to detecting citation reasons from the angle of citation networks and the attributes of cited authors, including their publication count (the number of single-authored publications, collaborative and first-authored publications as well as collaborative but non-first-authored publications, and number of whole publications), citation count, research topic interests, and gender. By applying the Exponential Random Graph Models (ERGMs), the current study revealed that authors in the field of information retrieval tend to cite those with more single-authored, collaborative and first-authored, and collaborative but not first-authored publications. Besides, in this field, the number of publications, similar topical domains, and same gender are proven to be significantly favorable in selecting references in our experiment.     

The changing dynamics in citation index publication position China in a race with the USA for global leadership

Along with China’s economic emergence is a controversy over the quality and international visibility of citation index publications. This study uses bibliometric statistics to shed further light on the global landscape of citation index publications with special focus on China and the USA. The analysis explores 31 years of the TRS (Thomson Reuters Scientific) database, spanning the 1980–2010 period. Based on this study, the USA maintains global dominance for both WOK (Web of Knowledge) and WOS (Web of Science) TRS publications. Although China ranks a distant second for WOK, it lags behind five other nations for WOS publications. China’s scientific base needs further restructuring for greater global visibility. Emerging economies such as China, India, Brazil and South Africa are fast rising in the global ranks for WOK/WOS publications. China may already be leading the world in some publication attributes, although it could take several more decades to catch up with the USA in others. Normalizations of the publications with population, PTE (population with tertiary education) and GDP (gross domestic product) put small/low-population countries in the global lead. However, countries such as Canada, Greenland, Iceland and Sweden still rank high for most of these publication attributes. Furthermore, WOS per WOK analysis shows that small and/or economically weak countries place greater emphasis on WOS publications. This is particularly visible for countries in Africa and South America. Despite the addition of a large number of indigenous Chinese journals to the TRS database, prediction analysis suggests that China’s desire to surpass the USA could be delayed for several decades. In the race for the next-generation scientific superpower, however, China not only needs to sustain substantial investments in research and development, but also requires restructuring of its research industry. This is especially critical for data readiness, availability and accessibility to the scientific community, and radical implementations of research recommendations.     

Scientific literature cited in USPTO patent documents as indicators for the evaluation and analysis of Spanish scientific research in biomedical disciplines

The use of indicators based on the analysis of the scientific literature cited in patent documents is proposed for the evaluation of biomedical research. A study carried out on several groups of researchers working in universities, public research centers, and hospitals, has shown that an important percentage of Spanish scientists have authored publications that are cited in US patents in the field of Biotechnology. The study and analysis of those cites allows a evaluation of the flow of knowledge generated by the different groups of scientists towards the development of technologies, and to learn on the relationship between the characteristics of the cited publications and the frequency they are cited in the patents. The results obtained avail the use of new indicators based on the cites in patents to perform a more complete evaluation of the published research related with Biotechnology and Biomedicine, both at the level of research institutions and individual scientists.     

Distribution of publications as an indicator for the evaluation of scientific programs

This article describes investigations into the publication behaviour of scientific authors from the GDR. The obtained data revealed that — analogous to the Lotka-distribution — not only a fifth of all authors produce half of the publications of a certain institute, but that these authors also have a quicker reaction time and receptivity to new international research problems. These findings may make it possible to substantiate proposals by guiding scientists in the direction of themes, respectively to help the science policy in the process of the elaboration of new research programs.     

Do types of collaboration change citation? Collaboration and citation patterns of South African science publications

Bibliographic records are extensively used in the study of citations. Based on ISI data, this paper examines citation patterns of the publications of South African scientists in recent years. In particular, the focus of this paper is on citations as to the collaborative dimensions of South African scientists in their publications. The study reveals that the number of citations received by a publication varies not only according to the collaboration but also to the types of collaboration of the authors who are involved in its production. Furthermore, it emerges that the impact of citations on publications differs from discipline to discipline, and affiliating sector to sector, regardless of collaboration.     

Institutional sectors of ‘mainstream’ science production in Subsaharan Africa, 1970–1979: A quantitative analysis

The place of production of ‘mainstream’ scientific authors in Subsaharan Africa is examined in terms of institutional sectors for the period 1970 through 1979. Patterns of production of ‘mainstream’ scientific literature and the citation visibility of this literature are also examined, for a shorter period of time, in terms of institutional sectors. It is shown that the university and public sectors predominate in the production of ‘mainstream’ authors. These same sectors also assure more consistent intra-African visibility of research results than do other sectors. However, the growth of the university and public sectors appears to have slowed considerably since the mid-1970s. Research conducted within regional and subregional cooperative organizations declined dramatically during the decade. A growing emphasis on external interventions under multilateral (rather than bilateral) auspices is noted.     

