A bibliometric study on the research outcome of Brazil,Russia, India, China, and South Africa [version 1; peer review: 2 approved]

The BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) countries are emerging as major influencers of geopolitical changes. BRICS was referred to for the first time in 2001 in a report titled Building Better Global Economic BRICS by Goldman Sachs economist Jim O’Neill. With the success of BRICS over the years, scientific literature has tried to have an improved understanding of these economies.1 In 2011 a total of 17.3% of research papers in science and engineering were published by BRICS countries compared to just 7.6% in 1995. This accounted for a 233.4% increase in publication output in 2011 compared to 1995.2 Globally, Brazil ranked 13th in terms of peer-reviewed papers produced between 2011 and 2016. Expenditure on research and development (R&D) as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was 1.17% in 2014 whereas citation impact has remained below average during the same period but improved between 2011 (0.73) and 2016 (0.86), an increase of 18%.3Russia had set aside a budget of 70 billion roubles (approx. US $3 billion) in 2018 while doubling its scientific paper output between 2006 and 2016.4 A total of 74,697 papers (research, review articles, and conference papers) were published by the Russian Federation in Scopus-indexed journals with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8% between 2006 and 2016, more significantly between 2012 and 2016 with a CAGR of 15.2%, while 54,669 papers were published in Web of Science (WoS) journals with CAGR of 5.9% during 2006-2016 and 12.9% between 2012-2016.5 Russia and China are predominantly single funding agencies, whereas Brazil and India have diversified funding sources. It was also found that research publications from Russia with foreign funding received more visibility and are published in journals with an average mean impact factor 1.9 times greater than Russian-funded publications in WoS.6 Russia spends 1% of national income on R&D, whereas public institutions conduct about 75% of research.7 In recent years, China is second only to the United States (US) in terms of R&D investment. It spent around 2.08% of the national GDP on R&D in 2015. Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST), and National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) are the three major funding agencies in the country.8 Based on recent data, South Africa spent about 0.8% of GDP on R&D