Energy research in a pluralistic system: Bibliometric analysis of SA publications

This article presents the results of a bibliometric analysis of South African energy publications during the period 2011 to 2021. Bibliometric analyses have the potential to reveal policy issues that cannot be identified easily through other approaches (e.g., peer review). Several findings are important for policy. It is identified that a substantial number of the energy publications produced by South Africans are proceedings papers. Identification of the main funders leads to the assumption that the National Research Foundation funding for conferences has led to the overproduction of proceedings. The most prolific producers of energy research produce approximately the same number of publications. Energy research is distributed to a large number of universities in the country. It is suggested that this may create diseconomies of scale. Comparisons of the organizational outputs of the South African organizations with international entities identify that the country’s organizations are subcritical. Analysis of the international collaborative patterns of energy identifies that collaboration is very light in comparison to collaborative patterns of all disciplines. It is noted that researchers moved towards renewable technologies even though there is no relevant support from the government. The investigation identifies that bibliometrics is a powerful approach for monitoring and evaluating disciplines within systems of innovation.