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

Mon, Dec. 24, 2018
CAIRO – 24 December 2018: Emerging economies revealed some of the largest increases in research output in 2018, according to estimates from the publishing-services company Clarivate Analytics. Egypt and Pakistan came at the top of 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. 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.