Conservation research capacity 925
degree of economic development and longer tradition of re- search institutions, such as South Africa, to have the greatest national conservation research capacity.We would also ex- pect there is now relatively more conservation research being done in sub-Saharan Africa by national authors as these countries develop economically, particularly with re- spect to increases in institutional capacity and tourism, as a prevalent type of tourism in some sub-Saharan African countries is ecotourism, which directly depends on effective local conservation and well-managed protected areas (Boley & Green, 2016; Cresswell, 2018). Searches of bibliometric databases for the number of re-
search papers produced by a country’s authors allow us to track how the productivity of researchers and institutions has developed over time (Verde Arregoitia & González-Suárez, 2019). We surveyed how much peer-reviewed literature published during 1987–2017 was classified with the keyword ‘conservation’ along with a sub-Saharan African country’s name. Inclusion of the country’s name in the search produces papers with that country listed under the institutional address ofanyauthors; the assumption is that ifapaperwas listed inthe search results, therewill be at least one national author on the paper, reflecting conservation research capacity for that coun- try (Cresswell, 2018). Although output of research papers does not necessarily equate directly to research capacity, publica- tion inthe international peer-reviewedliterature is increasingly seen as ameans for researchers to influence conservation pol- icy, andtherefore thenumberofpublishedpapers is apotential index of national research capacity (Mammides et al., 2016). Wesystematically sampled the resulting searches to determine the number of papers in which authors based in sub-Saharan Africa were the first author, which we refer to as the primary author. We identified potential country-specific predictors of this national conservation research output using general linearmodels. Themost productive institutions and countries were also determined, to examine conservation research out- put over time across sub-Saharan Africa. We predicted that: (1) conservation research output has
increased significantly over time, but there is much variation between countries, dependent on the degree of economic development and ecotourism, population size, quality of governance and education, and government expenditure on education; and (2) overall, the ratio of the number of papers produced with national authors as primary authors has increased over time relative to the number of papers with non-African primary authors.
Methods
Data collection Bibliometric analysis was conducted using data collected from the Clarivate Analytics Web of Science online
bibliographic database (Clarivate Analytics, 2019). We searched on the Web of Science Core Collection, using the Topic ‘conservation’ and the name of each of the 41 sub- Saharan African countries (Table 1). The countries selected were mainland countries, although Madagascar, Seychelles, and São Tomé & Príncipe were included because we per- ceived these to be active countries in conservation science within the African region. South Sudan was excluded from analysis, as no papers were produced from searches as- sociated with the country name for the time period and the country only gained independence in 2011. Searches were made for research articles published during 1987–2017, excluding the subject categories of Engineering, Physics, and Astronomy, with the word ‘conservation’ in the title, abstract or keywords. For example, a typical search term would be ‘TS=conservation NOT TS=medicine NOT WC= ENGINEERING NOT WC=PHYSICS NOT 6 WC= ASTRONOMY AND CU=Angola and PY = (1987–2017)’. The TS term searches the title, abstract, and keywords for the word ‘conservation’. The CU term only searches the address field for country, thus retrieving papers with au- thors working from institutions working within the country, rather than research conducted strictly within a country. The assumption here was that if a research article was listed on the search results for a country, then there would be at least one national author on the paper, reflecting conser- vation research capacity for that country. Thus, the total search results for each country was considered a measure of national conservation research capacity. A total of 12,701 papers were located for the 41 countries
(Table 1). For each of the countries we identified 14 potential predictor variables (Table 2), chosen based on availability of data at a national scale. There were missing values for the in- ternational tourism measure, education expenditure, liter- acy rate and GDP for a few countries, resulting in variation in sample size in our models. We also included whether English is listed as an official language for the country, as a factor to control for the confounding effect of English being the primary language of publication in the conserva- tion literature (Amano et al., 2016). The 12,701 papers included some non-conservationarticles
so the total number of articles per country will be an index of publication output, not an absolute measure. Another factor that could have influenced whether the number of papers re- trieved by our searches is an accurate measure of the number of conservation papers is the use of the search term ‘conser- vation’, which may not extract all relevant articles, such as ecological studies that are later applied to conservation pro-
blems.Herewe assumethat the proportion of both categories of articles (irrelevant and missed)will be the same across coun- tries and so that there is not a systematic bias confounding our comparisons between countries. The assumption that each research article represented at least one in-country conservation researcher was examined
Oryx, 2021, 55(6), 924–933 © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Fauna & Flora International doi:10.1017/S0030605320000046
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