The Research Publications Growth Rate of Pakistan in the Field of Material Sciences: Comparison with 50 countries

Abstract

The world has produced 289454 and 308238 research publications in materials sciences in 2019 and 2020, respectively. Twenty-four (24), Thirty-four (34) and Forty-six (46) countries have published atleast 3000, 2000 and 1000 research documents, respectively. Based on the number of publications, the top three countries for the year 2020 are China (n=124207/40.29%), United States (n=37245/12.08%) and India (n=22754/7.38%). We also calculated the relative growth rate (GR) (for the year 2019-2020) of top fifty (50) countries. The highest GR was recorded for Viet Nam (n=43.83), Saudi Arabia (N=40.03), Indonesia (n=38.77), United Arab Emirates (n=37.23) and Pakistan (n=33.75). It is worth noting that, based on the number of publications in 2020, Pakistan also occupied 20th position (n=3844) globally. This motivated us to explore the publication history of Pakistan in Material Sciences. From 1947 to 2000, Pakistan published only 819 documents. Infact, the 1st document was published in 1964. We also provided the per year global production (after 1964) and contribution of Pakistan. The lowest ranking was recorded in 1998 (n=71st), where Pakistan published only 46 research documents (0.04% global share). From 1964 to 2000, the average per year share was only 0.036%. From 2001 to 2020, Pakistan published 19313 documents. Or the average per year global share was 11.66 times higher than 20th century i.e. 0.42%. Based on the number of publications, the list of top 50 researchers, universities and sources are described for both eras. This astonishing increase in publication could be attributed to the establishment of higher education commission (HEC) Islamabad, increase in number of universities, rise in educational budget, funding, and international collaboration.