Over 6,000 articles by Bangladeshis in global journals with impact factor

Bangladeshi researchers were placed in the third position in South Asia in terms of the number of publications of scholarly articles in international journals with impact factor last year.  

Available data shows, the country lags far behind India and Pakistan.

The scholars of the country published a total of 6,363 articles and other documents in 159 peer-reviewed and impact factor journals where the highest impact factor is more than 7.

Indian researchers published more than 175,000 and Pakistani researchers published more than 22,000 articles and other documents.

Among the other documents are conference papers, reviews, book chapters, letters, errata, notes, editorials, data papers, books, short surveys, and others.

The impact factor, also known as Journal Impact Factor (JIF), is a metric used to evaluate the relative importance of a journal.

It is determined by calculating an average number of citations received by the selected articles in that journal within the last few years.

For example, if the impact factor of a journal is 2, that means all the articles of this journal are used or cited average 2 times as reference in a particular year.

Among all impact factor journals and documents, four were from Bangladesh.

These are Bangladesh Medical Research Council Bulletin, Geography in Bangladesh: Concepts, Methods and Applications, Bangladesh Journal of Medical Science, and Journal of Medicine Bangladesh.

According to Resurchify, an information portal, the impact factor of the Bangladesh Medical Research Council Bulletin is 0.09.

Besides, the impact factor of the Bangladesh Journal of Medical Science is 0.17 and the Journal of Medicine Bangladesh is 0.10.

Status of Bangladesh

An online magazine Scientific Bangladesh has published the annual report on scientific documents of the country analysing the data of Scopus, a citation database of peer-reviewed literature: scientific journals, books, and conference proceedings.

According to the database, the top three subject areas are engineering (1,861), computer science (1,644) and medicine (1,126) among the published articles and other documents.

University of Dhaka has dislodged Buet to become the top institution in number of published articles among the institutions in the country. Bangladesh University of Science and Technology (Buet) is in the second place.

Buet held the first position in the previous two years.

The ICDDRB is in the third position and Rajshahi University is in the fourth position.

The rest of the institutions are Jahangirnagar University, Brac University, Bangladesh Agricultural University, Daffodil International University, Shahjalal University of Science and Technology, and University of Chittagong.

Top Bangladeshi researcher is Kawsar Ahmed of Mawlana Bhashani Science and Technology University who published 39 articles, according to the data available.

In 2018, Bangladeshi researchers published 5,234 documents.

Dr Monir Uddin Ahmed, founder and executive editor of the Scientific Bangladesh, said, "Though publications of Bangladeshi researchers are increasing in small number, it is still far from enough for scientific advancement of the country. In comparison to

India and Pakistan, our publications are very few in number.

"Measures should be taken so that publication from our own research organisations increases and researches are commercialised."

Impact factor helps measure the relative importance of journals within particular areas and compare the journals within the same areas. The higher the journal impact factor, the better it is ranked. Typically, journals with more review articles or papers can achieve higher JIF.