Research output of the top 10 African countries : An analytical study

Purpose – This paper focused on African research output and aimed to measure and compare the continent’s leading countries in terms of the most indexed publications in the Web of Science. It also aimed to discover where the position of Egypt is on the African world map of research and estimate the rising percentage of African research output. Design/methodology/approach – The paper focused on African research output from 2015 to 2019. Data were extracted from the InCites research analytical tool from the Web of Science Group, collected from 2015 to 2019, and used to examine the growth of research output. Findings – The paper proved that the top 10 African countries in publishing scientific research are (South Africa, Egypt, Tunisia, Nigeria, Algeria, Kenya, Morocco, Ethiopia, Ghana, Uganda), and the top 10 countries contribute with 92.2% of total publications in Africa in the last 5 years, which means the rest African countries contribute only with 7.8 % of total publications. Found that Egypt has the most cited documents with 67% of the total publications which reflect the quality of Egyptian scientific research. Originality/Value – This study provides statistics on African research outputs and concentrating on the top 10 countries that have the most publications from 2015-2019, and this is the first paper discussing these countries in this period.