Scientific and Technical Productivity of African Countries: What Scopus and WIPO Patentscope Data Tell Us?

This study maps the scientific publication and patenting activity of the member countries of the African Union (AU) using different Scientometrics indicators. This study uses the Scopus data of Elsevier science. Scopus extensively covers global as well as African scholarly literature. This study traces the literature growth, subject wise productivity and citation pattern of AU member countries. Besides the literature data, this study also maps the patenting activity using data from the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) PATENTSCOPE database. The study observed a visible growth in publication since the last decade. The major activity is in Medicine related subject areas followed by Agriculture and Biological Science. The publications from African countries are wellcited (9.08 per paper) and above the average of Asian and Latin American countries but below the world average. The patenting activity as reflected from WIPO data, is limited and South Africa is the only country with quite a visible number of patents. The outcome and the recommendations of this study will undoubtedly be useful for scholars, policy, and decision-makers in the governments of the member states of AU.


INTRODUCTION
In recent years, the African continent has taken several initiatives to boost Science and Technology (S&T). Among the many initiatives, the Monrovia Strategy (1979), the Lagos Plan of Action (1980), the Abuja Treaty (1991), the establishment of the African Economic Community, and the most recently in 2007, the adoption of Africa's Science and Technology Consolidated Plan of Action (CPA) by the African Union (AU). Africa's S&T Consolidated Plan of Action has taken many initiatives to map the S&T output of the African Union, [1] for example, the publication of African Innovation Outlook in 2014. In 2014, AU adopted the Science, Technology, and Innovation Strategy for Africa -2024 (STISA-2024) (Science Technology and Innovation Strategy for Africa 2024, 2014). [2] This policy document aimed to shape Africa's S&T and innovation activities for the future. This document has significant potential for the S&T growth and overall socio-economic development of Africa. The policy document is widely acclaimed across the African continent as well as globally for sustainable and better Africa. [2] To map African Science, the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) has released the African Science, Technology, and Innovation Indicators Initiative (ASTII). So far, this initiative has published two detailed innovation and R&D surveys in various African countries. During the implementation of these surveys, it was realized that the true state of Science, Technology, and Innovation (STI) in any country requires more data than is ordinarily collected in innovation and R&D surveys. Thus, the reports of African Innovation Outlook (AIO) include bibliometric analyses of scientific productivity in African countries besides innovation surveys that participated in the ASTII. [1] Developed countries in the world have systematic and well-organized data sets on S&T activities. [3] For example, publication and patenting activities are well documented as well as properly maintained. This is not the case of developing and emerging economies where these kinds of databases are not available or not properly organized. [3] Hence, to map the scientific activities in developing countries, one must depend on the globally available citation databases (for example, Web of Science, Scopus, Google Scholar). These databases certainly have an English language bias, and publications from developed countries generally get more coverage than the developing countries in any form of publications (journals, books, conference proceedings, etc.).
It was observed that the share of international co-publications from African researchers had increased in the early 2000s. The co-authorship patterns African research output showed that 80 percent of middle Africa's research papers are produced in collaboration with a partner outside the African continent.
The study further observed that middle African countries still have contacts with their formal colonizers in terms of research collaborations. Joint papers showed that 46 percent of papers are produced in collaboration with European countries, and 35 percent of papers are in collaboration with past colonial rulers. Above all, the scientific collaboration patterns show that Europeans are still the dominant partners and co-authored about 77 percent of papers. [7] Also, another important observation was made that African science had little impact on the global scientific landscape, as reflected in the citation pattern. In comparison to the global trend, African publication was comparatively less cited than the publications from other continents. This indicated less relevant research, or perhaps the African researches are unnoticed by the global scientific community. Contrary to this, a study also observed that research output published in many South African journals showed a distinctive citation impact. Many of the scholarly publications are cited globally. However, many of the journals published from the continent are not indexed in the globally recognized indexing and abstracting databases like Web of Science and Scopus. [6] Hence there is a clear bias and many of the African research outputs have not been indexed in their database.
Almost all of the previous Scientometrics studies have asserted that the African continent as a whole is lagging in terms of scientific innovation. This trend was relevant till 1996 because Africa's share of the world's scientific output remained under 1.5 percent. Many of the developed, as well as emerging economies in the world publish more than the cumulative publication of the African continent. Opposing to this view in recent years, it is observed that the number of scientific papers published by researchers from Africa has been proportionally rising faster than the total world scientific output, particularly after the year 2004. This perhaps indicates a possible rise in African science. [18] According to Elsevier's estimate, the number of scientific papers published by the Africans has tripled in the past decade. The number of papers published by African scientists reached an all-time high in 2013. In that year, more than 55,400 articles have been reported published by the African Scientists. Although the number is quite low and contributes only about 2.4 percent share of the global total, but the phenomenon is perhaps a possible indication of a rise in African science. [19] Hence, it is very relevant to study the state of African Science with reference to the global landscape. The rationale is to undertake a bibliometric analysis of S&T production and As the developing and less developed countries' scholarly articles are covered less in globally indexing and abstracting databases. For developing countries, the indicators like WIPO Patentscope data, Clarivate Analytics' Web of Science (WoS), Scopus database of Elsevier are quite underused. Naturally, these indicators have pros and cons. The shortcomings of global literature databases to map African S&T outputs have been broadly discussed in many scholarly literatures. [4][5][6][7] The limitations of patent data as an indicator of technological activities are discussed by Griliches [8,9] and so on. Keeping these inherent limitations in consideration, this study will map the African scientific literature and patenting activities using the broader scientometrics / bibliometric analytical framework.
The section follows will briefly discuss the earlier bibliometric studies in the African context. Also, in this section, a brief literature review will be carried out on the bibliometric analytic tools for mapping S&T activities and the patent as an indicator of technological activities. The section follows will discuss the research objectives. The next section will discuss the research methods and data sources, followed by the limitations of the study. The next section will deal with the results. The last section is the discussion, followed by conclusions and policy recommendations.

