How the COVID-19 pandemic is shaping research in Africa: inequalities in scholarly output and collaborations and new opportunities for scientific leadership

Background: Scientometrics enables scholars to assess and visualize emerging research trends and hot-spots in the scientific literature from a quantitative standpoint. In the last decades, Africa has nearly doubled its absolute count of scholarly output, even though its share in global knowledge production has dramatically decreased. This limited contribution of African scholars to the global research output is in part impacted by the availability of adequate infrastructures and research collaborative networks. The still ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly impacted the way scholarly research is conducted, published and disseminated. However, the COVID-19 related research focus, the scientific productivity and the research collaborative network of African researchers during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic remain to be elucidated yet. Methods: This study aimed to clarify the COVID-19 research patterns among African researchers and estimate the strength of collaborations and partnerships between African researchers and scholars from the rest of the world during the COVID-19 pandemic, collecting data from electronic scholarly databases such as Web of Sciences (WoS), PubMed/MEDLINE and African Journals OnLine (AJOL), the largest and prominent platform of African-published scholarly journals. Results: In the present bibliometric study, we found that COVID-19 related collaboration patterns varied among African regions, being shaped and driven by historical, social, cultural, linguistic, and even religious determinants. For instance, most of the scholarly partnerships occurred with formerly colonial countries (like European or North-American countries). In other cases, scholarly ties of North African countries were above all with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. In terms of amount of publications, South Africa and Egypt were among the most productive countries. Discussion: Bibliometrics and, in particular, scientometrics can help scholars identify research areas of particular interest, as well as emerging topics, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. With a specific focus on the still ongoing viral outbreak, they can assist decision- and policy-makers in allocating funding and economic-financial, logistic, organizational, and human resources, based on the specific gaps and needs of a given country or research area. Conclusions: In conclusion, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has exerting a subtle, complex impact on research and publishing patterns in African countries. On the one hand, it has distorted and even amplified existing inequalities and disparities in terms of amount of scholarly output, share of global knowledge, and patterns of collaborations. On the other hand, COVID-19 provided new opportunities for research collaborations.