Research Productivity and Web Visibility of Dental Faculty in Tanzania: A Scientometric Analysis

Abstract

A scientometric study was conducted to analyze the research productivity and web visibility of dental faculty at the Muhimbili University of Health and Allied Sciences (MUHAS) in Tanzania from 1983 to 2013. Data were extracted using the Publish or Perish software which uses Google Scholar to retrieve publications, citation counts and related metrics. For each faculty, the retrieved metrics were the total number of papers, total number of citations, average citations per paper, average papers per author, average citations per year, average citations per author, and four indices - the h-index, g-index, Hc-index, and the HI-norm. The study findings indicate that a total of 364 publications were produced by dental faculty members, giving an average of 12 publications per year. The year 2006 had the most (14.6%) publications followed by 2009 (9.9%) while the years 1984 and 1986 had no publications at all. Majority (81.5%) of publications were multiple-authored with 37.6% of the publications having four or more authors and the degree of collaboration was very high (0.82). Overall, J.R. Masalu was the top ranking scholar followed by E.N. Kikwilu and E.N. Simon. All dental faculty members showed variation in their performance as no single scholar maintained the same rank in all nine metrics. Only eleven journal articles had 50 or more citation counts. Dental faculty in Tanzania had been publishing their research findings in a wide range of international scholarly journals with the Tanzania Dental Journal being the only Tanzanian journal with a substantial number of articles. These findings suggest that many factors should be considered in combination when evaluating researchers’ productivity and impact.