Literature review
The exhaustive Scientometrics study of African scientific output is minimal. So, the overall S&T performance in the African continent is somewhat less researched. This is because of the peripheral nature of science on the continent. Many of the poorest countries in the world are in this continent have their weak S&T infrastructure. [5] However, it is observed that among the African countries, South Africa and Egypt are the two most productive countries that have quite a significant number of scientific publications and patents. Moreover, South Africa is a country among the African countries that have made remarkable progress in terms of scientific publications. [10][11][12][13][14] Several studies have mapped the first-hand reality of the various aspects of scientific publications in South Africa. [14] For example, the subject wise bibliometric study includes engineering research in South Africa, [10,11] medical research in South Africa, [13] and the collaboration patterns among the scientists in South Africa. [10] Using various citation databases, these studies have observed that South African research publications mainly come from the universities. [15] Although the two countries (South Africa and Egypt) are more productive than any other African countries, the overall publication profile in terms of global standards, even for these two countries, was not growing till the end of the last century. [16,17] This proposition has been further asserted with the study conducted by Tijssen [6] using data from Web of Science (WoS).
knowledge flow as a critical aspect of the state of science, technology, and innovation in the participating countries. This study undertakes the bibliometric analysis of publication and patenting of the AU member countries. For this study, data is obtained from the Scopus database and the SCImago Journal and Country Rank [20] website. The website extracts data from the Scopus database for the ranking purpose. To map the patenting activity of the African countries, the patent data are extracted from the WIPO Patentscope database.

Bibliometric indicators as analytical tools
Allan Pritchard, in the year 1969, first coined the term 'Bibliometrics'. He defined Bibliometrics "application of mathematical and statistical methods to books and other media of communication". [21] In the same year, Nalimov and Mulchenko (1969) coined the term Scientometrics as "the application of quantitative methods dealing with the analysis of science viewed as an information process". [22] So, the term Scientometrics was generally used for measurement of science communication, and Bibliometrics was used to deal with more general information processes. [23] However, nowadays, Bibliometrics and Scientometrics are used interchangeably. [24] Bibliometrics has become a standard tool of science policy and research administration in the last couple of decades. [24] The assessment of the nature of scientific productivity is the topic of study in Scientometrics. By considering all the documents published in any field it is possible to construct an indicator considering different variables. [23] By using Scientometrics indicators, scientific productivity can be analyzed in any field of knowledge (natural science, social sciences, or humanities). Although a bibliometric analysis can be applied to define general productivity in a given research field, it can also be used to assess the individual scholar's productivity, the core journals that publish most of the articles in a given field, and the productive institutions, countries and so on.
In any Scientometrics analysis, the most important issue is the database coverage on which the study is based on. [23] As there is no database that extensively covers the African publication output, so to map the African scientific outputs, one has to depend on the global databases. Presently there are three citation databases (Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar) available globally, which provides citation analysis. However, Scopus of Elsevier has better coverage among these three databases than any other indexing and abstracting database globally. It covers scholarly journals, books, and other materials from different publishers encompassing the universe of knowledge (Science, Social Science, and Arts and Humanities subjects). Scholarly publication records for 54 African countries who are a member of the African Union (Appendix 1) are extracted from the Scopus database, and SCImago [20] SJR -SCImago Journal and Country Rank website is used to extract citation information. This database extracts data from the Scopus® database of Elsevier B.V.

