Citation Visibility of Africa's Science

Abstract

This Note analyzes data related to the visibility of the science being done in Africa. More specifically, the geographical distribution of citations to scientific papers produced at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria, and the University of Nairobi in Kenya, in the fields of botany, zoology, mathematics and physics is compared with similar data collected for two other peripheral Commonwealth universities. The hypothesis that botany and zoology may be more locally oriented (and thus more locally cited) than physics and mathematics was confirmed. Consistently high citation visibility has been observed in Britain for research carried out in all four peripheral Commonwealth universities. The high rates of intra-national citations received by scientists at Ibadan and Nairobi seem to indicate that the existing system of scientific communication affords significant visibility for the scientific work of developing nations.

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

“…Going beyond mere referencing to substantiate or contradict a viewpoint or a scientific argument, citations indicate how the production of scientific knowledge is used by the world scientific community [RABKIN & AL., 1979]. The number of citations per paper, called the relative citation impact (RCI), is a measure to gauge the impact of a nation's scientific output [MAY, 1997;KING, 2004].…”

The balance of knowledge flows

“…The aim there was to identify the countries which most benefited from Italian research results, both in absolute and relative terms, in over 200 fields. Rabkin, Eisemon, Lafitte-Houssat, and McLean Rathgeber (1979) explored world visibility for four departments (botany, zoology, mathematics, and physics) of the universities of Nairobi (Kenya) and Ibadan (Nigeria), measured by citations in the Science Citation Index (SCI) for the years 1963-1977. They assessed the distribution of the author-country citing publications among five macro-regions (OECD, Eastern Europe, Africa, Latin America, and Asia), with specific attention to Great Britain, given its historic relations with Kenya and Nigeria.…”

On the relation between the degree of internationalization of cited and citing publications: A field level analysis, including and excluding self-citations

“…Taking the normative view, in which citation linkages imply a flow of knowledge from the cited to citing authors (Mehta, Rysman, & Simcoe, 2010;Van Leeuwen & Tijssen, 2000), several scholars have relied on publication citations to investigate the international flows of scientific knowledge. Rabkin, Eisemon, Lafitte-Houssat, and McLean Rathgeber (1979) explored global visibility for four departments (botany, zoology, mathematics, and physics) of the universities of Nairobi (Kenya) and Ibadan (Nigeria). At the level of the single field, Stegmann and Grohmann (2001) measured knowledge "export" in the Dermatology & Venereal Diseases category of the 1996 CD-ROM Journal Citation Reports (JCR), and in seven unlisted dermatology journals.…”