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3-29-2021
Bibliometric Analysis of Researchers’ Competencies through Web Bibliometric Analysis of Researchers’ Competencies through Web
of Science of Science
Muhammad Abbas Ganaee International Islamic University, Islamabad, Pakistan, [email protected]
Shamshad Ahmed University of Sargodha, Sargodha, Pakistan, [email protected]
Muhammad Ajmal Khan Imam Abdulrahman bin Faisal University, Saudi Arabia, [email protected]
Ayesha Gulzar University of Sargodha, Sargodha, Pakistan, [email protected]
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Ganaee, Muhammad Abbas; Ahmed, Shamshad; Khan, Muhammad Ajmal; and Gulzar, Ayesha, "Bibliometric Analysis of Researchers’ Competencies through Web of Science" (2021). Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal). 5371. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/libphilprac/5371
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Library Philosophy & Practice (e-journal) 2021
Bibliometric Analysis of Researchers’ Competencies through Web of Science
by
Muhammad Abbas Ganaee1
Shamshad Ahmed2
Muhammad Ajmal Khan3
Ayesha Gulzar4 1 Principal Librarian, International Islamic University, Islamabad, Pakistan
2Associate Professor, University of Sargodha, Sargodha, Pakistan 3Head, Library Quality and Academic Accreditation, Deanship of Library Affairs, Imam
Abdulrahman bin Faisal University, Saudi Arabia 4M.Phil Scholar, University of Sargodha, Sargodha, Pakistan
Abstract Universities and institutes of higher education produce researchers and scholars who can find
the solutions to the problems in their fields of studies. Researchers belonging to any academic
discipline should have certain competencies and skills to conduct a valuable research. This study
uses the Bibliometric method to investigate the literature published on researchers’
competencies, not limited to any specific subject. The query to search literature on research
competencies was run on Web of Science and 5,716 results were analyzed. A comparison of
pattern of publications and citations year wise was presented from 1905 to 2020. The study
reveals that most of the publications were from USA. Similar results were found in the top ten
highest research producing institutions which included five American and two Canadian
universities. Keywords analysis shows the emergence of ‘research ethics’ and ‘academic
writing’ as two major areas in research competencies.
Keywords: Bibliometric; research competencies; research skills; research ethics; writing
competencies; critical thinking competencies; retrieval competencies; publishing competencies.
Introduction Universities and institutes of higher education produce researchers and scholars who can find the
solutions to the problems in their fields of studies. Being a part of the society, these researchers
locate research problems and try to find logical answers to these problems not only for academic
purposes but also to provide expert opinion to various issues emerged in the society. Academic
institutes contribute considerably in innovation processes and research in their localities (Fritsch
& Schwirten, 1999), to create competence-based individuals for mastering knowledge, abilities
and skills in practice (Gureeva, Korolkova, Novozhilova, Shovgenina, & Mityagina, 2015).
Universities have emerged as research institutes and play leading role to find solutions to society
problems, as during recent pandemic of COVID-19 “Fudan University in Shanghai, University
of Melbourne and University of Oxford are the top 3 institutions” whose efforts can be seen to
prepare a vaccine for COVID-19 (Radanliev, De Roure, & Walton, 2020).
Researchers and scholars have strong responsibilities on their shoulders to get them
equipped with the competencies and skills to find answers to societies questions and issues.
Researchers belonging to any academic discipline should have certain competencies and skills to
conduct a valuable research. The main purpose of universities is to prepare the student as a
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skilled researcher who “has acquired the knowledge and skills of conducting and
disseminating his or her research in a particular field of research” (Meerah et al., 2012).
Producing such researchers has been the focus of most of the research programs. Conducting
research is the core requirement to get university degree i.e., PhD, MS/Mphil or BS and students
use research competencies not only for their theses but also for preparing class assignments and
to complete tasks given by teachers. Students should have a rational knowledge of research
procedures (Murdoch-Eaton et al., 2010) for creating effective research. Getting expertise of
research competencies in creating next generation of researchers and scholars which in turn help
them to play their vital role in addressing the problems faced by society.
Previously, the competence of a person was considered as personal characteristics which
could be judged in terms of quality of a person’s character and abilities. These days, skill-
oriented behavior is termed as competence which could be observed through quantitative ways.
