Publication Productivity in Central Asia and Countries of the Former Soviet Union

Shalkar Adambekov, Sholpan Askarova, Sharon C. Welburn, Sharon L. Goughnour, Ayumi Konishi, Ronald E. LaPorte, Faina Y. Linkov

2016

Full text Open access: Gold Metadata (CSL-JSON)
DOI 10.5195/cajgh.2016.261
Data confidence 70 medium
How this score is calculated

It is built from checkable properties of the record itself: whether the article has a DOI, how many independent sources confirmed its data, whether the required fields are filled in, and how recent the latest confirmation is. Disagreement between sources and a missing identifier lower it. A value of 80 or above means the record was published without further checking; 60 to 79 means it is published at reduced confidence, with a manual check advisable. A record verified by an editor by hand is never pushed below 90 by a recalculation. This scores our data about the article, not the article itself.

Abstract

INTRODUCTION: Despite the significant number of research institutions and rich scientific heritage, published research from Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan) is traditionally underrepresented in international scientific literature. The goal of this paper was to analyze publication patterns in Central Asian countries, and to explore the factors that contributed to the publication productivity in Kazakhstan. METHODS: Publication productivity was evaluated using data generated by the SCImago Journal & Country Rank over the period of 1996-2014 for all of the 15 former Soviet Union Republics for all subject categories. Country specific data, including total population, gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, research and development (R&D) expenditure (% of GDP), number of reserchers (per million people), was abstracted from World Bank data. ANOVA and ANCOVA analyses compared the mean number of publications among Central Asian countries. Separate analyses was done for publication patterns in the health sciences. Multiple comparisons were performed using Tukey method. RESULTS: The analysis of publication productivity showed significant discrepancies in the number of published documents among the Central Asian countries. Kazakhstan demonstrated a significant increase in the number of published documents in the period of 1996-2014, mainly in the areas of natural and multidisciplinary sciences. Our analyses also showed that the number of publications are siginicantly associated with GDP and population size. CONCLUSIONS: We identified large gaps in publication productivity among the Central Asian countries. The association between publication rate with GDP and population size indicates there is a need to adjust for these factors when planning research policy.