A Study of the Scientific Publications by Afghan Researchers Indexed in the Scopus Database before the Taliban Resurgence with an Emphasis on Co-authorship Relations

Sharing resources and facilities, leveraging each other's experiences, and enabling interdisciplinary research are the benefits of co-authorship. The aim of this study was to investigate the co-authorship status of the scientific productions by Afghan researchers to plan the expansion of collaboration and employment of these researchers in migration destination countries, especially Iran.

This quantitative study examined 2732 articles indexed in Scopus with at least one Afghan author from the beginning of indexing in Scopus to September 2021. Statistical methods and analysis of the co-authorship network were used to analyze the data, via Python 3 language and VOSviewer 1.6.17 and Gephi 0.9.2.

The most scientific outputs of Afghan researchers are devoted to the writings of the medical field with 40.41%. The next scientific fields with a large difference are social sciences (15.67%), biological sciences (11.16%), and engineering (10.94%), respectively. The co-authorship network of Afghan researchers and their colleagues consisted of 13,379 nodes (researchers) and 2,511,879 weighted edges (co-author relationships). Afghan researchers collaborated most frequently with researchers from the United States. Iran, despite its geographic and cultural proximity, ranks fourth among its colleagues. America is followed by England and India.

Co-authorship varies among researchers in different scientific fields. The median number of authors of each article in dentistry, biochemistry and other majors close to medicine and basic sciences was about three times that of theoretical majors such as social sciences, arts and humanities.