Mahmood (2003) defined “a competency is having the capacity, skills and knowledge to produce
desirable outcomes”. The Council of Europe described “the set of knowledge and skills that
enable an employee to orient easily in a working field and to solve problems that are linked with
their professional role” (Webber, 1999).
A substantial number of studies (D. Abbott, 2015, 2019; L. E. Abbott, Andes, Pattani, &
Mabrouk, 2020; Adedokun, Bessenbacher, Parker, Kirkham, & Burgess, 2013; Agricola, Prins,
van der Schaaf, & van Tartwijk, 2018) are available on research competencies and skills in
general, in medical field (P. Abbott, Reath, Rosenkranz, Usherwood, & Hu, 2014; Abougergi,
Wright, Landis, & Howell, 2011; Acosta, Cuzme, & Galvez, 2019; Aguayo-Gonzalez, Leyva-
Moral, San Rafael, Fernandez, & Gomez-Ibanez, 2020; Ahn et al., 2020), research ethics
(Abdulrahman & Nair, 2017; Abu Tarboush, Alkayed, Alzoubi, & Al-Delaimy, 2020; Adams-
Hutcheson, 2017; Adams et al., 2017; Adesanya, 2020) and in academic writing (Abraham,
2015; Agosto-Riera & Mateo-Girona, 2015; Ahmed; Al Sharoufi, 2013). For instance, research
competencies and skills involve getting proficiency like “formulating appropriate research
questions, designing and running methodologically sound studies, gaining ethics approval,
collecting and analysing data, and sharing results” (Lander, Seeho, & Foster, 2019). Similarly,
‘Writing up the research’ is significant in these competencies due to globalization of academia
has pushed the scholars to publish their research works in well reputed international journals.
Academic writing requires the understanding of IMRAD (introduction, methods, results and
discussion) structure (Sollaci & Pereira, 2004) and is formal and concise, uses technical language
and its targeted audience is educated professional community (Candlin & Hyland, 2014).
Further, research ethics deals with the moral aspects during conduction of research and
the ethical behavior, conduct and approach of the researchers. Ensuring quality and informed
consent, taking care of privacy and minimizing harm are important components of research
ethics (Brown, Spiro, & Quinton, 2020). Effective searching competencies required the in-depth
understanding to locate relevant information in the ever expanding landscape of Internet,
knowing various internet tools, knowing searching techniques, cognitive ability to coordinate
searches, and the skills to perform the searches well (Laxman, 2010).
Research could be cost-effective by learning the interdisciplinary research training hence
scientists, clinicians, postdoctoral fellows and faculty members can play their part in this
endeavor by conducting research with fellows from other disciplines (Stone, Cohen, & Pincus,
2017). An appropriated educated professional with experiential background ensures the research
competencies to its students and provide mentoring during professional education (Hymel,
2005). Conducting research is mandatory for students to earn academic degrees hence institutes
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of higher education employ different models to increase the research competencies of university
graduates and their performance in producing valuable research. A teaching and learning
approach which is research-based could help a lot for developing research competencies of the
students (Wannapiroon, 2014).
Due to scarcity of bibliometric analysis on research competencies, it is of interest to
evaluate the concepts of researchers to gain better understanding on the subject. Bibliometric
analysis is quantitative way to examine the trends in published research on a particular subject. It
is an important instrument to analyze the research work and provides evidences for work done so
far on a topic. By using mathematical methods, patterns of development of a particular body of
literature like publication and authorship can be identified (Reitz, 2020). In the current study
literature published on competencies are restricted to; knowledge of the subject, critical thinking,
writing, retrieval, research and publishing competencies as well as research ethics. This study
presents a computable statistical analysis of the publications on research competencies, and also
portrays conceptual maps that integrate and correlate the knowledge of existing publications.
The study presented with the intention to get a review of literature on research
competencies. Additionally, the study was carried out for the following objectives:
1. To identify the literature on the research competencies produced by researchers of different
subject areas.
