India’s Research Collaboration Trend with the Selected African Countries: An Exploratory Study

Historically India has had cordial relationships with the African countries. So, the aim of the present study is to find out the collaboration status and research emphasis of the leading five African countries with India as reflected in the Scopus database for the last three decades. In the context of India’s collaborative research scenario, the five leading African countries are South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Nigeria and Kenya. The African countries contribute a total 14,053 co-authored articles which may be further categorized on the basis of different aspects like country wise contribution, chronological output, nature of collaboration, focus areas, leading co-authoring foreign countries, leading affiliations, source journals, most prolific affiliations and scholarly impact. India has the strongest collaborative relationships with the countries of the Northern Africa region. The developed countries like the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany have been found as the most influential collaborating partners. Conversely, the collaboration scenario confirms the fact that ‘Physics and Astronomy’, ‘Medicine’ and ‘Engineering’ are the primary emphasized areas among African countries.


INTRODUCTION
India is one of the largest emerging economies of the world with a consistent GDP growth of seven percent over last five years. [1] According to the Global Innovation Index (GII)-2019, [2] India has moved up to the 52 nd rank at the Global level perspective in terms of innovation performance. On the contrary, Africa is the world's second-largest and second-most populous continent, after Asia [3] and presently, six of the top 10 fastest growing economies are in the Africa. [4] Historically, India has strong friendly relationship with Africa. [5] In the year of 1953, the India's central government issued a circular, which suggested that state governments should sponsor at least two students from East and Central Africa. [6] In the line with this commitment, the Delhi University established a School of African Studies in 1954 to promote research on history and culture of Africa. [7] It is also worth noting that the first Afro-Asian conference at Bandung (1955), Indonesia was occurred to promote and strengthen South-South cooperation. [8] Besides, India's partnership with Africa is free of conditionalities and totally demands driven. [9] Both the countries have experienced the challenges of colonization and decolonization. India also supports Africa on the issues of struggling against colonialism and apartheid. Later on, peace and developmental issues also came on the agenda. [10] In 2008 India entered into a new phase in its relations with the continent by hosting the first India-Africa Forum Summit (IAFS) to enhance bilateral cooperation. [11] Further, in a speech to the Ugandan parliament, 2018 the Prime Minister, Government of India unveiled a strategic vision by outlining 10 guiding principles to boost India-Africa engagement. [12] Meanwhile, India has a strong research collaboration network at the global level. Among African countries India maintains a strong cordial relation with South Africa as they are common members in the BRICS [13] and IBSA group. [14] Further, India, Algeria, Egypt, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal and Zimbabwe are part of G15 members and share strong bilateral co-operations with each other. [15] India also has bilateral diplomatic relations with many of the other continental countries like Cameroon, [16] Ethiopia, [17] Morocco, [18] Tanzania, [19] Tunisia [20] etc. to execute mutual interest and national priority. These strategic, diplomatic as well as political relationships influence and endorse further academic and research partnerships to foster developmental objectives. Therefore, the present effort aims to examine India's collaborative research trend beyond continent with special focus on Africa by addressing answers to the following questions: African Department of Science and Technology (DST) through the Technology Localization Implementation Unit (TLIU) in partnership with the DST-India through the National Innovation Foundation (NIF)-India committed to a grassroots innovation technology exchange platform. [29] vi.
Further, India is also one of member states of the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) project, the next generation radio telescope hosted by South Africa. [30] vii. India has entered into a bilateral Scientific and Technological Cooperation agreement with Egypt. Under this agreement, the Academy of Scientific Research and Technology (ASRT), Egypt and the DST, India collaborated to fund the research project jointly. [31] viii. India and Ethiopia signed four agreements in the field of Science and Technology between the year 2011 and 2018 focusing on joint research, exchange of scientists, establishment of joint laboratory etc. There was also a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) in academic and research collaboration between the Ministry of Science and Technology of the federal democratic republic of Ethiopia and the Indian Institute of Technology Madras India that mainly aim to enhance academic and research collaboration in the area of mutual interest. [32] ix.
In 1995, India-Tunisia signed an agreement on Scientific and Technological (S&T) cooperation. Under this agreement, both sides jointly provide fund for new research projects for scientists. [33]

LITERATURE REVIEW
Many scientometric studies have showed Africa's collaboration trend and contribution to global scientific literature. In the central African collaborative research, Cameroon produced maximum research papers followed by Gabon and Democratic Republic of the Congo. Here European countries played an apparent role as collaborating counterparts. [34] Additionally among West African countries, Nigeria, Ghana and Senegal produced maximum scientific output. However, the research integration between the regional countries of West Africa was negligible. [35] In another study, Tijssen [36] did an effort to quantify the characteristics of African scientific literature and assumed that African science was becoming increasingly internationalized. South Africa, Egypt and Morocco were the dominating countries in the African science research. Apart from these, majority of contributions by African countries were primarily skewed towards the fields of Clinical Medicine (36%), Biology (17%) and Chemistry (14%). [37] Further, the i. Which African countries are major research partners of India in last three decades?
ii. Which scientific disciplines are the key areas for research collaboration? iii.
Which are the main African as well as Indian participated institutions that are actively engaged in research collaboration? iv.
What are the most productive countries that are involved in the co-authored research productivity?