Fluorine research in South Africa and four benchmarking countries: Comparative mapping and assessment

Fluorine research has been identified as a priority area in South Africa and the South African Nuclear Energy Corporation (NECSA) is embarking in an effort to expand its hydrogen fluoride and aluminium trifluoride production capacity. On the eve of those efforts this article reports the findings of an effort to map and assess fluorine research in South Africa in comparison to four other countries i.e. Malaysia, Australia, Germany and Italy. The results of the assessment are aimed at guiding future directions for fluorine research in the country, at identifying centres of expertise nationally where new research chairs could be established, at identifying international centres of expertise to be utilised for collaboration and of course for inter-temporal benchmarking of fluorine research in South Africa. South Africa is identified to be producing a small number of fluorine research publications in comparison to other countries like Germany and Italy which produce orders of magnitude larger number of publications and in comparison to country’s total research effort. Furthermore the relevant research effort appears to be dispersed geographically and in disciplinary terms. Relevant recommendations are provided with particular emphasis on the pluralistic science policy approach followed in the country.     

Knowledge production through collaborative research in sub-Saharan Africa: how much do countries contribute to each other’s knowledge output and citation impact?

This paper examines co-authorship of research articles in Thomson Reuters citation indexes in order to assess knowledge co-production in selected sub-Saharan African countries. Two indicators, namely publications and citations, were analysed to establish the patterns of knowledge co-production and its scientific impact, respectively. The study found that knowledge production through collaborative research among sub-Saharan African countries is minimal and contributes only a small percentage when compared to collaboration between sub-Saharan African countries and their foreign counterparts. Similarly, the scientific impact of international collaboration was higher than that of continental collaboration. Countries belonging to the same geographic region contributed to each other’s knowledge production more frequently than they did to the countries outside their region. It is recommended that, for knowledge co-production in sub-Saharan Africa to improve, various measures such as encouraging student and staff exchange, hosting more regional conferences and encouraging research networks need to be put in place.     

Evaluation of accounting journals by coverage of accounting topics in 2018–2019

The purpose of this article is to evaluate the coverage of accounting topics in 2018 and 2019 by the high-ranked and cited journals of popular international publishers. To achieve this, the study provides (1) research on the proportion of accounting journals in the international publishers; (2) identification of the largest publishers by the number of accounting journals; (3) a check of the high-ranked and cited accounting journals according to the journals’ websites, the SCImago database, and Web of Science database; (4) investigation of the trend in the number of accounting publications in 2018–2019 compared with 2016–2017 by SSRN, IDEAS/RePEc, and DOAJ; (5) a detailed overview of 1749 accounting publications for 2018 and 2019 using the reference databases of such international publishers as Blackwell, Elsevier, American Accounting Association, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, and Springer; (6) a self-developed classification of the accounting topics into 14 main directions; and (7) an assessment of the extent of coverage of accounting topics by each journal. The research methods are based on a cross-sectional survey between the website of each publisher and the SCImago database, and on a bibliometric analysis of the metrics and citation impact, the number and proportion of articles in the “major” journals in accounting, and the major bibliometrics databases. SCImago, as the main bibliometrics database, was used for the first time to identify the top-ranked and cited journals. This study highlights the importance of accounting in international publications in the high-ranked and cited journals, emphasizing the actual publications obtained in 2018–2019. The results indicate that a high quartile or high international citation level does not determine the full coverage of accounting topics in a journal. It was found that assets, control, management accounting, and financial reporting were the most frequently published topics in 2018 and 2019. The blockchain technology and IFRS research in accounting were published within 2018–2019 in only 125 articles (7.14%) by 26 accounting journals among the high-ranked and cited journals with an obtained high coverage of accounting topics. This study may help scientists to select a journal for publishing or researching an appropriate accounting topic. Moreover, to increase the coverage extent of accounting topics, the analysis and classification of publication topics conducted in this work are also recommended to editorial boards of accounting journals as information regarding the least disclosed accounting topics over the last 2 years.