Research Contributions of SAARC Countries in Social Science: A Bibliometric Study

SCI mago is the Journal and Country Ranking database available freely on the internet. We have accessed the required data from 2008 to 2017 from this database and evaluated the research productivity of SAARC countries and citations in the field of social science subject. This article studied SAARC countries publications, citations, citations per document, self-citations and degree of self - citations. The study revealed that on an average 6054 articles are published during the study period. India is the only country to publish more than the average citations publications during the ten years of study. India received 78% of citations and stood 1st rank in the study, whereas Pakistan and Bangladesh got 8% and 6% citations and stood 2nd and 3rd rank. Nepal got highest 76% of citations per document and stood 1st rank among the SAARC countries in the last ten years from 2008 to 2017. Further, it is found that the degree of self-citation is 0.24, which is very lowest. Since all the SAARC countries are underdeveloped so it is suggested that the government of SAARC countries has to encourage more and more publications, then only their socio-economic level may increase. Individuals, as well as organisations, should take more interest to publish their research articles in high impact journals both at national and international level.