Egypt records world 2nd highest rise in research output in 2018

CAIRO - 24 December 2018: Emerging economies showed some of the largest increases in research output in 2018, according to estimates from the publishing-services company Clarivate Analytics. Egypt and Pakistan topped the list in percentage terms, with rises of 21% and 15.9%, respectively, as reported by Nature Magazine.

China’s publications rose by about 15%, and India, Brazil, Mexico and Iran all saw their output grow by more than 8% compared with 2017.

Globally, research output rose by around 5% in 2018, to an estimated 1,620,731 papers listed in a vast science-citation database Web of Science, the highest ever.

This diversification of players in science is a phenomenal success, says Caroline Wagner, a science and technology policy analyst at Ohio State University, and a former adviser to the US government.

“In 1980, only 5 countries did 90% of all science — the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Japan,” she says. “Now there are 20 countries within the top producing group.”

The estimates were compiled for Nature by Clarivate, which owns Web of Science, and the analysis focused on 40 countries that have at least 10,000 papers in the database.

The whole-year projections are based on the number of research and review papers published between January and August, because there is a time lag between papers being published and them appearing in the database.

The estimates focused on forty countries with at least 10K research papers each in 2018, however the figures could reflect that the likes of Egypt have witnessed such an increase, because they started from near the bottom of the list, while an increase in funding and international collaboration was also cited by Clarivate Analytics as a reason for the increase.