A joint report by Elsevier, the information analytics business specialising in science and health, and the World Bank, shows that over a five-year period between 2012 and 2016, the South Asian region published 679,571 papers, accounting for 5.3 percent of the world’s scholarly output—increasing the region’s share of global scholarly output by 1.7 percentage points over the study period.
The region’s widely-diverse profile of population size, economic output, geographic features, natural resources, cultural characteristics, development priorities, national education, and research policies account for large variations in the respective level of scholarly output. For example, researchers based in India produced almost 600,000 papers between 2012 and 2016, while researchers in the Maldives produced less than 100 papers over the same period.
While researchers in India produce the most scholarly papers in the region – with India and Sri Lanka publishing more papers per researcher than the world average – research from several smaller countries achieves greater citation impact than the global average; their relatively modest output is boosted by impactful large-scale international research projects. Along with India, South Asia’s overall citation impact is below the world average, but that of Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, Afghanistan, Bhutan and the Maldives exceeds the global average.
While international collaboration can yield highly significant benefits among countries with lower levels of GDP and GERD by enabling them to leverage and complement the resources of countries with more developed research bases, the report showed that India undertakes relatively low levels of international collaboration when compared to other South Asian nations, so that less than 20 percent of South Asia’s scholarly publications results from international collaboration.
According to the report, Economic size appears to be inversely correlated with international collaboration, as South Asian countries with the smallest economies are the most reliant on international collaboration networks. International collaborations in South Asian countries generally reflect areas of national specialisation such as agricultural sciences, and are less frequent in the social sciences and the humanities.
The report further notes that while extra-regional collaborations can help South Asian countries address challenges that extend beyond the region, intra-regional scholarly collaborations help address common regional challenges in areas such as agriculture, medicine and infrastructure.
Academic-corporate collaborations in South Asia occur at about half the global rate. Only Afghanistan exceeds the global rate for academic-corporate collaborations. Except for Afghanistan, most other South Asian countries and their extra-regional comparators tend to have fewer patent citations than the world average in relation to their scholarly output.
This report measures scholarly output in terms of the total number of peer-reviewed scholarly publications (including research papers, systematic reviews, and conference proceedings) compiled in the Scopus® database. Scholarly output for each country is defined as the number of published papers with at least one author from that country. Intraregional collaboration is defined as collaboration between researchers based in at least two South Asian countries, and no researcher outside of South Asia. Extra-regional collaboration is defined as collaboration between at least one researcher in South Asia and one research outside of South Asia.
Because South Asian countries vary in population and economic size, it is challenging to directly compare their scholarly output and impact. The Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI) indicator can control for differences in citation activity by subject area, document type, and publication year.
Brought to you by Scope e-Knowledge Center, a trusted global partner for digital content transformation solutions - Abstracting & Indexing (A&I), Knowledge Modeling (Taxonomies, Thesauri and Ontologies), and Metadata Enrichment & Entity Extraction.
