Scientists working with peers abroad
South African scientists have steadily increased the number of papers they publish and are increasingly collaborating with their international peers, according to research from the University of Stellenbosch.
Greater international collaboration is important because it translates into a higher citation impact and improves access to funding opportunities.
“In the early 1990s there was very little international collaboration because of the apartheidera isolation and the academic boycott — very few scientists wanted to be associated with SA. But SA has now become part of global science and is no longer a pariah,” said Johann Mouton, director of the Centre for Research on Evaluation, Science and Technology at the University of Stellenbosch.
However, collaboration with other African countries remained low, despite the large number of bilateral research agreements that had been put in place, he said.
SA’s publication output rose from 3,688 publications in 2000 to 15,500 in 2017, according to an analysis conducted by Mouton and fellow researcher Jaco Blanckenberg, using the Web of Science database.
They found SA’s share of world output more than doubled over the 17-year period, rising from 0.4% in 2000 to 0.91% in 2016, and it rose up the world ranking from 34 to 28.
SA currently constitutes about 0.75% of the world’s population, according to the Worldometers website.
“We are punching above our weight,” said Mouton. “SA has a small science system, but it is certainly the most productive on the African continent.”
The proportion of South African papers with at least one foreign co-author rose from a third in 2000 to a half in 2017, in line with global trends towards greater international collaboration, said Mouton. Projects such as the hunt for gravity waves, sequencing genomes and large multicentre clinical trials could have dozens or even hundreds of collaborators, he said.
Their citation analysis found that the impact of South African research had steadily increased. The number of times a paper is referenced, or cited, by other scientists is one of the ways to measure its visibility. As citation practices vary between different scientific fields, the researchers calculated a normalised citation score for each publication, and then calculated the mean of these values.
They found the mean normalised citation score for SA rose from 0.8 in 2000 to 1.1 in 2017.
“This is very positive, as a score above one means SA’s papers are on average being cited slightly more than other papers in the fields in which we publish,” they said.