University of , ; Bibliometric Evaluation of Research Productivity Ikram Ul Haq1 Abstract Background: (UoP) is the first university established after the creation of Pakistan. The aim of this study is to present the bibliometric attributes of documents produced by the researchers of the University of Peshawar as reflected in the Elsevier’s Scopus database. Methodology: A retrospective study was carried out on publications output of the UoP till the date of December 31st, 2019. The data of bibliographic records of UoP have been extracted from Elsevier’s Scopus database. The data have been analyzed to determine the bibliometric indicators of chronological growth of publications, distribution of publications by subject areas, the preferred source of publications/journals, authorship patterns, collaborating research organizations and countries. Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet has been used for the calculation of frequency and graphic presentations of findings. Microsoft Excel correlation formula has been used to determine the correlation between authorship patterns and the number of citations. Results: A total of 4,820 documents were retrieved from 1957 to 2019. These documents received 57,212 citations with an average of 11.87 citations per document. The maximum research has been produced on the subject of chemistry, and the Journal of the Chemical Society of Pakistan found a most preferred journal. The bulk of papers have been written by four-author pattern and the highest number of citations were received by the publications having more than nine authors. The majority of research collaboration was done with the researchers of Abdul Wali Khan University, Mardan. The analysis of research collaboration by country showed that China has been a top preference for the authors of UoP, followed by United States, United Kingdom and Saudi Arabia. Conclusion: The success of university education is to cultivate the ability among the students to transform the conceptual knowledge into sustainable technology for the betterment of the society. The faculty and students of the UoP have been striving hard to get excellence through innovative research and actively involved in research collaboration, nationally and internationally. The remarkable research growth has been recorded during the last decade.

Keywords: Research productivity; Bibliometrics; University of Peshawar; Pakistan; Publications

1 College of Dentistry, King Saud bin Abdulaziz University for Health Sciences, King Abdullah International Medical Research Centre, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia Email: [email protected]

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Introduction The higher educational institutions (HEIs) play a fundamental role in the educational, economic, cultural, political and social development of the country. It brings positive and affirmative changes in society. Along with teaching and learning, the universities are considered to be a hub for the creation of new knowledge and research. The credibility and status of the university have been directly linked with the quality and quantity of research output, produced by its faculty and accomplishment of its alumnus (Haq, Al Fouzan, 2017; Kumar, et al. 2018). There are 211 degree-awarding universities or HEIs in Pakistan with 51.5 thousand teaching faculty and 1.86 million students’ enrollment. The literacy rate is 60% and unfortunately, that less than 10% of the population has access to higher education. There are 40 universities (29 Public and 11 Private sector) located in the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhaw (KPK) (Pakistan, 2020). The University of Peshawar (UoP) is a public sector university, located in the Peshawar, the provincial capital of KPK. It has a unique status, being the first university to be established after the creation of Pakistan in 1950 and it has also been regarded as a mother institute of KPK. It is affordable and reachable to all the population of KPK and also fulfills the educational needs of Federally Administrated Tribal Areas (FATA). (http://www.uop.edu.pk/). According to the latest records of Times Higher Education World University Ranking (2021), the UoP falls in the ranking of 801-1000 with 6,063 full-time equivalent students, with an overall score 25.1 – 30.1, the ratio of female and male has been recorded 46:54 and 10.7 scores in research as well as 47.6 in citations. The admirable infrastructure, competent teaching & administrative staff, up-to-dated curriculum, growing research activities and conducive academic milieu are the chief characteristics of UoP, that’s why its ranking has improved from the previous year (2020 Ranking was 1000+). There are various indicators to assess the quality of higher education, the evolution of the research output is one of them. The bibliometric technique helps to dig out the characteristics of intellectual growth and scientific communications (Shehatta, & Mahmood, 2016). The term bibliometric was introduced by Alan Prichard in 1969, earlier it was known statistical bibliography, the application of statistics and mathematics on publications and other media. The outcomes of bibliometric studies support the

