Research partnerships that count in sub saharan africa’s research output and impact A bibliometrics study of selected countries, 2000-2019

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent to which selected countries in sub-Saharan Africa benefit from their research collaboration with other countries, with special focus on countries outside Africa. Data was obtained from the Web of Science’s (WoS) citation databases using the country name in a search query CU=Country Name and limiting the search to research articles published between 2000 and 2019. The VOSviewer was used to map the country collaborations in the five sub-Saharan African countries, which were selected for the study, namely Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria and Tanzania. The findings reveal that the number of collaborating countries has not only increased since 2000 but also that the intensity of collaboration among countries has tremendously grown over time. The USA and England contribute the most to the five countries’ research performances and therefore constitute the core country contributors. The collaborators’ contribution to the five countries is close to being proportional but greatly differs in terms of percentage share across the five countries. The greatest beneficiary of regional (hereinafter used to refer to ‘Africa’ or ‘African’) and international collaboration is Kenya, followed by Nigeria, Ghana, Tanzania and Ethiopia. The collaboration among researchers from different countries is likely to intensify as many governments and funders place more emphasis on research collaboration. Given the current increased interest in university rankings, institutions in sub-Saharan Africa are likely to encourage their researchers to engage in collaborative research that benefits the institutions the greatest.