Cross-country comparisons of scientific performance by focusing on post-apartheid South Africa

TL;DR

This study analyzes South Africa's scientific performance from 1994 to 2014 across quantity, impact, and quality, comparing it with global trends and other countries to understand its transition to a knowledge-based economy.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive, relative indicator-based assessment of South Africa's scientific development over two decades, highlighting its position amidst global and regional competitors.

Findings

South Africa's scientific performance steadily increased over the period.

Its global position remained stable despite growth.

Countries like China and Turkey showed rapid improvements.

Abstract

This paper examines the scientific performance of South Africa since 1994 (post-apartheid) until 2014 in comparisons with the rest of the world, utilizing relative indicator. It provides a view over current standing of South Africa in the scientific world as well as its temporal evolution after the apartheid. This study focuses on four major aspects of scientific performance, namely quantity, productivity, impact and quality, as the main attributes of scientific perfomance on national level. These are measured by re-based (relative) publication, publication per population or GDP, citations and citations per publication respectively. The study focuses on scientific outputs (in the form of papers published in peer-reviewed journals) and their impact (measured by the citations they have received) to bring into a light a homogeneous comprehension of South Africa's scientific performance in all these four aspects. Indicators are adopted cautiously by considering the measures put forward recently for scientometrics indicators and their usage in the long-term comparisons studies. The temporal evolution of these indicators for South Africa are discussed in the context of three major groups of countries, namely African countries, developing countries, and developed (including BRICS) countries. It aims to examine the process of transition of South Africa from a developing world economy system into a knowledge-based and innovation-driven one of the developed world. The study reveals that South Africa has shown steady increase in its scientific performance during the studied period when compared to the rest of the world. However, due to the increasing competition from the other developing countries, South Africa's position stands the same during this period, while countries such as China, Iran, Turkey and Malaysia have shown great jump at least in the quantity of their scientific performance.