Assessing the research profile of highly productive authors of Pakistan

Abstract

Purpose Assessing the research performance of researchers offers inducement toward excellence in research. This study aims to analyze the research productivity of the most prolific authors of Pakistan considering their trends toward publications, citations and collaboration. Design/methodology/approach Top 100 authors from the top 10 Pakistani universities from Web of Science over the 10 years with the rigorous data cleaning process were selected. Scientometric analysis techniques were carried out to evaluate the research profile of these authors. Findings The findings revealed that majority of the productive authors were male working in the position of Professor in the physical sciences area. The publications and citations gradually increase with time. They preferred to collaborate for their publications, while first authorship publications were found less in number. Moreover, the propensity to collaborate at the international level increases double-fold from the first five years to the next five years period. In addition, the position of the authors was explored among different performance metrics. The finding exhibits variation in the ranking of authors among them. The impact of numbers of authors, funding status, publication of articles, presence of collaboration and international collaboration on the dependent variable and citation count was insignificant. However, the publication of review papers has a significant impact on the citation counts. Practical implications Findings have significant implications for policymakers to make maximum opportunities for researchers to strengthen linkages for collaboration and increase the funding prospects. Originality/value Studies on this topic are scarce, and therefore, this study provides useful recommendations to researchers and institutes to improve research productivity.