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

Maxime Descartes Mbogning Fonkou, Nicola Luigi Bragazzi, Emmanuel Kagning Tsinda, Yagai Bouba, Gideon Sadikiel Mmbando and Jude Dzevela Kong
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Maxime Descartes Mbogning Fonkou: UFR IM2AG, Université Grenoble Alpes, 38000 Grenoble, France
Nicola Luigi Bragazzi: Laboratory for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (LIAM), Department of Mathematics and Statistics, York University, Toronto, ON M3J 1P3, Canada
Emmanuel Kagning Tsinda: Graduate School of Medicine, University of Tohoku, Sendai 980-8575, Japan
Yagai Bouba: Chantal BIYA International Reference Centre for Research on HIV/AIDS Prevention and Management (CIRCB), Yaoundé 3077, Cameroon
Gideon Sadikiel Mmbando: Graduate School of Life Sciences, University of Tohoku, Sendai 980-8577, Japan
Jude Dzevela Kong: Canadian Centre for Disease Modelling (CCDM), Department of Mathematics and Statistics, York University, Toronto, ON M3J 1P3, Canada

IJERPH, 2021, vol. 18, issue 14, 1-16

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.

Keywords: bibliometrics; scientometrics; Africa; COVID-19 pandemic (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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