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authorities in educational planning, decision-making, rewards and distribution of funds (Iqbal, et al. 2018). These studies also highlight the prevailing research trends, productive authors, collaboration patterns and strong areas of research (Warriach & Ahmad, 2016). Country-level bibliometrics studies on Pakistan slightly discussed the research profile of the UoP as Iqbal et al. (2018) performed the comprehensive case study on the research productivity of Pakistan from 1981 to 2015 based on the Web of Sciences database. This study identified that the UoP produced 2,413 documents for 35 years. Meo, Almasri and Usmani (2013) estimated the research output of Pakistan during 1996- 2012. A total of 58,133 produced by Pakistani authors during this period and the UoP with 1,299 documents reached in 6th position at the national level. Bashir (2013) explored the share of Pakistan in global research output from 1996 to 2010, as seen in Scimago Journal and Country Rank. Pakistan produced 38,245 documents, 0.16% share of the global knowledge and stood in 48th position amongst the 236 countries of the world. This study is aimed to present the bibliometric attributes of the research productivity of UoP as retrieved from the Elsevier’s Scopus database.

Methods For this retrospective study, bibliographic records of documents produced by the authors of the UoP along with the number of citations were extracted from the Elsevier’s Scopus database. The chronological data have been categorized into three phases, 1957-1995, 1996-2006, and 2007-2019. Total scholarly output produced by Pakistani authors till 2019 was retrieved to determine the share of UoP at the national level. A total number of authors, including multiple counts and authorship patterns in relation to citations, were calculated to review the correlation with authorship patterns and the number of citations. The data were further divided by subjects, by journals, by research collaborating organizations and countries. A Microsoft Excel spreadsheet was used to calculate the frequency and findings were presented in tabular and graphic format.

Study Limitation This analysis of research productivity of UoP is limited to publications indexed in the Scopus database. A large number of papers were published

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in national journals recognized by the Higher Education Commission of Pakistan but haven’t indexed in the Scopus database, are not added in this analysis. Similarly, research, written and published in national and regional languages of Pakistan are also not included in this study. The Scopus and other databases don’t offer a complete picture of research output, but present fairly a large snapshot to appreciate the prevailing trends and strengths.

Literature Review Library and Information Science (LIS) professionals of Pakistan have been conducting bibliometrics studies for the last three decades. Few studies examined the growth of LIS research in Pakistan, Mahmood (1996) examined the 92 LIS articles contributed by Pakistani authors in international journals between 1947 to 1997 and Syed Jalaluddin Haider found a productive author with 12 articles. Anwar and Saeed (1999) analyzed 251 LIS papers as reflected on the LISA-PLUS database. More than half (57%) of the articles were published in Pakistan Library Bulletin. Khurshid (2013) assessed the qualitative aspects of 516 LIS articles published in reputed journals, 11 non-residents Pakistani authors produced 244 (47.28%) of articles. Some studies dealt with the literature published on Pakistani LIS journals. Naseer and Mahmood, (2009) investigated the 236 articles published in the Pakistan Library and Information Sciences Journal from 1998 to 2007, Warriach and Ahmad (2016) studied the bibliometrics characteristics of 111 articles published from 1995 to 2010 in 11 issues of the Pakistan Journal of Library and Information Science, Haq and Alfouzan (2019) assessed the 369 articles of the Pakistan Library and Information Science Journal from 2008 to 2017. Few papers assessed the productivity of LIS researchers, known as bio- bibliometric studies, Mahmood and Rehman (2009) measured the publication output of Dr. Anis Khurshid, who produced 182 items from 1957 to 2003. Kousar and Mahmood (2010) scrutinized the 96 documents produced by Dr. Syed Jalaluddin Haider during 41 academic career. Qayyum and Naseer (2013) inspected the 115 items contributed by Dr. Khalid Mahmood till 2011. Now Dr. Khalid Mahmood has been emerged as a prolific author in the field of social sciences in Pakistan. Naveed (2018) presented the research profile of Dr. Mumtaz Ali Anwar, who

