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Friday, December 21, 2012

Scientific Publications from the Muslim world in 2012

by Salman Hameed

Since the world is still intact, we will continue with the posts here.

This week's Nature has a nice graphic of scientific publications in 2012. The sky scrappers below are U.S., China, and a number of European countries, along with Canada and Japan. A few Muslim countries are in the one and two-storey buildings. Pakistan - the nuclear state - does not even show up (the cut-off was 6000 papers from Jan-Oct, and it includes 39 countries). Click to see the larger version of the figure:

The surprising element here is Saudi Arabia - where there is a 33% increase in publications from the previous year. I don't know what this means. It is quite likely that these are papers are from researchers associated with KAUST, where many hold multi affiliations (see this earlier post: Saudi universities buying academic prestige?). Nevertheless - it is good to see this increase in publications from Saudi Arabia. Turkey, Malaysia, and Egypt have maintained roughly the same levels of publications from 2011, with Iran showing a slight increase. If you are looking for rising states, China, South Korea and India are showing consistent increases in their publication rates from year to year. Just as a reminder, here is the plot from last year, where Iran had the largest increase from year prior (click to see the larger version of the figure):

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