Assessing South African ICT4D research outputs: a journal review
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18489/sacj.v30i1.541Keywords:
ICT4D research, ICT4D literature survey, South AfricaAbstract
South Africa is an ideal test bed for ICT4D research, since on the one hand it has stark development challenges, and on the other hand it has well established ICT infrastructure that could be utilised towards socio-economic development. Not surprisingly, a plethora of ICT4D projects are executed in South Africa by a variety of role-players. This paper focuses on how effective South African researchers are in converting ICT4D research activity into significant research outputs. Since effective research is assessed by journal publications, a review was done of papers published by South African authors in the prominent international ICT4D journals. It is found that while South Africa has a prominent presence in ICT4D journals, this prominence is concentrated in one research institution and one ICT4D journal. A surprising finding is that cooperation among research institutions that leads to co-authored publications is very low, even among neighbouring institutions. Future research is suggested to investigate the good practices of the most prolific research institution, to investigate reasons for the low cooperation between institutions and to more thoroughly investigate the research contributions made by the South African authors.Downloads
Published
2018-07-10
Issue
Section
Research Papers (general)
License
Copyright of all work published here subsists in the authors. While SACJ retains right of first publication, subsequent re-publication is expressly permitted provided the original SACJ publication is acknowledged and cited, according to the terms detailed below. If plagiarism is detected during review, a paper may be summarily rejected and will not be accepted unless even minor infringements are corrected. Should plagiarism be detected after a paper is published, the Editor reserves the right to withdraw a paper from publication. We expect authors to be honest in representing work as their own, and to respect the time and effort our reviewers put in without an undue burden of policing plagiarism, and hence take violations seriously. SACJ applies the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial 4.0 License (CC BY-NC 4.0) to all papers published in this journal. Authors who publish with SACJ agree to the following:- Authors retain copyright and grant SACJ right of first publication. The work is additionally licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License that requires others who share the work to acknowledge the work’s authorship and initial publication in SACJ. Should anyone else wish to make commercial use of the work, SACJ cedes the right to the author to negotiate terms and does not expect to be paid any royalties.
- Authors may enter into additional arrangements for non-exclusive distribution of the SACJ-published version of the work (e.g., post it to a repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are required to refrain from posting their work online prior to completion of reviews so as not to compromise double-blind reviewing or confuse plagiarism checks.