INDIA'S S&T INITIATIVES WITH AFRICAN COUNTRIES
India has launched several important initiatives and programmes to deepen engagement with Africa. These include the Exim Bank's Focus Africa, [21] the Techno-Economic Approach for India-Africa Movement (TEAM-9) partnership, [22] the India-Africa Forum Summit (IAFS) [23] and Pan-African e-Network Project. [24] Subsequently, India with the African counterparts takes several bilateral as well as multilateral Science and Technology (S&T) initiatives mutually to enhance research collaboration and capacity building for researchers of India as well as African countries. Some of the significant initiatives are highlighted below: i. The Federation of Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) on behalf of Government of India launched the CV Raman Fellowship for African researchers in 2010 for conducting research in Indian institutions covering all areas of science and technology. [25] ii. The Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR) offers 900 scholarships for African students to pursue undergraduate, postgraduate and higher courses from the Indian institutions/universities. [26] iii. The Africa-India Mobility Fund (AIMF) has been introduced by the African Academy of Sciences and the Welcome Trust/DBT India Alliance in 2018 to boost scientific collaboration among the researchers of Africa and India. [27] iv. India and South Africa signed a bilateral agreement in science and technology in 1995. In the line of the agreement, the National Research Foundation (NRF), South Africa and the Department of Science and Technology (DST), India provide fund for joint research project for South African and Indian researchers. [28] v.
To promote grassroots innovation, India and South Africa signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) in 2016. Under this MoU, the South-University of Cape Town, South Africa was found to be the most productive of all African institutions. [37] Besides, the collaborative research status in the sub-Saharan African countries pointed out that the African countries contributed minimal to each other's knowledge production in terms of research articles. [38] Parallelly, Pouris [39,40] through his several studies narrated the research collaboration trend of the African countries at country and continental level. The scientific productivity and collaboration pattern of the five research universities of South Africa addressed the fact [41,42] that the South African authors preferred to collaborate more with International authors (73.99%) than with national authors. Furthermore, Clinical Science (29.51%), Plant and Animal Science (20.85%) and Physics (13.88%) were considered as the most productive disciplines. Conversely, the collaborative scientific activity of South African scientists from 1945 to 2005 delineated that the developed countries like the USA, England and Germany were the leading collaborating countries. [43] Additionally, Patra and Muchie [13,44] in their two attempts analysed the performance of South African Universities in terms of publications and patents and also assessed the S&T capacity building of India and South Africa. The trend of China-Africa Science and Technology (S&T) relationship during 1975-2017 highlighted that the technology collaboration between Africa and China was quite weak. [45] Furthermore, the scientific collaboration networks of the five BRICS countries from 1980 to 2012 showed [46] that a strongest collaboration link existed between South Africa and India having Engineering as the most concentrated area.
From the studies mentioned above, the research trend of African continental countries had confirmed the fact that the developed countries like the United States and European nations were the main collaborating partners and intercontinental collaboration network was minimal. On the other hand, India is one of the largest R&D sector providers from the Asia and is also playing an important role in global research and development. Further, no such study is yet to found on research collaboration pattern between India and African countries except South Africa. Hence, to fill the research gap, the present study is an endeavor to identify the research collaboration trend between India and selected African countries.

OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY
The main aim of the study is to identify the collaboration pattern and research emphasis of African countries beyond their continent with special reference to India. The other objectives are: i.
To determine the African continental countries collaboration portfolio with India To report scholarly impact of the co-authored publications and citations pattern

SCOPE, COVERAGE AND METHODS USED
The present scientometric study explores the research collaboration pattern of Indian scientists with selected leading countries of Africa for the past 3 decades spanning from the period of 1990 to 2019. Among 55 member states of the African Union (AU), [47] five most productive countries in terms of scientific collaboration output with India have been identified and considered for the study as reflected in the Scopus database during 2 nd -3 rd week of April, 2020. Scopus is a largest citation and abstracting database of Elsevier.
The five most collaborating African counterparts are 'South Africa', 'Egypt', 'Ethiopia', 'Nigeria' and 'Kenya'. The names of five African countries and 'India' have been used individually as a search term for the search field -'Affiliation country'. Further, below search strings have been used to restrict the results for only 'Journal Articles'.

Document type-Article
Source type-Journals Then the co-authored articles have been refined and collected. The five African countries contributed total 14,053 co-authored articles that count many collaborated papers in more than one category. On the other hand, from India's perspective, 12,958 unique co-authored articles have been found from the five collaborating partners. Finally, the records have been exported into a excel database and interpreted keeping in mind the objectives of the study. Besides, the VOSviewer software tool has also been used for mapping the collaboration networks.

