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Egypt is clearly the largest producer of scientific papers shown here, and its output continues to trend upward. Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, displays a peak in output in 1996 (1,537 papers), followed by a slight decline, although since 2000 production has leveled at approximately 1,300 papers per year.
For this analysis, Science Watch turned to the Thomson ISI National Science Indicators database, 1981-2002, which contains publication and citation data for more than 170 countries. Notable by its absence among these Middle Eastern nations is Israel. For the purposes of this study, Science Watch elected to exclude Israel, since the relatively large size of its scientific enterprise tends to preclude any meaningful comparison with its geographic neighbors. (During the 20-year period, for instance, Israel produced 157,379 papers, in contrast to the 39,404 fielded by Egypt.) Similarly, Science Watch chose not to consider nations whose scientific output, as of now, remains small; these countries include Sudan, Yemen, and Libya. The most prolific of these, Sudan, averaged roughly 150 papers per year through the mid-1980s but has not exceeded 100 papers since 1999. Libya and Yemen, individually, have not yet produced 100 ISI-indexed papers per year. The general aim of this survey, then, was to examine a roughly comparable group of nations (comparable in terms of geography and scientific presence, at any rate) in order to gauge their areas of key output and influence. Even among the smaller-producing nations, as the upper right graph shows, there are some notable upward trends. Oman, for example, contributed exactly zero scientific papers to the ISI database in 1981; by 2002, the nation’s scientific output was 236 papers. Last year a Nature report on science in the Arab world mentioned that Oman increased its R&D budget by more than 83% between 1992 and 1996 (see E. Masood, Nature, 416:120-2, 14 March 2002). The present survey suggests that such measures may be paying off.
Jordan also increased its output substantially during the 20 years, from 55 papers in 1981 to 485 in 2002, while Syrian representation increased over the same period, from 10 papers to 108. And Lebanon, which saw its output dip under 100 papers per year in the late 80s and early 90s, has produced more than 300 papers in each of the last two years. Iraq, meanwhile, has trended in the opposite direction, from a high of 204 papers in 1981 to 70 last year. The graph at the right (lower-half) compares each country’s citations per paper (all fields, in a series of five-year overlapping periods) against the world average (expressed as 1.00). As the graph shows, these selected nations have yet to reach the world impact average, although most appear to be on an upward trend in recent years. Oman, by virtue of its small number of papers during the early 1980s, displays an artificial spike in citation impact in the graph’s upper left, but (as is usually the case when nations increase their paper output) the figure adjusts to a more representative level over the time span. The upper left-hand table identifies the nations whose impact compared most favorably with the world average in selected main fields over the last five years. Scientists from Oman, for example, appeared as authors or coauthors on only 113 ISI-indexed chemistry papers between 1998 and 2002, but the impact mark of those papers was 68% of the world average—the best showing of any of these nations that produced at least 100 papers in the field. Finally, the "field concentration" table above shows the field to which each nation
contributed its greatest share of papers between 1998 and 2002. Iran, for
example, is most highly represented in chemistry. Other fields to which Iran
contributed relatively high percentages of papers are pharmacology, mathematics,
and engineering. Egypt, in addition to its comparatively high representation in
materials science, also contributed notably to the fields of chemistry,
agricultural sciences, and pharmacology. And Saudi Arabia, along with its share
of the engineering field, registered its highest percentages in clinical
medicine, pharmacology, and computer science over the last five years.
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n
recent years, Iran has substantially increased its presence in world science,
according to papers indexed by Thomson ISI between 1981 and 2002. That’s just
one finding in a new Science Watch survey examining the output and
impact of a selected group of Middle Eastern nations over the last 20 years. As
the graph at the right (upper-half) shows, Iran’s output in science—although
still comparatively small—has rocketed upward in the last decade, more than
tripling from the 501 papers
indexed in 1996 to a total of 1,830 in 2002.
.
