Science and research landscapes across D-8 organization member countries from a historical perspective: The policy context and collective agendas

Abstract Intergovernmental Economic Organizations usually leverage the scientific capacity of their member countries to ensure economic prosperity through consensual science policies. The D-8 Organization for Economic Cooperation is an intergovernmental economic forum constituting eight developing Muslim-majority countries with a host of recent initiatives toward encouraging interstate scientific and technological collaborations. This study presents an overview of the forum’s overarching science policies and the research performance in the member countries in the past two decades. The individual D-8 countries’ performance over a set of STI indicators is analyzed to examine the driving forces of the STI system in the member countries. The findings revealed marked disparities among the countries in economic prosperity, R&D expenditure, and the stock of researchers in their STI systems. Although the aggregate research volume of the D-8 countries almost quadrupled over the 2010s compared with the previous decade, there are salient differences in the research capacity and scientific impact among these countries. GDP, R&D expenditure, human development index, GNI per capita, and the number of researchers (FTE per million inhabitants) contribute to explain the growth of publications in some of the D-8 countries. Knowledge sharing, transfer of technology, research collaboration, and investment in R&D infrastructure among the member countries underline the recent overarching scientific policy initiatives of the D-8 organization.