Bibliometric analysis of income inequality in Africa

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of the study is to provide a bibliometric review of scientific articles published on “Income inequality in Africa” in order to understand the patterns of research on the topic and identify agendas for future research.

Design/methodology/approach

We conduct a bibliometric analysis on 459 research publications between 1993 and 2023 using the biblioshiny function of bibliometrix package of R-studio to map out and analyze the bibliometric data.

Findings

The findings from our analysis can be summarized in five points. Firstly, African researchers are underrepresented on a global scale and yet are dominant at institutional and author levels. Secondly, most dominant research has not being published in top 100 tanked economic journals. Thirdly, there is underrepresentation of females and white males in research output. Fourthly, there are weak author collaborations on the topic and currently the authors with higher collaborative partnerships tend to have more research output and higher citations. Lastly, we find that authors who include simple terms such as “Income inequality”, “Africa”, “poverty” and “economic growth” as keywords in their studies tend to have higher visibility.

Originality/value

This is first study to perform a bibliometric analysis for research on “Income inequality in Africa”.

Citation

Raimi, R. and Phiri, A. (2024), "Bibliometric analysis of income inequality in Africa", Journal of Economic and Administrative Sciences, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/JEAS-10-2023-0269