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COVID-19 Pandemic Related Research in Africa: Bibliometric Analysis of Scholarly Output, Collaborations and Scientific Leadership

ABSTRACT: Scientometrics enables scholars to assess and visualize emerging research trends and hot-spots in the scientific literature from a quantitative standpoint. In the last decades, Africa has nearly doubled its absolute count of scholarly output, even though its share in global knowledge production has dramatically decreased. The still-ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly impacted the way scholarly research is conducted, published, and disseminated. However, the COVID-19-related research focus, the scientific productivity, and the research collaborative network of African researchers during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic remain to be elucidated. This study aimed to clarify the COVID-19 research patterns among African researchers and estimate the strength of collaborations and partnerships between African researchers and scholars from the rest of the world during the COVID-19 pandemic, collecting data from electronic scholarly databases such as Web of Science (WoS), PubMed/MEDLINE and African Journals OnLine (AJOL), the largest and prominent platform of African-published scholarly journals. We found that COVID-19-related collaboration patterns varied among African regions. For instance, most of the scholarly partnerships occurred with formerly colonial countries (such as European or North-American countries). In other cases, scholarly ties of North African countries were above all with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. In terms of number of publications, South Africa and Egypt were among the most productive countries. Bibliometrics and, in particular, scientometrics can help scholars identify research areas of particular interest, as well as emerging topics, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. With a specific focus on the still-ongoing viral outbreak, they can assist decision- and policy-makers in allocating funding and economic-financial, logistic, organizational, and human resources, based on the specific gaps and needs of a given country or research area.

SUBMITTER: Mbogning Fonkou M

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8308093 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:IntroductionHealth research is one mechanism to improve population-level health and should generally match the health needs of populations. However, there have been limited data to assess the trends in national-level cardiovascular research output, even as cardiovascular disease [CVD] has become the leading cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide.Materials and methodsWe performed a time trends analysis of cardiovascular research publications (1999-2008) downloaded from Web of Knowledge using a iteratively-tested cardiovascular bibliometric filter with >90% precision and recall. We evaluated cardiovascular research publications, five-year running actual citation indices [ACIs], and degree of international collaboration measured through the ratio of the fractional count of addresses from one country against all addresses for each publication.Results and discussionGlobal cardiovascular publication volume increased from 40 661 publications in 1999 to 55 284 publications in 2008, which represents a 36% increase. The proportion of cardiovascular publications from high-income, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development [OECD] countries declined from 93% to 84% of the total share over the study period. High-income, OECD countries generally had higher fractional counts, which suggest less international collaboration, than lower income countries from 1999-2008. There was an inverse relationship between cardiovascular publications and age-standardized CVD morbidity and mortality rates, but a direct, curvilinear relationship between cardiovascular publications and Human Development Index from 1999-2008.ConclusionsCardiovascular health research output has increased substantially in the past decade, with a greater share of citations being published from low- and middle-income countries. However, low- and middle-income countries with the higher burdens of cardiovascular disease continue to have lower research output than high-income countries, and thus require targeted research investments to improve cardiovascular health.

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COVID-19 Pandemic Related Research in Africa: Bibliometric Analysis of Scholarly Output, Collaborations and Scientific Leadership

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