Bibliometric analysis of bioeconomy research in South Africa

Abstract

This document provides an analysis of bioeconomy research in South Africa and it discusses sources of growth in the country’s bioeconomy literature in general. We performed bibliometric analysis as indexed in the Web of Science (WoS) for number of South African authored publications and citations in bioeconomy, and compared them with Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRICS) and selected countries for the period 2008 to 2018. The WoS is used for research dealing with the scientific dynamic of a particular topic in most widely diffused journals and for citation analysis. The results highlight South Africa ranked last in the BRICS group in terms of number of bioeconomy publications produced in the selected period, and has a world share of 0.8%, which is higher than the national research average of 0.5%. The citations growth for South Africa bioeconomy publication increased by 6.8%, higher than Brazil, Russia and world citations during the period under review. The University of Cape Town is a leader in bioeconomy publications in South Africa followed by University of Stellenbosch and the University of KwaZulu Natal, with majority of the publications on environmental sciences ecology. South Africa collaborates the most with institutions from the United States of America in bioeconomy research, and the percent of international collaboration is similar with that of national scientific publications. However, South Africa experienced a decline in bioeconomy industry collaboration publications during this period.