Abstract
Research enhances the efforts to address climate change through improved understanding of the causes, effects and likely impacts as well as formulation of climate change policies and strategies for adaptation and mitigation measures. A bibliometric analysis was conducted to assess research trends on climate change in Tanzania for the period between 2006 and 2016. Data were extracted using the Publish or Perish programme which uses Google Scholar to retrieve the number of publications, citation counts and related metrics. The study findings show that there were 319 scholarly publications for the 10-year period, giving an average of about 32 publications per year. As the rate of growth of publications increased, the corresponding doubling time decreased. Journal articles were the dominant (56.1%) type of publications. Areas with relatively higher number of articles were “climate change adaptation” (25.2%), “climate change impacts/implications” (23.3%) and “climate variability” (13.8%). Many (68.9%) publications were multiple-authored and the degree of collaboration among scholars was 0.69. The top 10 ranked scholars contributed nearly one third (31%) of the publications. These results suggest that research productivity in the area of climate change in Tanzania is generally low compared to other countries in the world. Concerted efforts are therefore necessary to foster the research on climate change in Tanzania. Key words: Bibliometrics, climate change, research, publications, Tanzania.
Highlights
Climate change is a global phenomenon that results from increased concentration of Greenhouse Gases (GHGs) in the atmosphere primarily from industrialization, deforestation and increased use of fossil fuels
The results show that the vulnerability researches on climate change have experienced a rapid growth since 2006, and the publications are distributed in several journals
The findings focus of the growth of the climate change literature, collaboration patterns, subject categories citations trends as well as individual researchers‟ publication productivity
Summary
Climate change is a global phenomenon that results from increased concentration of Greenhouse Gases (GHGs) in the atmosphere primarily from industrialization, deforestation and increased use of fossil fuels. These lead to higher temperatures, unreliable rainfalls, unpredictable synchromes and storms as well as rise in sea level all of which have adverse effects on living organisms and the environment (IPCC, 2007). Developing countries including Tanzania are more vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change because majority of their populations depend on climate sensitive natural resources and they have lower adaptive capacities (UNFCCC, 2007). In Tanzania, the impacts of climate change on various socio-economic sectors, environment and livelihoods are already vivid and these impacts threat to undermine and even undo development efforts attained so far (Nindi and Mhando, 2012)
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