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International collaboration in scientific publishing: the case of West Africa (2001–2010)

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Abstract

Bibliographic data of publications indexed in Web of Science with at least one (co-)author affiliated to any of the 15 West African countries and published from 2001 to 2010 included are downloaded. Analyses focused one collaboration indicators especially intra regional collaboration, intra African collaboration and collaboration with the world. Results showed that the rate of papers with only one author is diminishing whereas the rate of papers with six and more authors is increasing. Nigeria is responsible for more than half the region’s total scientific output. The main African partner countries are South Africa (in the Southern Africa, Cameroon (in the Central Africa), Kenya and Tanzania (in the Eastern Africa). The main non African partner countries are France, USA and United Kingdom, which on their own contributed to over 63 % of the papers with a non West African address. Individual countries have higher international collaboration rate, except Nigeria. West African countries cooperated less with each other and less with African and developing countries than they did with developed ones. The study suggests national authorities to express in actions their commitment to allot at least 1 % of their GDP to science and technology funding. It also suggests regional integration institutions to encourage and fund research activities that involve several institutions from different West African countries in order to increase intra regional scientific cooperation.

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Notes

  1. Resolution CM/Res. 464 (XXVI) adopted by the African Unity Organisation (now African Union) Council of Ministers meeting in its twenty-sixth ordinary session in Addis-Ababa (Ethiopia) from 23 February to 1st March 1976. The countries list was updated in 2004.

  2. Even though Morocco is an African country and belongs to the North from a geographical point of view, it is not member of the African Union due to political reasons. Therefore, it is not considered in the African Union’s classification. However, in this study, we included it into the Northern region.

  3. CDS-ISIS is text database management software developed and distributed by UNESCO (UNESCO 1989a).

  4. CDS/ISIS provides a programming language “designed to develop CDS/ISIS applications requiring functions which are not readily available in the standard package” (UNESCO 1989b). This programming language enables users to extend functions of the standard package, to make it more robust and in order to meet users’ specific needs (Mêgnigbêto 1998).

  5.  « The formatting language allows you to define precise formatting requirement for data base records. Through this language, you may select one or more specific data elements in the order you want and optionally insert constant text of your choice, e.g. to label some or all the fields, as well as specify vertical or horizontal spacing requirements (…). The formatting language is therefore the core of many operations and an efficient use of CDS/ISIS requires a thorough knowledge of this technique » (UNESCO 1989a).

  6. A search in the CDS/ISIS database returned an additional two journals. 6 out of the 7 journals were put out by the publisher Academic journals. The additional two journals were removed from Web of Science due to the publisher’s unfair practices. Other titles from the same publisher should be sentenced the same way (see Harzing 2012).

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Correspondence to Eustache Mêgnigbêto.

Appendix

Appendix

See Appendix Table 10.

Table 10 African regions (according to the African Union)

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Mêgnigbêto, E. International collaboration in scientific publishing: the case of West Africa (2001–2010). Scientometrics 96, 761–783 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-013-0963-2

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