Mbogning Fonkou Maxime Descartes, Bragazzi Nicola Luigi, Tsinda Emmanuel Kagning, Bouba Yagai, Mmbando Gideon Sadikiel, Kong Jude Dzevela
UFR IM2AG, Université Grenoble Alpes, 38000 Grenoble, France.
Laboratory for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (LIAM), Department of Mathematics and Statistics, York University, Toronto, ON M3J 1P3, Canada.
Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2021 Jul 7;18(14):7273. doi: 10.3390/ijerph18147273.
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.
科学计量学使学者能够从定量的角度评估和可视化科学文献中新兴的研究趋势和热点。在过去几十年里，非洲的学术产出绝对数量几乎翻了一番，尽管其在全球知识生产中的份额大幅下降。仍在持续的新冠疫情对学术研究的开展、发表和传播方式产生了深远影响。然而，在当前新冠疫情期间，非洲研究人员与新冠疫情相关的研究重点、科研生产力以及研究合作网络仍有待阐明。本研究旨在厘清非洲研究人员的新冠疫情研究模式，并估计在新冠疫情期间非洲研究人员与世界其他地区学者之间合作与伙伴关系的强度，从诸如科学网（WoS）、PubMed/MEDLINE和非洲在线期刊（AJOL）等电子学术数据库收集数据，AJOL是非洲出版学术期刊的最大且著名的平台。我们发现，与新冠疫情相关的合作模式在非洲各地区有所不同。例如，大多数学术伙伴关系是与以前的殖民国家（如欧洲或北美国家）建立的。在其他情况下，北非国家的学术联系首先是与沙特阿拉伯王国。就出版物数量而言，南非和埃及是产出最多的国家之一。文献计量学，尤其是科学计量学，可以帮助学者识别特别感兴趣的研究领域以及新兴话题，如新冠疫情。特别关注仍在持续的病毒爆发，它们可以根据特定国家或研究领域的具体差距和需求，协助决策者和政策制定者分配资金以及经济金融、后勤、组织和人力资源。
