The impact of internet access on cloud computing research in Africa: Analysis of bibliometric and online search data

The objective of this paper is to uncover the relationship between internet penetration and cloud computing research output and to understand the connection between the interest in cloud computing on research outputs in cloud computing from African countries. For the period of 2009 to 2017, bibliometric data on cloud computing research was retrieved from the Scopus database. Online search traffic data on the search term “cloud computing” was obtained from Google trends for the period under review. Our results show that there was a strong significant correlation between internet penetration and the total number of scholarly outputs within the given period for all countries studied, suggesting that an increase in internet penetration is directly proportional to increase in cloud computing research activities and outputs from a given region. The penetration of internet technologies contributes significantly to the advancement of research efforts and scholarly outputs in ICT-related endeavours.