Analyzing institutional research publications, citations and collaboration activities in sustainable development and its sub-areas, with particular reference to Asian institutions

This paper aims to assess the research publications, citations and collaboration activities in the area of sustainable developments and its sub-areas: climate change, renewable energy, fishery and forestry. The study is conducted using the scientific literature of top ten Asian institutions in terms of publication output in sustainable development over the time period of 1999–2008. Sustainable development and its sub-areas are defined by the set of keywords, vetted by 16 domain experts. Using these keywords, we pull 17,911 papers from the Scopus database. We analyzed research landscape of the selected institutions in terms of absolute publication counts, citation counts, institute citations per paper, percent international collaborations and percent international citations. The results indicated that the institutions which are strong in sustainable development overall may not be strong in all sub-areas and that the institutions which are not strong in sustainable development overall may have significant niche strength in a given sub-area. It is also noted that the Chinese institutions appear to be strong in terms of publication output in sustainable development and its sub-areas but they do not appear to be strong in terms of scholarly impact. While the Chinese Academy of Science and Tsinghua University shows 24.55% and 15.07% of publication share in renewable energy during2004-2008, they only show 20.12% and 8.83% for citation share. In contrast, Japanese institutions show increase in citation share, e.g. Kyoto University shows 9.26% publication share in renewableenergy during 2004-2008 but its citation share is the highest among all the selected institutes (i.e. 21.15%) in the same time window. Finally, using Spearman’s correlation, we compared institutes’ ranking based on publication counts in sustainable development with traditional university ranking systems. We found weak correlation, ρ= 0.26190 with QS ranking and ρ= 0.09523 with Shanghai Jiao Tong University ranking, which suggest that the institutes may have different standing in terms of their research standing in a particular subject field than the traditional ranking systems.