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contributed 187 items from 1964 to 2017. Nearly three-fourth (n=134; 72%) of the publications were the single author. Haq & Ahmad (2019) surveyed the 137 items produced by Dr. Kanwal Ameen during the period of 1991 to 2017. She is now Vice-Chancellor, University of Home Economics, Lahore. The bibliometric studies on medical journals have also been a hot area and numbers of LIS professionals evaluated the bibliometric parameters of different medical journals. Ibrahim & Jan (2015) investigated the 913 articles of the Journal of Pakistan Medical Association from 2009 to 2013. Ullah, Butt & Haroon (2008) appraised the publications’ output and citation analysis of the Journal of from 1997 to 2006. Hussain et al., (2019) reviewed the papers published in the Journal of . Baladi (2019) studied the research productivity of Pakistan Journal of Ophthalmology from 1995-2017. All these studies help to understand that there is a growing tendency of publications in every field of knowledge. Iqbal et al. (2018) studied the research output of Pakistan from 1981 to 2015. The data was taken from the InCite feature of the Web of Science database. A share of research produced by Pakistan from a global perspective was 0.36%, and 15% of the total Pakistani research was done on the subject of chemistry, followed by plant and animal science (14.6%) and clinical medicine (13.7%). Quaid-e-Azam University has been standing on the first rank with the share of 11.4% research, whereas UoP falls in 10th position, with 2,413 papers, and a 3.29% share of the total national output. Most of the research collaboration was done with the authors of United States (n=6262) followed by United Kingdom (n=4913) and China (n=3,811). In the analysis of the research collaborating organization, King Saud University of Saudi Arabia has been on the top (n=1,172), then the Chinese Academy of Sciences (n=1,053) and the University of California System, United States (n=1,016). Haq, Elahi & Dina (2019) searched the publications’ growth of Pakistan authors in the field of medical microbiology as seen in the PubMed database. Pakistan produced 333 documents from 2013 to 2017 and a five- author pattern has been on the topmost pattern. Most of the publications were produced by the researchers of the and in international research collaboration, the USA has been found on the high preference.

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Bibliometric studies have been very frequent all around the world. One country level and three studies on the different universities of Saudi Arabia revealed the dynamic bibliometric attributes of research output (Shahetta & Mahmood, 2016; Haq & Al Fouzan, 2017; Ahmed & Al- Raysee, 2019; Al Fouzan, et al. 2019). Hugar (2019) and Mera and Sahu (2014) presented the research profile of Indian universities, Darmadji et al. (2018) assessed the publication growth of the Islamic University of Indonesia.

Results The researchers affiliated to UoP produced 4,820 publications during the period of 63 years. First Scopus indexed publication appeared in 1957, seven years after the establishment of the university. Slow progress has been recorded from 1957 to 1995, only 166 (3.44%) records were identified in these 39 years. The gradual increase of publications (n=435; 9.02%) was observed during the second phase from 1996 to 2006. The remarkable growth of publications has been seen from 2007 to 2019 with 4,219 (87.53%) publications. A slightly more than 80% (n=3,859) of the papers were published during the last ten years, with an average of 385.9 papers per year. (Figure-1). Figure-1; Distribution of publications by years 1957 to 2019 (n=4,820)

The Scopus database usually assigned more than one subject areas to one document, this database classified all 4,820 publications into 27 broad categories and assigned 8,366 subjects. Amongst the top-10 subject areas, the subject area of chemistry has been found very strong with 1,250

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(14.94%) documents, followed by physics and astronomy (n=642; 7.67%), environmental sciences (n=626; 7.48%) and agricultural and biological sciences (n=613; 7.32%). All top-10 research areas have more than 500 publications each as seen in Figure-2. There is a need to write more papers on less researched areas such as business, management and accounting (n=55), Art and humanities (n=47), Economics (n=43), psychology (30), and veterinary (n=29).