RESULTS
The bibliographical details of the exported records have been analyzed and presented below in the following sub-sections: African continental countries' collaboration portfolio with India Table 1 chalks out the top 10 African collaborating partners of India and corresponding research publication status. Of these, South Africa produced largest number of 6,561 coauthored articles which account 2.75 percentage of total articles followed by Egypt having 3,276 articles and Ethiopia having 1,703 articles. Conversely, India played an imperative role as a collaborating partner with Ethiopia, Nigeria, South Africa and Egypt and it has been placed the position of 3 rd , 6 th , 8 th and 10 th rank respectively as a collaborator. It is significant to note that out of the top 10 productive countries as reflected in Figure 1, four countries are representing from Northern-Africa region, while three countries are from Eastern-Africa region and one country from rest 3 regions each.
Collaboration trend of leading African countries with India The mathematical formula for calculation of Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) [48] is mentioned below: Ending value CAGR 1 Begining value CAGR%= CAGR × 100; where n is the number of interval periods in the dataset.

Research emphasis on bilateral collaboration
The distribution of focus areas in bilateral collaboration have been depicted in the      Table 6 illustrates the leading collaborative foreign countries with the co-authored articles of India and African partners.

Leading Collaborating partners
It is clearly seen from the observed data set that the United    Ethiopia and colonial impact has been playing an important role.
Leading collaborating countries and focus areas Table 7 exhibits the data related to top 10 leading coauthoring countries' contribution and corresponding focus areas. Out of 12,958 articles, the United States produced highest number of 4,150 articles as a collaborator followed by the United Kingdom (3,165), Germany (2,529) and China (2,490). The Table clearly shows that the top 10 countries' involvement primarily lies in the domain of 'Physics and Astronomy' followed by 'Medicine'. On the contrary, 'Earth and Planetary Sciences' and 'Engineering' disciplines were also found to be the apparent and interest area of research among the coauthoring countries.

Leading affiliations from India
The leading 5 Indian institutions and the data regarding their collaboration output along with focus areas have been figured out in the Leading source journals for scholarly communication Scholarly impact of the co-authored publications    The h-index indicates that the h papers have cited at least h times and the remaining papers have received fewer than ≤h citations each. [49] Further, the A-index counts average number of citations of h-core papers in the h-index and it can be formulated as follows: [50] where, h = h-index, and cit j = Total citations counts of h-core papers The composite performance index (p-index) or mock h-index was introduced by Prathap [51] and can be measured as follows: Where, C = total number of citations; P = total number of papers Table 12 illustrates the citation wise distribution of articles. Out of 5 African countries, Kenya gained highest share i.e. 2.20% and 2.31% of articles in case of at least 1000 and 500 citations respectively followed by Nigeria having percentage of 1.25% and 1.12%. On the other hand, it is apparent from the Figure 2 that the maximum percentage of articles from Ethiopia and Nigeria were found as lesser cited (≥1 -<10) and uncited while the articles of Kenya gained largest share of most cited articles i.e. ≥100 -≥1000.

CONCLUSION
Over the last three decades, a positive collaborative research effort among the scientists of India and five African countries is gradually increasing and since 2008, a quick increasing progress has been found in the collaborative output. South Africa contributes the majority of collaboration output with India and it is also playing an imperative role as an intercontinental collaborating partner. Apart from these, India plays the most crucial role in the context of Ethiopia and Nigeria's collaboration. Further, out of top 10 collaborating partners, Cameroon having 9 th rank is the only country representing from the Central-Africa region. Hence, it is revealed that India has the weakest collaboration partnership with the countries of Central-Africa region.
It is also noted that the attentive areas for bilateral collaboration vary country-wise. South Africa is primarily involved in the area of 'Physics and Astronomy'; Egypt and Ethiopia are more focused towards 'Engineering' whereas Nigeria and Kenya have given priority to the 'Agricultural and Biological Sciences' area. In case of bilateral collaboration, the partners should stress on their strengths and potentiality to set research priorities for gaining developmental goals.
Subsequently, the overall collaboration efforts mostly occurred in the field of 'Physics and Astronomy' and 'Medicine'. The United States and United Kingdom are the major partners in the India-Africa team efforts. However, in the case of Egypt and Kenya, the total collaboration scenario is overemphasized towards 'Physics and Astronomy' (41.24%) and 'Medicine' (48.2%) respectively. Similarly, the collaborative research of Egypt and Kenya is more influenced by the United States and both the countries produce minimal numbers of bilateral papers with India. But collaboration should be balanced, not skewed in favour of one particular field or partner. This skewed trend raises concern and demands more attention from the policy makers of Egypt and Kenya. Small African countries having limited S&T budgets should come forward to set up research consortiums to fulfill mutual interest and developmental objectives.
Furthermore, the presence of the majority of the Indian DAE institutes indicates that high energy physics is the main subfocus area under Physics for research collaboration. In terms of p-index, the research articles of South Africa and Kenya have been found as the most prominent. Hope, despite many hurdles, India and the African countries will identify their potentiality and quality scientific research will be continued too long for the enhancement of the mutual benefits.