South Africa

420.3k papers and 8.3M indexed citations i.

About

In recent decades scholars affiliated with institutions in South Africa have published 420.3k papers, which have received a total of 8.3M indexed citations. Scholars in South Africa publish mostly in Sociology and Political Science (34.4k papers), Molecular Biology (28.3k papers) and Plant Science (26.2k papers) and are cited by scholars working on Molecular Biology (823.6k citations), Plant Science (618.2k citations) and Ecology (614.4k citations). Scholars in South Africa collaborate with scholars from United States, United Kingdom and Australia. Scholars in South Africa have published in prestigous journals including Nature, Science and Cell.

In The Last Decade

Fields of papers citing works of authors working in South Africa

Since Specialization
Physical SciencesHealth SciencesLife SciencesSocial Sciences

This network shows the impact of papers produced by authors working at institutions in South Africa. Nodes represent research fields, and links connect fields that are likely to share authors. Colored nodes show fields that tend to cite the papers produced by authors working at institutions in South Africa. The network helps show where authors in South Africa may publish in the future.

Countries collaborating with authors based in South Africa

Since Specialization
Citations

This map shows the geographic impact of research produced by institutions in South Africa. It shows the number of citations coming from papers published by authors working in each country. You can also color the map by specialization and compare the number of citations received by papers from institutions in South Africa with the expected number of citations based on a country's size and research output (numbers larger than one mean the country cites South Africa more than expected).

Rankless uses publication and citation data sourced from OpenAlex, an open and comprehensive bibliographic database. While OpenAlex provides broad and valuable coverage of the global research landscape, it—like all bibliographic datasets—has inherent limitations. These include incomplete records, variations in author disambiguation, differences in journal indexing, and delays in data updates. As a result, some metrics and network relationships displayed in Rankless may not fully capture the entirety of a scholar’s output or impact.

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2025