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

Abstract

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 subSaharan 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 subSaharan 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.

Water research and collaboration in the Southern African Development Community

“…Some collaborative research exists between South Africa and Zimbabwe and South Africa and Namibia. These findings confirm those of Onyancha et al (2011) who identified that knowledge production through collaborative research among sub-Saharan African countries is minimal. Zimbabwe is the country collaborating most with SA among the SADC countries (almost 27% of all co-authored publications during the 2012-2014 period), followed by Tanzania and Malawi.…”

Research emphasis and collaboration in Africa

“…Sooryamoorthy (2009) investigated the collaboration patterns of South African researchers and Boshoff (2010) identified the collaborative patterns in the Southern African development community (SADC) countries. Onyancha and Maluleka (2011) found out that knowledge production through collaborative research among sub-Saharan African countries is minimal. Schubert and Sooryamoorthy (2010) showed that "a theory of scientific collaboration building on the notion of marginality and centre-periphery can explain many facets of South African-German collaboration, where South Africa is a semi-peripheral region, a centre for the periphery, and a periphery for the centre".…”

Research growth and citation impact of Tanzanian scholars: A 24 years scientometric study

“…However, other scholars found that the research collaborations within African countries are still low, when compared with extra-Africa collaborations (Onyancha and Maluleka, 2011;Confraria and Godinho, 2015;Nature, 2015). Further, the research collaboration of the top publishing African countries is dominated by a few external partners, mainly the US, UK and France (Confraria and Godinho, 2015).…”

“…The level of collaborative research activities in Africa is substantially higher as compared to the rest of the world, although the intra-Africa collaboration is still low (Onyancha and Maluleka, 2011;Confraria and Godinho, 2015;Nature, 2015).…”