2. To explore the research trends and citations of research work during different years
3. To identify different concepts and keywords used in the literature on research competencies
4. To identity the top countries that produces the literature on research competencies and
collaboration within various countries
5. To identify the top journals that have published research works on research competencies
Methodology This study uses the Bibliometric method to investigate the literature published on research
competencies of researchers, not limited to any specific subject. This method is used to examine
studies in scientific and applied sciences (Ellegaard & Wallin, 2015). In bibliometric analysis
mathematical/ statistical methods are used to find trends and patterns of publications, citations,
authorship, co-authorship and collaboration between regions and organizations in published
articles, conferences papers and scholarly documents (Durisin, Calabretta, & Parmeggiani,
2010). This provides opportunity to researchers to evaluate the published literature without
contacting its authors (Garfield & Merton, 1979).
Database Selection
Many online available database services provide bibliographic information of published research
including articles, reference papers, review articles like Web of Science (WOS), Scopus, Google
scholar, MELINE, PubMed. This study uses WOS which have resources on science, social
sciences, arts and humanities. WOS was selected for this study as it is believed to be most
powerful, reliable and trusted database among professionals and researchers (Saleem, Khattak,
Ur Rehman, & Ashiq, 2021). WOS also published Journal Citation Reports (JCR) annually
including impact factor journals indicating the quality of journals.
Search Query
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The query used to get a quick understanding of the publications on research competencies of the
title (TI) field of the WOS. Following syntax was used to search for finding the literature:
TI=("research competenc*" OR "research skil*" OR "research techniqu*" OR
"academic writing" OR "searching techniqu*" OR "Searching skills" OR "research
ethics") OR AK=("research competenc*" OR "research skil*" OR "research techniqu*"
OR "academic writing" OR "searching techniqu*" OR "searching skills" OR "research
ethics")
Inclusion/Exclusion Criteria
The Web of Science Core Collection produced 5,718 records by running the above query (on
date December 08, 2020). The search was conducted on SCI-EXPANDED, SSCI, A&HCI,
CPCI-S, CPCI-SSH, ESCI, CCR-EXPANDED and IC indices of WOS. No time limit was opted
in searching the above query so all records till 8 December 2020 were included in the
downloaded search results. For downloaded data, duplication of records was checked by
importing the dataset into EndNote and two duplicate records were found whose WOS accession
numbers were noted. The query was run again on WOS by excluding the duplicate records which
produced 5,716 results in the final query (Figure 1).
Figure 1 Flow chart of data extraction and duplication checking process
Types of documents excluded during searing were letter, note, correction addition,
meeting abstract, book chapter, reprint, editorial material, discussion, retracted publication, news
item, software review, retraction, book review, correction and bibliography.
Microsoft Excel, VOSviewer and Biblioshiny were used to examine the data records in
this study. VOSviewer (Kawuki, Yu, & Musa, 2020; Martynov, Klima-Frysch, & Schoenberger,
2020; Merigó, Pedrycz, Weber, & de la Sotta, 2018; Xie, Zhang, Wu, & Lv, 2020) and
Biblioshiny (Homolak, Kodvanj, & Virag, 2020; Janik, Ryszko, & Szafraniec, 2020) are popular
softwares used by many researchers for bibliometric analysis.
Data analysis
Publications and citations trend
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Graphs in Figure 2 shows the distribution of documents published in a year, total citations
received and average citations per documents in a specific year. The data was from 1905 to 2020
and a total of 5716 documents were retrieved while 11056 author-keywords were counted
altogether. First year of publication of a document was 1905, when only one document was
found. It was the year 1977 when first time 10 documents in a year were existed. During the last
decade of previous century, around 26 documents were found on average each year, with around
130 citations each year.
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Figure 2 Pattern of publications and citations year wise
Number of total publications kept on rising from the start of current century and first time
in the year 2011 total publications crossed the 200 mark. The graph shows number of
publications has a steady growth in the last decade, although number of publication has fallen in
2020, this might be for the reason that some publications yet to be accumulated in the
bibliographic database. The line graph reveals the highest number of citations per documents was
received in 2004 when 78 documents a total number of 3820 citations were located. The graph
shows an increasing trend in the number of publications and total citations from year 2000
onwards but the average citation per document per year shows a decline as enormous number of
research work is being produced and published.
