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

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 per cent 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 Normalised 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 per cent reaching peaks higher than before the economic crisis.