Evaluation of Research Productivity of the Islamia University of Bahawalpur, Pakistan

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the research output and publications trends of the Islamia University of Bahawalpur (IUB), Pakistan for the last 42 years as observed in the Scopus database. IUB is the premier degree-awarding institution of the Southern Punjab, Pakistan and considerably subsidized their valuable share in national research growth. A quantitative bibliometric research technique was employed to enumerate the documents and their parameters. The publications record of IUB from 1980 to 2021 was retrieved on 2nd January 2022. The Microsoft Excel and VOSviewer software were used to appraise the dataset and presented the findings in tabular/graphic formats. The authors affiliated to IUB contributed the share of 2.52% in the national research growth of Pakistan with 6,209 documents and 62% of the documents were published in the last five years (2017-2021). The review papers and subscription-based documents gained more citations as compared to articles and open-accessed documents. The highest numbers of the documents were published on the subject area of “Agricultural and Biological Sciences” and about 15% of the documents were published in top-10 journals. Bahauddin Zakariya University was found on the top among the research collaborative institutions and China emerged as the top preference in the international research collaboration. The findings confirmed that a promising research growth has been explicit in the last decade. The outcomes of this study are significant for the IUB authorities and they can review their efforts to promote research culture. The findings of this paper would also serve as a benchmark for the future studies on IUB as well as the other universities of Pakistan.