International collaboration and contribution
The highest number of research works was produced by the authors from USA, showing with
bigger circle in the map. Figure 3 shows the map of countries, which was generated by limiting
countries with minimum of 5 publications. Out of 140 countries of the data downloaded from
WOS, 80 countries met the criteria of minimum publications. The map showed 76 countries with
largest set of connected items skipping Kuwait, Slovenia, Belarus and Bolivia which had week
connections in the network. Lines between the circles showed the relation between two
countries, how often they appear together. England is the second highest productive country,
followed by Canada shown by green circle just behind and partially overlapped by England.
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Figure 3 Collaboration network among the countries based on the number of publications
Top ten high-research- producing institutions
The top 10 institutions in respect to highly producing research publications on research
competencies are shown in Table 1, with their research impact. It can be observed from the table
that five institutes were American in the list and by including two Canadian institutes, 70%
universities were belonged to North American region. All the institutes have publications more
than 50 on their credit except University of Sydney which has 49 publications. Although the
most productive university is University of Pennsylvania, USA with 88 publications but
University of Melbourne, Australia has the higher citation impact value of 23.25, which is the
ratio between total citations and total publications. University of Sydney, Australia has the
lowest citations impact of 9.84 with 49 publications. It has been observed that most of the
research work by University of Pennsylvania was on research ethics, although works on other
aspects of research like research collaboration, research techniques etc. were also found.
Table 1 Top ten most highly productive organizations
Affiliations and Countries TP TC Citations Impact
University of Pennsylvania, USA 88 1288 14.64
University of Oxford, UK 82 1479 18.04
University of Toronto, Canada 77 1646 21.38
McGill University, Canada 73 1090 14.93
University of Washington, USA 67 1434 21.4
Johns Hopkins University, USA 64 1415 22.1
National Institutes of Health, USA 91 1554 17.08
University of Michigan, USA 53 846 15.96
University of Melbourne, Australia 51 1186 23.25
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University of Sydney, Australia 49 487 9.94 TP=total publications, TC=total citations
Keyword analysis
As seen from Figure 4, two big clusters around the nodes can easily be observed and size of the
nodes represents the occurrences of the keywords appeared in the publications, i.e., ‘research
ethics’ and ‘academic writing’ and the former makes strong relation with most of the keyword in
the visualization map. These two clusters are placed at distance to each other shows two different
points of opinion on ‘research skills’, which lies in the space between these two nodes. This
visualization map shows the overall concepts associated with the research competencies of
researchers.
Figure 4 Co-occurrence network of the most frequent keywords
Note: (A minimum occurrence of 10 was applied for keywords provided by authors and 268
words met the criteria of this threshold out of 10683 keywords. The total strength of the co-
occurrence links is calculated with other keywords. In the figure, keywords having the greatest
total link strength are shown.)
The third bigger cluster is of ‘informed consent’, although the keyword is not visible in
the map, has 440 appearances in the searched literature. It is shown in sky blue color, partially
hidden under the ‘research ethics’ node and overlapped by it, which indicates a strong relation
with it. Hence informed consent appeared as a strong component of research ethics, as appeared
in the searched literature, although it has no relation with second big cluster of ‘academic
writing’. This cluster is very close to another keyword ‘clinical trials’ indicates the studies have
been conducted in the field of medical science.
Authorship pattern
The figure 5 shows the authorship pattern for the publications explored in the study. The highest
number of authors for a publication is 50 persons. There was one publication found with 19, 20,
21, 22, 23, 25, 27, 31 and 50 authors each. The single authorship has the highest number of
publications, i.e., 1976 and other top authorship patterns were 1469 publications with two
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authors, 886 publications with three authors and 503 publications with four authors. The sum of
first two top publications, i.e., with one and two authors is more the 1.5 times of the aggregate of
all other publications examined in this study.
Figure 5 Authorship pattern
International and national collaborations
Corresponding author is the principal author of the publication who does all the communication
of submitting the article, response to revisions of article etc., with the publisher of the journal.
International collaboration of corresponding author is shown in the Figure 6, with single country
publication (SCP) indicates the intra-country collaboration and multiple country publications
(MCP) are inter-country publications.
Figure 6 Corresponding author’s country
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Although, USA has the highest number of total publications and also highest inter-
country publications (n=155), but the Netherlands (34%) has the highest ratio of inter-country
collaboration (MCP) calculated on total publications, followed by Switzerland (31%) and
Norway (26%). For the USA, 90% of articles were contributed by domestic authors represented
as percentage of single country publication (SCP) where as MCP was 10%. For Iran, only 4%
corresponding authors found a chance to have international collaboration for their publications
with the least MCP ratio. China is the top most Asian country, with the highest number of
publications and MCP ration (17%).