Patent as an indicator of technological capability
Patents as innovation indicators are widely used in scholarly as well as popular literature. Patent information is the rich source of growth and development of a particular technology. It is also considered as an indicator of national technological capability building in neo-Schumpeterian literature. [25] However, there are limitations in using the patent data to map innovation output. [9] Firstly, the value of patents is highly twisted, as there are relatively small numbers of patents that are highly valuable, and a large number of patents are of little value. Secondly, many inventions are not patented9. Besides these issues, it isn't easy to get a patent by African inventors because of its cost. Many African countries' patent offices are not well equipped to keep their records online or available in computer-readable formats. So, keeping these options in mind, this study is based on the analysis of WIPO patent data to access the African countries' technological capability.

Objectives
The broad objectives of this study are as follows: (i) To find the overall and region-wise scientific productivity of AU member countries in terms of their scientific publications in the Scopus database.
(ii) To map the subject wise scholarly publication patterns of different regions and countries.
(III) Citation analysis of the African continent as a whole and region-wise citation matrix of the African continent.
Map the technological capability of African countries in terms of patenting activity, as reflected in the WIPO patent data.

METHODOLOGY
Scholarly articles published in the peer-reviewed and professional journals are the internationally comparative sources of information on scientific outputs. Presently there are three globally available databases, the Scopus, provided by Elsevier, Web of Science (WoS) by Thomson Reuters, and Google Scholar provided by Google.
Scopus® database of Elsevier B.V. is the largest database of peer-reviewed scholarly literature. It covers about 46 million abstracts from more than 25,100 peer-reviewed journals (as of January 2020). Scopus is also one of the globally available databases which provide citation analysis facilities. It has very wide coverage in almost all fields of knowledge covering science, arts and humanities, and social sciences. Although it has the extensive coverage of scholarly journals globally, there are only about 136 journals indexed in Scopus are from Africa.
As mentioned in the literature review section, no database extensively covers the African publication output. However, Scopus of Elsevier is better coverage than any other indexing and abstracting database available globally. Scholarly publication records for 55 AU member countries are extracted by searching affiliation country. For example, the search string to retrieve records from South Africa was the following: (AFFILCOUNTRY (South Africa) AND PUBYEAR > 1989 AND PUBYEAR < 2020). Further, citation information was searched from The SCImago Journal and Country Rank.

RESULTS
The following section will deal with the publication pattern of different African countries. The data available from the SCImago Journal and Country Rank website [20] was further used to analyse the citation patterns of the member countries of AU. The indicators are developed from the records of the Scopus database of Elsevier B.V. These indicators are freely available on the Internet and can be used to assess and analyze scientific domains. The indicators are available at http://www. scimagojr.com [20,26] Scientific publications of AU member countries    Five Southern African countries produced 340,081 (29.3 percent), and Sixteen countries in West Africa produced 180,021 (15.5 percent) articles. So, it can be concluded that in terms of the number of publications, Northern Africa produced more articles than the other regions of Africa, and the performance of Middle Africa is at the lowest.

Region wise distribution of publications
It is important to note here that there are only a few countries that perform better in terms of publications in every region. From a total of 18 countries of Eastern Africa, only the following four countries have more than 10,000 publications. articles. In western Africa, Nigeria is the most productive with 109,207, followed by Ghana with 24,431 articles.
In sum, in every zone, only a few countries perform better and in terms of the number of publications. The whole continent's productivity is based on only a few 'star performer' countries.

Subject wise distribution of publications
Scopus has categorized the universe of knowledge into 27 major thematic categories. These categories are further classified into 313 specific subject categories. Table 1 and Figure 2 show the subject-wise distribution of articles from AU member countries' cumulative publications based on these thematic classification schemes. Africa all together published the maximum number of articles in medicine (304,331 articles and 29.26 percent). The next productive areas are Agriculture and Biological Science (179,598 articles 15 percent), Engineering (174,791 articles 15 percent), Biochemistry Genetics, and Molecular Biology (113,900, 9.8  percent articles). From their scholarly publication profile, it is observed that North Africa more engineering articles (115,507 articles 23.10 percent).

Citation Analysis
Citations are a powerful analytical tool and widely used measure of the impact of scientific publications. Citation analyses are increasingly used as an effective tool to compare research productivity and impact between authors, institutions, or countries. Generally, scholarly literature includes references to the earlier related research works of other scholars. The literature that refers to earlier works is somehow related to that work. In that way, citations link between authors, groups of researchers, topics of study, or countries. So, the effect and significance that earlier researcher(s), studies, or journals have on a scientific community can be measured by means of citation analysis. [22] However, there are many pros and cons of the citation analysis and its interpretations. Hence, Citation analysis cannot be taken as a sole indicator for evaluation of research preformation, but it can give some indications of its impact on a given field of research. [23] SJR -SCImago Journal and Country Rank [20]  So, the earlier observations that African science had little impact on the global scientific landscape is perhaps not true. Research outputs published in many African authors or scholars have a good impact and perhaps not less than any other international research communities. However, many journals from Africa are not indexed in the globally recognized indexing and abstracting databases (Tijssen 2007). [6] The inclusion of more African journals or possibly an African Citation Database created solely from the continent's literary resources will perhaps give a better picture of African science as a whole.
The self-citations of papers are also comparatively lower (about 30 percent). This indicated that African scholars do not self-cite much of their articles.

