A Bibliometric Analysis of Engineering Research Productivity of Nigerian Universities from 2010 to 2022: Trends, Hotspots, and Future Outlook

Abstract

In this study, data of scholarly articles sourced from the Scopus® database were used to evaluate the performance of engineering-based research in Nigerian universities from 2010 to 2022. Analyses of the sourced data were carried out using VOSviewer®. These analyses via publication related to organization, country and author collaboration, citation counts of top scholarly articles and publication sources, and co-occurrence of author keyword were used to assess the engineering research productivity of the Universities. A total of 15083 scientific articles which translates to 1160 articles per year were published. Covenant University is the most productive University with 632 articles. Malaysia (1758 articles) and Tshwane University of Technology (South Africa) are the country and institution with the most research collaboration with Nigerian Universities. The most cited paper is the work of Alaneme K.K. (2015) with 170 citations. Engineering-based research publications are observed to be cited most in the Journal of Cleaner Production (5919 citations). Mechanical engineering is noticed to produce the highest number of publications followed by Civil Engineering. Hot topics are related to material development, renewable energy, machine learning, optimization techniques, modeling, and simulation studies. Future research (sustainable and novel materials, green building, machine learning, artificial intelligence, smart grid, COVID-19, renewable energy, etc.) is expected to agree with the fourth industrial revolution, circular economy, and sustainable development goals agenda. Conclusively, research funding and collaboration must be intensified, and local research outputs should be published in impactful journals to further improve the visibility and ranking of the researchers and the Universities.