Sci-Bytes> Science in South Africa, 2005-09
Week of July 10, 2011
South Africa’s world share of science and social-science papers over a recent five-year period, expressed as a percentage of papers in each of 21 fields in the Thomson Reuters database. Also, South Africa’s relative citation impact compared to the world average in each field, in percentage terms.
Field | % papers fr. South Africa | Impact vs. world |
---|---|---|
Plant & Animal Science | 1.56 | -14 |
Environment/Ecology | 1.37 | +2 |
Social Sciences | 1.16 | -20 |
Geosciences | 1.09 | -15 |
Space Science | 1.01 | +19 |
Immunology | 0.97 | +9 |
Economics & Business | 0.77 | -64 |
Microbiology | 0.76 | +1 |
Agricultural Sciences | 0.69 | -6 |
Psychiatry/Psychology | 0.61 | -38 |
Mathematics | 0.58 | Even |
South Africa's overall percent share, all fields: 0.56 | ||
Biology & Biochemistry | 0.50 | -23 |
Clinical Medicine | 0.43 | +10 |
Pharmacology & Toxicology | 0.41 | -27 |
Chemistry | 0.37 | -26 |
Engineering | 0.36 | -16 |
Physics | 0.28 | -13 |
Computer Science | 0.26 | +46 |
Materials Science | 0.24 | -27 |
Molecular Biology & Genetics | 0.22 | -40 |
Neuroscience & Behavior | 0.22 | -34 |
Between 2005 and 2009, Clarivate indexed 29,168 papers that listed at least one author address in South Africa. Of those papers, the highest percentage appeared in journals indexed under the heading of plant & animal science, followed by environment/ecology. As the right-hand column shows, the citations-per-paper (impact) figure for plant & animal papers from South Africa-based was 14% below the world mark (2.82 cites per paper for South Africa, versus 3.28 for the world). On the other hand, South African impact was above the world average in environment/ecology and in several of the fields shown, notably space science, clinical medicine, and computer science. In mathematics, South Africa’s impact score happened to match the world mark precisely: 1.51 cites per paper.
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FIELDS, 2001-August 31, 2011.