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Abstract
Ghana is a West African country for which apparently there are limited scientometric studies. The objective of this study was to analyze the Ghanaian contribution to knowledge captured in the Thomson Reuters Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED) database from 1936 - 2016. The following data were analyzed: document type, the language of publication, publication trend, Web of Science Subject Categories, Journals, international collaboration, institutions, authors, and highly cited articles. Indicators such as the total number of articles, first author articles, and corresponding author articles were applied to compare publication performance for collaborative countries and institutions. Also, number of single institute articles: number of nationally collaborative articles: number of internationally collaborative articles (S : N : I) were also used to compare publication characteristics of institutions in Ghana. Results showed that publication trend increased from 1998 to 2015, with researches focusing on health and medicine. PLoS One was the top productive journal, and the most collaborative country for Ghana articles was the USA. Contributions from the University of Ghana were ranked the top one institution for Ghana articles, and higher citation papers were found in international collaborations. In conclusion, the contribution to knowledge of Ghanaian authors is massive in the areas of public, environmental and occupational health and tropical medicine but the impact factor is higher for immunology, infectious diseases, and microbiology articles. Therefore, Ghanaian authors are encouraged to publish more articles in high impact factor journals with Thomson Reuters Scientific indexing in order to have their researches recognized by the existing international databases.
Highlights
Science Citation Index (SCI) was known in the science community in 1955, and it is currently the cutting-edge tool to facilitate the dissemination and retrieval of scientific literature (Garfield, 2006)
Based on the above realization, scientists have embarked on bibliometric analysis to understand the nature and complexity of research activities
Bibliometric analysis is defined as the quantitative study of science, communication in science, and science policy (Sam, 2008; Milojević & Leydesdorff, 2013)
Summary
Science Citation Index (SCI) was known in the science community in 1955, and it is currently the cutting-edge tool to facilitate the dissemination and retrieval of scientific literature (Garfield, 2006). They generally leave out a lot of research outputs of researchers from the developing regions (Nwagwu & Egbon, 2011) This has gingered researchers from Africa to publish in journals with Thomson Reuters Scientific indexing services, in order to have their researches recognized by the existing international databases, and this has been executed perfectly well via research collaboration. Latest research works on bibliometric studies in Ghana include: Research focus and trends in nuclear science and technology in Ghana: A bibliometric study based on the INIS database (Agyeman & Bilson, 2015); a scientometric analysis of research performance of Ghanaian polytechnics (Lomatey, Abledu, Baayel, Akussah, & Botchway, 2016); research collaboration in Ghana: patterns, motives and roles (Owusu-Nimo & Boshoff, 2017) Among these bibliometric studies presented so far, there is no comprehensive bibliometric analysis of Ghana publications in the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED) from 1936-2015. This research will, provide the following: names of authors, title, year of publication, source journals publishing the articles, contact address, and each year citation times for every publication in SCI-EXPANDED
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