Participation of ‘international national organisations’ in Africa’s research: a bibliometric study of agriculture and health in Zimbabwe

The study investigated the participation of so-called ‘international national organisations’ (INOs) in agricultural and health research in Zimbabwe, a country in southern Africa. An INO refers to an international organisation or an initiative of an international organisation that uses an African country address in its publications. A first objective was to develop a classification of authorship types that accommodates the phenomenon of INOs as a form of international participation next to international co-authorship. A second objective was to apply the framework to the research output of Zimbabwe in the period 1980–2016, to determine whether changes in authorship types, and also INO participation, coincide with changes in the country’s socio-economic context. The dataset was compiled by integrating relevant Zimbabwean articles from Scopus and Web of Science. It comprised 10,753 articles across all fields, of which 2091 were in agriculture and 4353 in health. The results showed that, in the period 2009–2016, 36% of articles in agriculture involved an INO. The corresponding figure for health was 15%. Participation by INOs rarely occurred without any international co-authorship also being present. A visualization of the location of INOs in author research networks revealed a small number of INO authors occupying prominent spaces in the networks for agriculture and health, with the INO authors being of different kinds (e.g. ‘INO only affiliated authors’ vs. ‘INO affiliated authors with other local and foreign affiliations’). It is concluded that relatively small tailor-made bibliometric datasets, developed for African countries with small science systems, have the potential to produce new insights and frameworks to direct future studies on research in Africa.