SA trails Brics partners in research output

IS IT fair and realistic to compare South African research output with that of its Brics counterparts? Academics’ opinions are as extreme as the data. Recent research shows that academic publications rose steeply from the year 2004 to 7 468 publications in 2010, pushing SA into 33rd spot in the world.

Special mention is often made of the fact that SA trails far behind its Brics partners Brazil (31 274), Russia (26 374), India (40 711) and China (124 822).

But the reality is that SA’s gross domestic product and population are a faction of those of its Brics partners, which means that it does not have the same kinds of funds to allocate to research and development or the same quantity of human capital to undertake research.

SA’s gross domestic product (GDP) last year was $408,2bn, which pales in comparison with China ($7,3-trillion), India ($1,85-trillion), Russia ($1,86-trillion) and Brazil ($2,48-trillion), according to the World Bank. In terms of population, SA with its 50,6-million people is also small fry: Russia has 142-million people, China 1,3-billion, India 1,2-billion and Brazil 197-million people.

But GDP per capita shows that SA sits in the middle of the Brics: according to International Monetary Fund data, GDP per capita for SA last year was $10 973, China $8 382, Russia $16 736, India $3 694 and Brazil $11 769.

Despite its small size, it has a higher than expected percentage of highly cited research papers, 0,56% of the global total, especially considering its relatively small pool of researchers. SA’s overall proportion of global citations is 0,5%.

“You have to choose your comparators carefully,” says Michael Kahn, professor extraordinaire at Stellenbosch University. “It’s absurd to compare us to the Brics. We’re a midget, even just in terms of our populations. Norway is a better example. Their innovation system is in the same ball park as us; they don’t exceed us by seven times,” he says.

Prof David Kaplan, an economics professor at the University of Cape Town, says: “It’s difficult to compare big and small countries. But on a per capita basis, you might get somewhere: how is our share of publications per capita changing relative to other countries?

“What’s our share of world publications?”

SA has a poor patent record in global, domestic and coinvented patents. In 2008, SA was granted 91 patents by the US Patent Office, while India and Brazil were granted 679 and 103 patents respectively.

However, Anastassios Pouris, director at the University of Pretoria’s Institute for Technological Innovation, says that SA has to compare itself with the rest of the world, irrespective of how small it is.

“The approach is similar to a marathon. It does not help if you run and everyone runs faster than you…. Our GDP, economic activity depends on how competitive we are in comparison to the rest of the world.”

However, Rhodes University vicechancellor Saleem Badat says comparing SA’s academic publications to those of Brics countries is a “futile quest”. “Simplistic comparisons with the Brics could be a misguided effort…. We should also be asking questions about population size, about levels of development, underdevelopment and GDP, investment in higher education and the like, so that we can formulate sensible and realistic target for ourselves. From a policy perspective, we must be extremely cautious about futile or unrealistic quests.”

However, all academics agree that SA is experiencing an increase in research output. The question is how should the country be benchmarking its achievement, and whether a Brics comparison is unhelpful and unrealistic.