Research out of Africa.

摘要

Several initiatives have aimed to strengthen research capacity in Africa over the past couple of years. How is Africa's research landscape faring? Global research report-Africa published on April 12 by Thomson Reuters tries to assess this issue. The report looks at research activity on the continent by measuring the volume of scientific publications produced by countries. It divides Africa into regions-north, central, and south. Unsurprisingly, it finds that South Africa dominates the south with 47000 papers published during 1999-2008. In the north, Egypt dominates with 30000 papers published over the same period, and Nigeria leads the central region with more than 10000 publications. These three nations dominate again when the data are broken down into areas of research, with South Africa publishing the most papers in clinical medicine and most other life sciences (eg, microbiology, immunology, and neuroscience).