Climate change research trends in Tanzania

Abstract

Research enhances the efforts to address climate change through improved understanding of the causes, effects and likely impacts as well as formulation of climate change policies and strategies for adaptation and mitigation measures. A bibliometric analysis was conducted to assess research trends on climate change in Tanzania for the period between 2006 and 2016. Data were extracted using the Publish or Perish programme which uses Google Scholar to retrieve the number of publications, citation counts and related metrics. The study findings show that there were 319 scholarly publications for the 10-year period, giving an average of about 32 publications per year. As the rate of growth of publications increased, the corresponding doubling time decreased. Journal articles were the dominant (56.1%) type of publications. Areas with relatively higher number of articles were “climate change adaptation” (25.2%), “climate change impacts/implications” (23.3%) and “climate variability” (13.8%). Many (68.9%) publications were multiple-authored and the degree of collaboration among scholars was 0.69. The top 10 ranked scholars contributed nearly one third (31%) of the publications. These results suggest that research productivity in the area of climate change in Tanzania is generally low compared to other countries in the world. Concerted efforts are therefore necessary to foster the research on climate change in Tanzania.