Abstract
Faced with limited resources, scientists from around the world enter into collaborations to join their resources to conduct research. Like everywhere else, international co-publishing in southern African countries is increasingly on the rise. The aim of this study was to document and analyse the level of scientific productivity, collaboration patterns, scientists’ experiences and attitudes towards South–South and South–North collaboration. We performed 105 interviews with scientists based at five southern African Universities, namely; University of Malawi—Chancellor College, National University of Science and Technology, the University of Botswana, the University of Zambia, and the University of Zimbabwe. We also traced 192 scientists from the various departments at these universities that had jointly published 623 scientific papers in the field of basic sciences in the period 1995–2014 in Web of Science journals. Our results show that in the majority of the cases funding from the North contributed substantially to increased scientific productivity, and international co-authorship. The results also show that collaboration with southern scientists is equally valued as that with northern scientists, but for different reasons. We conclude that supporting international and national collaboration which includes increased scientific mobility, strong scientific groups and networks, are key factors for capacity building of research in southern African Universities.
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Notes
This continues to be a puzzle. Could this be due to the quality of the research, or simply due to the fact that scientists are more likely to quote similar networks and the African networks are relatively new and/or weaker.
We use a definition of South–South collaboration that is based upon historical, political and economic relationships and related to the perceptions of our informants at the university departments.
South–North collaboration is important because of knowledge exchange and innovation transfer. Also, it has been estimated that more African descent Ph.D.-holders, of which many in field of science, work outside Africa than within Africa (Hassan, 2001). The increased communication between these scientists and scientists in Africa is a large potential and can be very beneficial for capacity building in science in Africa.
This may change in the future following the establishment in 2012 of a second public university, the International University of Science and Technology (BIUST 2015).
Departments of statistics, and biochemistry are included.
The search was conducted on Web of Science# (WoS) within five databases: Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED), Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AandHCI), Conference Proceedings Citation Index- Science (CPCI-S), and Conference Proceedings Citation Index- Social Science and Humanities (CPCI-SSH). In order to identify the papers, we used name of department, name of scientist that we found on university department web pages or identified through interviews, name of the scientists that were found as coauthors and also belonged to the targeted departments. The type of data we gathered in the WoS search involved year of publishing, authorship position, and coauthor’s institutional belonging.
OECD list of ODA recipients effective for reporting on 2014, 2015 and 2016 flows. Available at: http://www.oecd.org/dac/stats/documentupload/DAC%20List%20of%20ODA%20Recipients%202,014%20final.pdf.
The reasons for low share of papers reaching international journals might be low research quality, local focus of the research, as well as hard access to the journals. It could also be due to the fact that some of the journals are not indexed in web of science and so these papers do not show up in the search.
International Science Programme at Uppsala University, Sweden.
The respondents were free to list more reasons.
National collaboration includes all national scientific institutions and organizations (such as hospitals, NGOs, other universities and research centers), but not the University of the author. The reason for this is that we want to see how strong the inter-institutional networks within the country are.
United States of America.
Some of the donors come from UK, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, US, EU, Germany, Italy, Saudi Arabia, and African Union.
The funding is not the only factor that might influence the productivity. The age, title, ability to network are other factors that can be looked at.
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Zdravkovic, M., Chiwona-Karltun, L. & Zink, E. Experiences and perceptions of South–South and North–South scientific collaboration of mathematicians, physicists and chemists from five southern African universities. Scientometrics 108, 717–743 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-1989-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-1989-z