Assessing South African ICT4D research outputs : a journal review

Abstract

South Africa is an ideal test bed for ICT4D research, since on the one hand it has stark development challenges, and on the other hand it has well established ICT infrastructure that could be utilised towards socio-economic development. Not surprisingly, a plethora of ICT4D projects are executed in South Africa by a variety of roleplayers. This paper focuses on how effective South African researchers are in converting ICT4D research activity into significant research outputs. Since effective research is assessed by journal publications, a review was done of papers published by South African authors in the prominent international ICT4D journals. It is found that while South Africa has a prominent presence in ICT4D journals, this prominence is concentrated in one research institution and one ICT4D journal. A surprising finding is that cooperation among research institutions that leads to co-authored publications is very low, even among neighbouring institutions. Future research is suggested to investigate the good practices of the most prolific research institution, to investigate reasons for the low cooperation between institutions and to more thoroughly investigate the research contributions made by the South African authors.