Figure-2; Distribution of publications by subject categories

All documents received 57,212 citations with an average of 11.86 citations per document and the share of citable documents counted 4,013 (83.25%). A little more than one fifth (n=11,741; 20.5%) of the total citations, received by 64, highly-cited documents having citations range between minimum 100 to maximum 1179 citations. A total of 41,317 journals and source publications are indexed in the Elsevier’s Scopus database. (https://www.scopus.com/sources), among them, 102 Pakistani journals are indexed. All the documents (n=4,820) produced by UoP are published in 1,473 journals / source publications of the world. One fifth (n=995; 20.64%) of the total documents were published in 50 journals published from Pakistan, while 3,825 (79.36%) of the research published in 1,423

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international journals / source publications. There are 818 journals with single documents each, 253 journals with two publications each while 109 journals with three publications each. More the one-third (n=1,651; 34%) of the documents were published in 80% (n=1180) of the journals having 1 to 3 documents each, whereas the other 20% of the journals published almost two-third of the total documents. Almost 18% (n= 850) of the documents were published in the 10-most preferred journals, the first four, and serial no. 10 are Pakistani journals, others are international. The Journal of the Chemical Society of Pakistan has been on the top with 307 (6.37%) documents, followed by Pakistan Journal of Botany (n=129; 2.68%) and Journal of Himalayan Earth Sciences (n=108; 2.24%), these top three journals having more than 100 documents each (Table-1).

Table-1: 10-Most preferred source of publications / journals S.No Name of Journal Documents (%) 1. Journal of the Chemical Society of Pakistan 307 (6.37%) 2. Pakistan Journal of Botany 129 (2.68%) 3. Journal of Himalayan Earth Sciences 108 (2.24%) 4. Pakistan Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences 77 (1.60%) 5. Journal of the Chilean Chemical Society 46 (0.95%) 6. Arabian Journal of Geosciences 41 (0.85%) 7. Journal of Materials Science: Materials in Electronics 38 (0.79%) 8. African Journal of Biotechnology 36 (0.75%) 9. Desalination and Water Treatment 34 (0.71%) 10. Pakistan Journal of Zoology 34 (0.71%)

A total of 23,875 authors, including multiple counts, produced 4,820 documents with an average of 4.95 per document. The majority of documents were the result of a research collaborative, only 118 (2.44%) documents were written by solo author. The analysis of the authorship pattern shows that the four-author pattern found favorites (n=916; 19%), followed by a three-author pattern (Figure-3). Table-2 indicates that citations count with authorship patterns to determine the influence of collaborative research on the number of citations. The correlation of numbers of documents and citations has been calculated by using =CORREL formula in Microsoft Excel, which produced the result of

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0.950176. This result shows that there is a very strong and positive correlation between the number of publications and the numbers of citations. It is affirmative that the documents produced by 10 or more than 10 authors got maximum citation impact (18.88). The overall citation impact was found in 11.87 citations per document.

Figure-3: Distribution of publications by authorship patterns

Table-2: Authorship pattern with citation impact S.No. Authorship Pattern Documents Citations Cite/doc 1. Single Author 118 755 6.40 2. Two-Author 476 4,653 9.78 3. Three-Author 898 9,622 10.71 4. Four-Author 916 9,353 10.21 5. Five-Author 759 10,769 14.19 6. Six-Author 600 7,619 12.70 7. Seven-Author 378 4,447 11.76 8. Eight-Author 280 3,464 12.37 9. Nine-Author 156 2,017 12.93 10. 10 & Above Authors 239 4,513 18.88 Total 4,820 57,212 11.87

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Table-3 illuminates the list of 10-most collaborative research organizations with UoP, five organizations have belonged to KPK province, Abdul Wali Khan University, Mardan has been on the top followed by Quaid-e-Azam University and COMSATS University, . One international organization, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has also been fall into this list. Slightly less than half (n=2,195; 46%) of the total research have been the result of research collaboration with ten organizations.

