The role of South African researchers in intercontinental collaboration

The analysis presented here focuses on mapping, based on publication output, the scientific collaboration of African based researchers and the role of the South African research community as a channel for within- and intercontinental collaborations. We have selected 10 scientific fields, namely, Tropical Medicine, Parasitology, Infectious Disease, Ecology, Water Resources, Immunology, Zoology, Plant Sciences, Agricultural and Food Sciences, and Psychology to gain a clear picture of the aforementioned scientific activity. As a first step, we created cooperation networks and visualized them on world-maps. In addition, centrality measures of the network were calculated to see the frequency of involvement regarding different countries, with a focus on South Africa, in the collaboration process. Furthermore, first and last authorship positions of the publications were summed to highlight the influence of the selected authors on the direction of and resources provided to the publications. Finally, the most prominent funding organizations and their focus on the selected fields were singled out. Through combining these steps of analysis, we gained an accurate picture of the level of involvement of the South African research community in within- and intercontinental scientific collaboration.