South Africa ‘punches above its weight’ in research, says study

Despite low levels of investment in research and the country’s limited researcher capacity, South Africa’s research performance is disproportionately high and the country clearly “punches above its weight in this area”, according to a new report on the state of research in South Africa.

Commissioned in 2015 by the National Research Foundation and led by Professor Johann Mouton of the Centre for Research on Evaluation, Science and Technology (CREST) at Stellenbosch University in South Africa, the study, now in e-book format took three years to complete and has, according to Mouton, “arguably” resulted in the most comprehensive empirical assessment of the state of the South African research enterprise.

Capturing the major strengths and achievements of South African research, the report notes that the country has doubled its research output since 2000 and overseen an “exceptional” growth in the production of doctoral students – especially since 2005 – leading to an expansion of the academic and future scientific pipeline.

South Africa’s research production compares favourably with its comparator (most similar) countries (Argentina, Chile, Greece, Malaysia, Mexico, Poland, Portugal and Turkey) when it comes to increased research output, increased world share (doubled from 0.4% in 2000 to 0.91% in 2016), improved world rank (28 in 2015), acceptable levels of international research collaboration (52% in 2015), and citation impact (1.1 in 2016 which puts the average citation impact of South African-authored papers in 2016 as slightly above the world average impact for the fields in which it publishes).

“Overall, South Africa’s research performance is disproportionately good relative to the low levels of investment in research and the country’s small researcher capacity; South Africa clearly punches above its weight in this area!” the report states.

On the issue of doctoral graduates, it notes that “it now seems feasible, mainly because of the influx of large numbers of postgraduate students from the rest of Africa, that we will in fact meet the target of producing 5,000 doctoral graduates by 2030”.

Weaknesses

However, while the country has made “great strides” in expanding the pipeline over the past 15 years, the ratio of doctoral graduates to one million of the population still remains well below international benchmarks.

For example, the actual number of doctoral graduates increased from 972 in 2000 to reach 2,794 in 2016, which means that the average number of doctorates per million of the population increased commensurately from 21 in 2000 to 49 in 2015 – likely driven by national strategies and changes in the government funding framework for research at universities.

However, when compared with other countries, South Africa does not shine: lead countries such as Slovenia, Switzerland and the United Kingdom had more than 400 PhDs per million of the population in 2015 while the top comparator countries – Portugal (227), Greece (148) and Malaysia (132) – recorded ratios three to four times higher than South Africa.

“Even when compared to other African countries, South Africa lags third behind Tunisia (118) and Egypt (73),” the report said.

Of critical importance is a lack of funding. The report notes that South Africa invests too little in research and development – ZAR32.3 billion (US$2.1 billion) in 2015-16 or 0.8% of gross domestic product. When compared to eight very similar research systems (including Malaysia 1.3%, Portugal 1.24%, Poland 1.0%, Greece 0.97% and Turkey 0.88%), South Africa’s investment is less than half of their mean investment.

The report highlights a significant decline in the contribution of business to research and development (R&D) – 56% in 2001 to 39% in 2015 – and calls for remedies.

Noting the current economic climate, the report deems it “increasingly unlikely” that the government’s stated target of 1.0% investment in R&D by 2020 will be met.

Research capacity

It also finds that the research capacity in South Africa measured in terms of full-time equivalent researchers per thousand of the workforce is small and needs to be urgently expanded.

While researcher numbers grew by 3,400 over the past five years, most of this growth was due to the increase in the numbers of postgraduate students and post-doctoral researchers.

“In fact, the increase in overall numbers masks a decline in full-time equivalents employed as researchers within universities. Within universities, full-time equivalent (FTE) researchers, not including postgraduates, declined from 5,098 in 2014-15 to 4,702 in 2015-16. This is the first time that this has happened in the last decade.”

Regarding its number of researchers, South Africa is comparable to the average country in Africa. However, comparator (similar) countries have, on average, twice as many FTE researchers per thousand of the population and three times the number of researchers per million of inhabitants than South Africa.

Research output

In terms of “relative field strength”, a measure of research activities across fields, the results of the study show that South Africa has one of the more “well-rounded science” systems of all comparator countries with relatively higher activities in all fields except for engineering and (to a lesser extent) health sciences.

The results also show that South African scientists and scholars are increasingly collaborating with the rest of the world and specifically with countries outside Africa. Overall international collaboration has increased from 34% in 2000 to 52% in 2016. Concomitant with this increase has been a decline in national collaboration as well as single-authored articles.

The citation impact of South African-authored papers, as measured by the mean normalised citation score (MNCS), has steadily increased from 0.8 in 2000 to 1.1 in 2016. “This means that the average citation impact of South African-authored papers in 2016 is slightly above the world average impact [for the fields in which we publish],” the report states.

South Africa is also making progress in the area of transformation with the proportion of female-authored papers increasing from 31% in 2005 to 34% in 2016 and the proportion of black-authored papers increasing from 16% in 2005 to 31% in 2016.

However, the report notes that the trend towards more inclusivity and representativeness “varies hugely across scientific field and remains unrepresentative of the academic population”.

The report sounds a cautionary note on the issue of research ethics, arguing that increases in scientific publication need to be moderated “against the background of growing concerns about increased examples of unethical and questionable publication practices (including predatory publishing, indiscriminate publication strategies and growing evidence of gaming of the Department of Higher Education and Training publishing system).

The report says that despite some corrective measures taken by government, the National Research Foundation and many universities, a balance is needed between impact on the one hand and good practice in research ethics on the other.