Research Collaboration in Saudi Arabia 1980–2014: Bibliometric Patterns and National Policy to Foster Research Quantity and Quality

What is it about?

Using bibliometric indicators from InCitesTM database of ISI’s Web of Science, the present study examines the publication productivity and collaboration of Saudi Arabia (KSA) researchers over the period 1980–2014. The data cover 24 (with at least 500 publications) out of 65 KSA organizations that have bibliometric indicators at InCitesTM. The 24 most active KSA organizations accounted for 85.48% (74,767 out of 88,506) of all KSA publications. The analysis shows that 60,639 documents were multi-authored publications indicating the collaboration ratio of 81.1 %. Various collaboration patterns (single, domestic and international) were investigated. The international collaboration has increased from 56 publications in 1980 to 9,859 publications in 2014. This increase corresponds to 10 times increase in percent of KSA share in the Worldwide international collaboration. KSA is ranked the first and second among the 50 most productive countries in % international growth in collaboration and % overall international collaboration over the 35-year period. Around half of the collaborative articles (49.2 %) were published by two or three authors. The collaboration of KSA researchers in the six disciplines according to the Global Institutional Profiles Project – GIPP schema is examined. The top 20 collaborating countries belonged to five continents and the United States and Egypt were the most collaborative countries with KSA. The highest citation impact came from collaboration with developed countries and all are higher than the world overall citation impact (12.01). Egyptian and US organizations dominate in the top 20 international collaborative organizations. Accurate prediction of the total publications and citations are proposed using the total number of international collaborations of KSA. The findings revealed that collaboration had a positive effect on scientific productivity and quality, since the collaborative publications received more citations and were published in journals with higher impact factor, thus they characterized high quality. Accordingly, developing national research policies are needed to foster and support collaborations among researchers, organizations and countries.

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