A BIBLIOMETRIC ANALYSIS OF RESEARCH PRODUCTIVITY AT HARAMAYA UNIVERSITY DURING THE PERIOD OF 1981-2016

Abstract

This study is an attempt in the direction of applying Bibliometric analysis to investigation the extent of research outputs, activities, nature, current trend and direction of research. The study analyse entirely 2309 research output of Haramaya University staff, research scholars and post graduate students that have been indexed in Haramaya University Electronic Thesis and Dissertation repository ranging from the year 1981 to 2016. Bibliometric studies were used to identify, relative growth rate, exponential growth rate, authorship pattern, collaborative measures, author’s productivity, doubling time, time series analysis of single authorship trend most prolific department, most prolific region and relative research effort. The laws of Lotka have also been tested. The results indicate that the year wise distribution of total research output has an annual average growth rate of 0.25. Out of 2309 research outputs contribution 70.12 % have been contributed by single authors, followed by contribution made by three authors 25.12 %, two authors 6.79 % and four authors 0.42 % respectively. A total of 3553 authors contributed 2309 research outputs during the study period with an average of 1.9 authors per paper and 0.4 paper per authors. The laws of Lotka was applied in Haramaya University research output during the period under study and found that Lotka’s law was not applicable to this data. Average degree of collaboration was found 0.3, which also indicated dominance of single author’s research. The relative growth rate and doubling time of research outputs have shown increasing trend. It is also found that the annual average exponential growth rate was 1.08.The most favoured department among the research community of Haramaya University are Plant science, followed by Animal and Range science, Agricultural economics. The future trend of growth in single authored research output may take a decreasing trend during the year to come. The highest research effort was made in the year 1997 and 2009 with 1.55 PEI and the lowest research effort was made in the year 2011 with 0.62 PEI. The regional distribution of Haramaya university research output reveals the most researched region among the research community is Oromia, Amhara, and SNNPR. It is therefore recommended that, in the present study Collaboration is studied only as it relates to joint authorship. A broader view of collaboration can be studied by other researchers that includes inter disciplinary collaboration, local and foreign collaboration activities among authors by country and institution