COVID-19 publications: Database coverage, citations, readers, tweets, news, Facebook walls, Reddit posts

© 2020 The Authors. Published by MIT Press. This is an open access article available under a Creative Commons licence. The published version can be accessed at the following link on the publisher’s website: https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00066The COVID-19 pandemic requires a fast response from researchers to help address biological, medical and public health issues to minimize its impact. In this rapidly evolving context, scholars, professionals and the public may need to quickly identify important new studies. In response, this paper assesses the coverage of scholarly databases and impact indicators during 21 March to 18 April 2020. The rapidly increasing volume of research, is particularly accessible through Dimensions, and less through Scopus, the Web of Science, and PubMed. Google Scholar’s results included many false matches. A few COVID-19 papers from the 21,395 in Dimensions were already highly cited, with substantial news and social media attention. For this topic, in contrast to previous studies, there seems to be a high degree of convergence between articles shared in the social web and citation counts, at least in the short term. In particular, articles that are extensively tweeted on the day first indexed are likely to be highly read and relatively highly cited three weeks later. Researchers needing wide scope literature searches (rather than health focused PubMed or medRxiv searches) should start with Dimensions (or Google Scholar) and can use tweet and Mendeley reader counts as indicators of likely importance

Collaboration Towards a More Inclusive Society: The Case of South African ICT4D Researchers

In this study, research collaboration in the context of South African Information and Communication for Development (ICT4D) researchers was investigated using a mixed methods approach. South Africa, a country with stark development challenges and on the other hand a well-established ICT infrastructure, provides an appropriate context for ICT4D research. Firstly, a quantitative analysis of South African research collaboration between 2003 and 2016 was conducted to determine the existing research collaboration patterns of South African ICT4D researchers. This is based on the publications in three top ICT4D journals namely the Electronic Journal of Information Systems in Developing Countries (EJISDC), Information Technologies & International Development (ITID), and Information Technology for Development (ITD). The results show that most co-authored papers were intra-institutional collaborations, with limited inter-institutional collaboration between South African authors or between South African and other African authors. Secondly, interviews were conducted with South African researchers who emerged as inter- and intra-institutional collaborators to gain insight into the technology, drivers and barriers affecting South African research collaboration. We report our findings and discuss the implications for employing research collaboration as a mechanism for addressing inequality and supporting inclusion.School of Computin

A bibliometric analysis of research on Ebola in Science Citation Index Expanded

Pouris, A. and Ho, Y.S. (2016), A bibliometric analysis of research on Ebola in Science Citation Index Expanded. South African Journal of Science, 112 (3-4), 83-88, Article Number: 2015-0326

Biotechnology research in South Africa:a benchmarking exercise

Biotechnology has been identified as a priority area for the national innovation system in South Africa. Since 2003 new structures have been established in the country in order to enhance biotechnology research and innovation in accordance with the “National Biotechnology Strategy”. Recently and for the first time in the country’s science policy history, the Department of Science and Technology published the “Ten Year Plan 2008-2018” which sets quantitative objectives for the national system. The effort of this article is to benchmark the country’s research related to biotechnology in order to provide the foundations for themonitoring of the evolution of the field and the accomplishment of the broad objectives set by the Department of Science and Technology. The international comparisons identify a number of management challenges and policy concerns and the extent of efforts required so that the South African biotechnology innovation system meets the objectives set by the Government

Research emphasis and collaboration in Africa

[[abstract]]Pouris, A. and Ho, Y.S. (2013), Research emphasis and collaboration in Africa. Scientometrics, (in press)