Abstract
This research letter discusses whether Arab Spring explains the changes in research productivity and impact of Arab countries by identifying non-sociopolitical factors that can be behind the variations of the research performance of several Arab nations such as Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Lebanon and Algeria.
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Notes
Tunisian revolution started on December 17, 2010 and finished on January 15, 2011 (Angrist 2013).
E.g. Three Tunisian scholars appearing on Clarivate Analytics’ Highly Cited Researchers list are currently working in Saudi Arabia: Mohamed Slim Alouini (KAUST), Bessem Samet (King Saud University) and Hassen Aydi (Dammam University) (Turki 2015).
E.g. Tunisia, Algeria and Lebanon respectively improved their research productivity between 2006–2010 and 2011–2015 by 71.0%, 93.2% and 74.8% (Ibrahim 2018).
Tunisia, Algeria and Lebanon respectively issued 833, 562 and 2189 publications in these highly-referred journals between 2006 and 2010 and 1132, 808 and 2551 publications in the same journals between 2011 and 2015 (Clarivate Analytics 2019b).
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Turki, H., Ben Aouicha, M. & Hadj Taieb, M. Discussing Arab Spring’s effect on scientific productivity and research performance in Arab countries. Scientometrics 120, 337–339 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-019-03127-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-019-03127-7