Collective number of total publications of North American countries, i.e., USA and
Canada is higher than the total number of publications of other eight countries for the top ten
highly productive countries.
Table 2 Top 15 journals with highest number of publications
Sources TP TC CPP IF* PY
Journal of Empirical Research on Human Research Ethics 211 1941 9 1.253 2006
Journal of Medical Ethics 131 1599 12 2.021 1992
Journal of English for Academic Purposes 105 1500 14 1.893 2010
Science and Engineering Ethics 100 665 7 2.787 1998
BMC Medical Ethics 93 901 10 2.451 2010
Developing World Bioethics 89 741 8 1.431 2006
Bioethics 82 833 10 1.799 2000
American Journal of Bioethics 67 1971 29 7.647 2003
Accountability in Research-Policies and Quality Assurance 62 315 5 1.458 2008
Ethics & Behavior 55 754 14 1.120 1995
English for Specific Purposes 43 979 23 2.612 2001
Higher Education Research & Development 39 330 8 2.129 2008
Journal of Second Language Writing 39 1120 29 3.077 2002
Social Science & Medicine 38 1474 39 3.616 1991
Nursing Ethics 36 417 12 2.597 1999
Note: (* Figures for Impact factor was provided from the Journal Citation Report 2020, Web of
Science)
Top highly influential journals
Analysis was carried out of top journals that published the articles on searched query. The list
was generated by using a threshold value of minimum of 34 documents published by a source, to
create a list limited to 15 journals. Journals in the list are ranked according to the total
publications (TP) by the source. American Journal of Bioethics secured more citations than the
journal ranked first (Journal of Empirical Research on Human Research Ethics) in the list,
although it has two third less publications than it, also its highest impact factor (7.647) is another
indicator of getting more citations by its publications. Social Science & Medicine has the highest
value of citations per publications (CPP=39) is also the only journal in the list with higher value
of CPP than it total publications (TP=38). The last five journals in the list (English for Specific
Purposes, Higher Education Research & Development, Journal of Second Language Writing,
Social Science & Medicine and Nursing Ethics) have less than 50 publications but all have an
impact factor more than two.
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Table 3 Authors impact
Author TP TC h_index g_index m_index PY_start
van delden jjm 25 249 11 14 0.917 2009
sugarman j 23 809 11 23 1999
weijer c 23 294 9 17 0.375 1997
fisher cb 22 367 9 19 0.375 1997
hyland k 21 1544 15 21 0.789 2002
hyder aa 20 220 8 14 0.533 2006
miller fg 18 524 14 18 0.737 2002
parker m 17 287 9 16 0.750 2009
van der graaf r 17 154 7 12 0.583 2009
dubois jm 16 235 8 15 0.471 2004
kimmelman j 15 209 7 14 2007
pratt b 15 106 7 9 0.700 2011
taljaard m 14 141 7 11 0.500 2011
wassenaar d 14 198 8 14 0.700 2005
cho mk 13 696 11 13 0.846 2008
nebeker c 13 163 7 12 1.167 2015
bull s 12 250 8 12 0.889 2012
kim syh 12 242 8 12 0.444 2003
london aj 12 175 7 12 0.467 2006
ali j 11 93 6 9 0.667 2012 TP = total publication, TC = total citation
Authors’ impact
Authors’ impact is analyzed for top 20 authors and they were ranked according to total
publications (TP) in Table 3, with their h-index, g-index and m-index. Hirsch (2005) introduced
the h-index a way to measure the bibliometric impact of an author and defined it as, “a scientist
has index h if h of his or her Np papers have at least h citations each and the other (Np - h) papers
have fewer than h citations each”. In other words, to have an h-index of 5, an author has to have
5 highly cited publications, each receiving at least 5 citations. Egghe (2006) introduced the g-
index, another way to measure the author impact, which always the same or more than h-index
and is the highest rank where the sum of citations is larger than square of rank. Whereas, m-
index is the ratio of h-index and number of years since first publication. It measures author
impact and “avoids a bias towards more senior scientists with longer careers and more
publications in past, but now slowdown or stop publishing in recent past”(Khan, 2020).
