Nature has a package of articles this week on the moribund state of research in Egypt. The country spends only 0.2-0.3% of its GDP on research, while interviews with scientists in the country who are eager for reform provide assessments more damning than statistics alone.
An analysis provided to Nature by Elsevier from its Scopus database puts Egypt’s research performance over the past decade in context with neighbours and the rest of the world. It shows how absolute counts of publications per country and relative citation impact have changed from 2000 to 2008. In the motion chart below, click to select individual countries and drag the slider to compare their changing output over time; or use tabs in the upper right of the chart for different output styles. Trends to watch include Iran’s surge in output and impact, and that Egypt’s impact differs little from other Arab states, though its output is greater.
Note: The ‘relative citation impact’ measures the average number of citations received by a country’s publications, weighted for research field practice and normalized to a global average of 1. Each year represents a 5-year window, so ‘2000’ is 1996-00; ‘2008’ is 2004-08.
At the same time, the UK’s Royal Society last year noted signs of “renewed ambition and investment in education, science and innovation across the Islamic world,” as it states in its June 2010 positioning paper, ‘A new golden age? The prospects for science and innovation in the Islamic world’.
Until recent events, Egypt hadn’t been considered at the forefront of these prospects, yet it is a hub of what little research collaboration takes place between Muslim nations, as Elsevier analyst Andrew Plume noted in an analysis published online in Scopus’ ‘Research Trends’ newsletter in January. His network analysis of these collaborations is republished below.
Given the country’s geopolitical history, it’s not surprising that Egypt should lie at the centre of this network; and remember these links are still weaker than the co-publishing ties connecting each country to the USA, Europe, and Japan. Still, it is striking that, according to data from Thomson Reuters, 6% of Egypt’s research output is co-published with scientists from Saudi Arabia, making Saudi Arabia Egypt’s second-favoured collaborative partner (after the USA with 9% and just ahead of Germany). In return, nearly 13% of Saudi Arabia’s national output is co-published with Egypt – its top partner. All in all, Egypt is well placed to take advantage of existing collaborative links, if the environment for research in the country and the region improves over the next decade.
Image details: Collaboration map of selected OIC countries in the period 2004–08 inclusive. Collaborative patterns between countries are represented based on numbers of jointly authored research papers (with a threshold of 25 papers). The data were visualized in Gephi using the Force Atlas algorithm, which treats the network of lines as a system of interconnected springs and seeks to satisfy the tension of all lines simultaneously in a 2-D rendering; as such, countries sharing a collaborative relationship tend to group together, while those that do not are placed further apart. Source: Scopus.