Pakistan Overtakes BRICs Countries With Highest Percentage of Cited Papers

Pakistan has, in the last 10 years, emerged as a country with highest percentage of highly cited papers as compared to BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China).

Citations are acknowledgments by the scientific community of useful findings and advances that add significantly to the ongoing research.

A recent report entitled “Pakistan: Another BRIC in the Wall” issued by Thomson Reuters states that though Pakistan’s R&D environment faced substantial economic challenges, despite this the most influential research was not affected.

The report mentions that though from productivity perspective the comparison with BRIC is showing a huge difference, using contextual indicators Pakistan can be benchmarked with such emerging and dynamic countries.

It reveals that in last decade Pakistan’s scientific productivity increased by more than four times from 2000 articles in 2006 to more than 9000 articles in 2015. During this period, the number of highly cited papers featuring Pakistan based authors increased 10-fold, from nine articles in 2006 to 98 in 2015.

The percentage of Pakistani documents cited during 2006 to 2015 was 62.27% of the total published documents as against 59.73% of the documents published by all BRIC countries. “Percentage of cited documents gives a starting perspective on efficiency of the published documents.”

“In 2012, Pakistan’s Category Normalized Citation Impact (CNCI) was higher than all of BRIC countries. Also, percentages of documents cited and percentage of highly cited papers are higher.”

The report mentions that although for 10-year analysis, only the Humanities area has a higher CNCI than the world average, Natural Sciences, Engineering and Technology are the major contributors to the steady increase in Pakistan’s citation footprint, which shows a focus on applied research.

It further says that in the last two years there has been a significant increase in the number of articles cited among the top 10% reaching peaks higher than before the economic crisis.

Original report can be downloaded from here.


  • FYI.. this is how top people of academia see this report.

    facebook DOT com/story.php?story_fbid=10209536989555951&id=1063390766

      • Its working for me. Actually putting link holds the comment for admin review. Try this after removing spaces.

        m. facebook. com/story.php?story_fbid=10209536989555951&id=1063390766

  • Begs the questions: Then why don’t we see such research get implemented in our daily lives? Why doesn’t Pakistan lead the region in technology?

  • Ok -_- Geo Nawaz. Its all happening due to maryam and her visionary ahsan iqbal. His vision is so high. like really high. and Thank you raheel sharif.


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