The number of scientific papers published by researchers in Africa has been rising faster than the total world scientific output in recent years. This trend is relevant, as for a long period up until 1996, Africa's share of the world scientific output remained below 1.5 %. The propensity to publish in the continent has risen particularly fast since 2004, suggesting that a possible take-off of African science is taking place. This paper highlights that, in parallel with this most recent growth in output, the apparent productivity of African science, as measured by publications to gross domestic product, has risen in recent years to a level above the world average, although, when one looks at the equivalent ratio after it has been normalized by population, there is still a huge gap to overcome. Further it is shown that publications from those few African countries whose scientific communities demonstrate higher levels of specialization and integration in international networks, have a higher impact than the world average. Additionally, the paper discusses the potential applications of the new knowledge that has been produced by African researchers, highlighting that so far, South Africa seems to be the only African country where a reasonable part of that new knowledge seems to be connecting with innovation.

The impact of the scientific output produced by different nations in different fields varies extensively. In this article, we apply bibliometric and econometric analysis to identify which countries are producing research with relatively higher scientific influence, and to understand what factors lead to higher citation impact. We focus specifically on the Global South because countries in this group are starting to converge in terms of output with the Global North. We find that previous citation impact, level of international collaboration and total publications in a specific scientific field are important determinants of citation impact among all nations. Yet, specialisation in particular scientific fields seems significantly more important in the Global South than in the Global North. We propose possible explanations for the patterns found and derive some policy implications.

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Analysts are rapidly developing methods to map publications to SDGs in the face of policy demands. However, as reported by Armitage et al. (2020), a high degree of inconsistency is found when comparing the bibliometric corpora obtained with different approaches. These inconsistencies are not due to minor technical issues, but instead they represent different interpretations of SDGs. Given the variety of understandings regarding the relationship between research and SDGs, we propose that bibliometrics analysts should not assume that there is one single, preferred or consensus way of mapping SDGs to publications. We propose instead that, since different stakeholders have contrasting views about the relationships between science and SDGs, the contribution of bibliometrics should be to provide a plural landscape for stakeholders to explore their own views. We describe here the beta-version of an interactive platform that allows stakeholders to scrutinise in a global map of science the clusters potentially related to SDGs.