The big picture of climate change research in the Arab world: insights from bibliometric analysis

Abstract

Global impacts of climate change are wide-ranging and unprecedented in scope, ranging from shifting weather patterns that threaten a permanent change of the ecosystem on earth (which may severely affect human life, including water and food security), to major events directly affecting human lives, such as natural / climate-related disasters, rising sea levels, etc. With the organization of two successive conferences of the parties (COP) in the Arab region, it became evident that there is extensive attention from governments and regional bodies in the Arab region towards issues related to climate change. In this study, we aim to analyze the research performance of Arab scholars on climate change based via a bibliometric analysis of published research articles in 22 Arab countries. We have used a multivariate approach for data analysis and bibliometric indicators characterization. Many indicators are used to examine scientific performance, as well as the trends of a growing number of publications, number of citations, number of authors, etc. Using a predefined set of keywords related to climate change and UN climate change themes, we were able to assemble a dataset of 68,193 documents (published papers) that were further analyzed to set the scene and show the status of scholarly publications from authors of the Arab world. Saudi Arabia comes on top of the Arab countries in terms of the number of publications in climate change research-related publications, followed by Egypt, Morocco and the United Arab Emirates, while IEEE, Energy Procedia and Arabian journal of geosciences are the top three choices for publications related to climate change among the Arab researchers.