Research Productivity and Scholarly Impact of Forestry Researchers at Sokoine University of Agriculture

Abstract

A bibliometric analysis was conducted to understand the research productivity and scholarly impact of forestry researchers at Sokoine University of Agriculture for the period of 1998 to 2013. Data were obtained using the Publish or Perish software that uses Google Scholar to retrieve scholars’ publications, citations and related metrics. A total of 1031 publications were recorded for all forestry researchers, giving an average of 64.4 publications per year and an annual growth rate of 6.3%. The year 2008 had the most (12.7%) publications followed by 2007 with 9% of all publications while the year 2003 had the lowest (3.2%) number of publications. Majority (88.1%) of the publications were multiple-authored and the degree of collaboration was 0.88. The top ten ranked forestry researchers contributed nearly half (46.3%) of all publications; hence corroborating to the Lotka’s Law of scientific productivity. However, these top ten scholars showed considerable variation since no single scholar maintained the same rank in all nine metrics. These findings suggest that many factors should be considered in combination when evaluating research performance. The study findings call for a paradigm shift for scholars to focus on the scholarly impacts of their publications.