Eastern Africa
During the 1996-2018 period, Kenya is the most productive country among 18 East African countries, with 35,120 publications (Table 3). Kenya ranked 67 th globally and 7 th in Africa in terms of the number of publications. However, Seychelles (26.57 per paper) is at the top with citations per paper followed by Mozambique (20.27 per paper).
Kenya has h-index of 179 and is at the top, followed by Uganda with 128 and Tanzania with 122, Malawi 104, Ethiopia 101. These five countries are only h-index of more than 100. This shows that highly cited articles in these countries.

Middle Africa
Middle African countries are the least productive group of countries among the African continent. Among the nine countries in this group, Cameroon is the most productive with 11 th position among African countries and 90 th position globally in terms of the number of publications (Table 4). Cameroon has produced 16,395 publications during the 1996-2018 period. In terms of citations per paper, Gabon has the highest citation rate per paper (20.33 per paper).

Northern Africa
From North Africa, Egypt is the most productive country with 203952 publications. It ranks 2 nd in Africa and 39 th position globally (Table 5). Among the six Northern African countries Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco have quite a good number of publications. However, in terms of citation per paper, Sudan is at the top with 11.01 citations per paper.  (Hirsch, 2007). [27] II. Documents-Cumulative scholarly documents from that continent III. Citable documents-includes articles, reviews, and conference papers and percentage (in bracket) of citable documents with respect to total documents

Southern Africa
Among the five Southern African countries, South Africa is the most productive with 272886articles. South Africa is at the top among African countries and ranked 35 th globally (Table 6). Rest other countries ranked low globally because of minimal scientific publications. In this group of countries, Namibia has the highest citation paper (13.53). Although South Africa has a very high number of publications, its self-citation rate is also relatively high. The h-index of South Africa is 423 and the highest among the whole continent. It indicates productive researchers from this country.

Western Africa
Among the 16 countries in Western Africa, Nigeria is the most productive country. Nigeria is also placed in the 53rd position globally, with 90031 publications (Table 7). Gambia has the highest citation per paper (37.38 citations per paper), followed by Guinea-Bissau (21.29 citations per paper). The top productive country Nigeria got 7.17 citations per paper and is the lowest. Nigeria has the highest h-index (181), followed by Ghana (142).

Patenting Activity
To analyze African countries' patenting activities, patent   Table 8.

DISCUSSION
This study attempts to map the scientific publication and patenting activity of the 55 member countries of AU. Standard bibliometric indicators are used to map the literature growth patterns, citation, and patenting activities of the African continent as a whole. The study mapped zone wise literature growth and citation analysis and patenting activities of the member countries of AU. This study uses Scopus data because Scopus extensively covers global as well as African scholarly literature.
The study observed that during 1990-2019 publication data of the total 55 African countries altogether published 1,158,398 articles. It can be seen from the Scopus data that the scientific publications from Africa have increased almost ten times from the year 1990 to 2019. The advance of African publications is visible, particularly after the year 2000. This has been observed in many scholarly publications as well as popular articles. [28] Like other previous studies, South Africa ranks at the top among all African countries, followed by Egypt. Among the top 50 highly productive countries globally, only these Journal of Scientometric Research, Vol 10, Issue 3, Sep-Dec 2021 two countries ranked in the global publication landscape. In terms of global publication, South Africa Ranks 35 th position and Egypt 39 th position. Region-wise analysis of publication patterns shows that in terms of the number of publications, Northern Africa cumulatively produced more articles than the other regions of Africa. The performance of the countries in the middle regions is at the lowest. In sum, in every zone, only a few countries perform better in terms of the number of publications. The whole continent's productivity is based on only a few 'star performer' countries. WIPO patent data shows that 55 African countries altogether produce 18,827 patents. The cumulative growth curve of African patents as a whole shows an increasing trend. However, there is a drop in patenting in recent years. This may be due to the incomplete coverage of African patents. However, the findings are inconclusive and require further investigation. Among all five regions of Africa, the southern zone is the most productive solely due to South African patents. The South African patents are the reflection of the whole continent's patenting. No other country on the continent is the match of South African patenting activity. However, the process is still under the development and testing phase and will take time to implement the database for public use. Similarly, the patent database from the WIPO has many limitations. However, this study recommends a possible indicator of the African continent's science and technological capability.