The Arabic Citation Index -- Toward a better understanding of Arab scientific literature

TL;DR

This paper introduces the Arabic Citation Index (ARCI), analyzing its content, coverage, and thematic structure to enhance understanding of Arab scientific literature and its role in research evaluation.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of ARCI's contents, geographic and disciplinary coverage, and employs machine learning to uncover its thematic structure, highlighting its potential in research assessment.

Findings

ARCI contains over 138,000 publications mainly in Arts & Humanities and Social Sciences.

Most publications are from Egypt, Algeria, Iraq, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia.

Machine learning reveals key research topics and thematic areas in ARCI.

Abstract

The Arabic Citation Index (ARCI) was launched in 2020. This article provides an overview of the scientific literature contained in this new database and explores its possible usage in research evaluation. As of May 2022, ARCI had indexed 138,283 scientific publications published between 2015 and 2020. ARCI's coverage is characterised by using the metadata available in scientific publications. First, I investigate the distributions of the indexed literature at various levels (research domains, countries, languages, open access). Articles make up nearly all the documents indexed with a share of 99% of ARCI. The Arts & Humanities and Social Sciences fields have the highest concentration of publications. Most indexed journals are published in Egypt, Algeria, Iraq, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. About 8% of publications in ARCI are published in languages other than Arabic. Second, I use an unsupervised machine learning model, LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation), and the text mining algorithm of VOSviewer to uncover the main topics in ARCI. These methods provide a better understanding of ARCI's thematic structure. Next, I discuss how ARCI can complement global standards in the context of a more inclusive research evaluation. Finally, I suggest a few research opportunities after discussing the findings of this study.