The top most author in Table 3, van delden jjm (Johannes JM van Delden) is a Dutch
researcher from medical science and most of the research work covered the ethical aspect of
research like “Ethics in clinical trial regulation: ethically relevant issues from EMA inspection
reports” (Bernabe, van Thiel, Breekveldt, Gispen-de Wied, & van Delden, 2019), “The social
value of clinical research” (Habets, van Delden, & Bredenoord, 2014), “Participant selection for
preventive Regenerative Medicine trials: ethical challenges of selecting individuals at risk”
(Niemansburg, Habets, Dhert, van Delden, & Bredenoord, 2015) etc.
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Figure 7 Three-factor analysis of the relationship among countries (left), authors (middle) and keywords (right)
The author hyland k (Ken Hyland) who got the highest citations for published articles
also got highest h-index value of 15, which indicates that author’s 15 top highly cited articles got
15 or more citations per article. Ken Hyland is a British Professor at the University of East
Anglia, United Kingdom, of Applied Linguistics in Education. He highlighted the academic
writing feature of research, like “Is academic writing becoming more informal?” (Hyland &
Jiang, 2017), “Metadiscourse in academic writing: A reappraisal” (Hyland & Tse, 2004) etc. in
his research work.
NEBEKER C who has low number of total publications (TP=13) than other top 15
authors in the Table 3, but succeeds to get the highest value (1.167) for m-index. It was due to
less number of years since first research publication, as 2015 was year of first publication for the
author and appeared to be youngest researcher in the table. So, m-index provides a chance to
young researchers to secure higher impact in publications when compared with inactive
researchers.
Three-factor analysis of countries, authors and keywords
The Figure 7 shows the relationship among countries, author and keywords on research
competencies research. Top authors shown in the figure, i.e., weijer c, taljaard m, sugarman j,
parker m and fisher cb had relationship with almost all author-keywords like research ethics,
research, informed consent etc except keywords academic writing, writing, academic, education
and institutional review board but had strong relationship with top three countries, i.e., USA,
Canada and United Kingdom.
Limitations of the study and Future Research Guidelines Firstly, in the current study the analyzed data was taken from the WOS core collection, although
no time limitation was applied while searching the available data from the beginning of research
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works. Data was searched on a specific date, so there could be different search results when data
would be searched with same query from WOS. Secondly some type of documents which were
excluded while searching the WOS might include some useful information on research
competencies. These documents are letter, note, correction addition, meeting abstract, book
chapter, reprint, editorial material, discussion, retracted publication, news item, software review,
retraction, book review, correction and bibliography. Thirdly data from other renowned
databases were not included in this study, like Scopus, Google Scholar etc.
Conclusions This study was conducted to get an overview of the research work published regarding research
competencies possessed by researchers belonging to any field of study. These research
competencies assure the quality of research and authenticate the ability of researchers to conduct
valuable research. This study conducted the bibliometric analysis of publications from the start
of previous century till the date of searching the WOS (i.e., December 08, 2020) on researchers’
competencies.
There was a rapid boost in the number of publications on the researchers’ competencies
since the start of first decade of twentieth century and the trend continued with higher rate during
the last decade especially during last five years. Authors with highest number of publications
examined in this study were from USA, followed by authors from United Kingdom and Canada.
Authorship patterns revealed that the single-author publications are very famous as the
highest number of publications, i.e., 1976 were contributed by sole authors (figure 5). Frequency
of author-provided keywords revealed that the high focus areas were ‘research ethics’ and
‘academic writing’. Top journals which published works on research competencies are inclined
to ethical consideration of research including Journal of Empirical Research on Human Research
Ethics, Journal of Medical Ethics, Journal of English for Academic Purposes and Science and
Engineering Ethics. With regard to highly productive organizations, top ten were American,
Canadian and Australian institutes.
This research had contributed in reviewing the growing body of knowledge on
researchers’ competencies. The study analyzed 5716 articles, early access articles, proceedings
papers and review articles from 2258 sources, searched and downloaded from WOS.
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Corresponding author
Muhammad Abbas Ganaee can be contacted at: [email protected]
ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-0691-0473