Table-3: Ten most collaborative research organizations (n=4,820) S.No. Research organizations Documents (%) 1. Abdul Wali Khan University Mardan 342 (7.10%) 2. Quaid-i-Azam University 313 (6.49%) 3. COMSATS University Islamabad 282 (5.85%) 4. University of 263 (5.46%) 5. Islamia College, Peshawar 202 (4.19%) 6. University of Malakand 201 (4.16%) 7. Kohat University of Science and Technology 180 (3.73%) 8. PCSIR Laboratories 144 (2.99%) 9. Chinese Academy of Sciences 136 (2.82%) 10. University of Swabi 132 (2.74%)

The analysis of research collaboration by country shows that UoP collaborated with 96 countries of the world. There are 19 countries with one research collaboration each, nine countries with two documents, and 29 countries with a range of three to nine publications, and 39 countries with 10 or more than 10 documents. The highest number of documents have been produced with the collaboration of Chinese researchers (n=480; 9.95%), followed by United Kingdom (n=305; 6.32%) and United States (n=255; 5.29%). Six countries are having more than one hundred publications each.

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Figure-4: Distribution of publications by research collaborative countries

Pakistan produced a total of 1,86,289 research papers indexed in the Scopus database from 1947 to 2019. A slightly more than three-fourth (n=1,41,866; 76.15%) papers were produced during the last ten years 2010-2019, Quaid-e-Azam University is standing on the top with 16,615 (8.77%) publications. The share of UoP has been recorded by 2.58% (n=4,820) and holding the 10th position in national research productivity.

Discussion The UoP is the oldest university and the mother institute of KPK, came into being as the pioneer higher educational institute after the creation of Pakistan in 1950. The remarkable research progress, 80% of the total, has been observed in the Scopus indexed journals during the last ten years (2010-19). The analysis of citations has encouraging that all 4,820 documents received 57,212 citations with an average of 11.87 citations per documents. The subject area of chemistry emerged as the most favorite area of research, then physics & astronomy and environmental sciences. All the UoP research documents were published in 1,473 journals. The Journal of the Chemical Society of Pakistan has been on the top with 307

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publications. A slightly more than one-fifth of the total research was published in local journals of Pakistan whereas almost 80% were published in international journals. A total of 23,875 authors including multiple counts contributed 4,820 documents with an average of 4.95 authors per paper. More than 97% of the documents were the result of research collaborations, only 118 papers contributed by a single author pattern. Four-author and three-author patterns found most preferred patterns, while the papers written by 10 or more than 10 authors got maximum citations. A strong correlation (0.95) has been found between the numbers of documents and citations count. Abdul Wali Khan University, Mardan found on the top, amongst the research collaborative organizations inside Pakistan and Chinese Academ of Sciences in abroad. The researchers of UoP have been very active in research collaboration internationally, they collaborated with 96 countries of the world, China has been on the first rank with 480 publications followed by the USA (n=305) and UK (255). The UoP contributed 2.58% of the total national research productivity, while Quaid-e-Azam University has been on the top with a share of 8.77%. The comparison of Iqbal et al. (2018) study on the total research productivity of Pakistan with the present study, which is limited to one university, the subject of chemistry has been the most preferred area in both studies. The research collaboration with USA was on the top in Iqbal’s paper, while the China has been on the first preference by the researchers of UoP.

Conclusion One of the most important assignments of the university is to cultivate the young brains, who are the future of the country. After attaining the degree from the university, these graduates must have the capability to transform the conceptual knowledge into applied technology for the advancement of the whole world. The assessment of research productivity has been an important parameter to reflect the quality of teaching and learning in the university. The faculty and students of the UoP have been contributing their valuable share in national research productivity. There has been remarkable growth from the last ten years, and confidently, this momentum will not only be maintained but also improved in the coming years.

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