Hydrogen Evolution Reaction Electrocatalyst Research in Africa: A Bibliometric and Knowledge-Mapping Analysis

Research on hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) electrocatalysts at African institutions has grown, yet publication visibility, technical performance and research leadership are seldom distinguished. This study applied bibliometric methods to English-language journal articles indexed in Scopus between 2010 and 6 October 2026. Screening yielded 590 articles, analysed using full counting, harmonised institutional and author records, country co-authorship analysis and VOSviewer mapping of combined author and indexed keywords, complemented by a query-term sensitivity analysis and a technical assessment of 18 highly cited studies. Output increased, with 437 articles (74.1%) published from 2022 onwards. Egypt, South Africa and Algeria were the most productive African countries, and 76.1% of the articles involved international co-authorship. At a threshold of ten occurrences, 169 keywords formed seven clusters covering catalyst synthesis and characterisation; transition-metal compounds for bifunctional water splitting; alloy electrodes; electronic structure and adsorption energetics; electrocatalyst architectures; charge-transfer kinetics; and platinum-containing nanocomposites. The assessed studies revealed limitations in electrochemical comparability, computational validation and deployment evidence. The findings support broader collaboration involving less-represented African institutions, more uniform reporting and experimental–computational validation. Because the corpus derives from Scopus alone, the study maps research activity and conceptual relationships; it does not evaluate catalyst performance or commercial readiness.