Research productivity of gulf cooperation council (GCC) countries in science and social sciences

Objective: to investigate the research progress of gulf cooperation council countries in science and social sciences. methods: this study was conducted in the department of physiology,college of medicine,king saud university,riyadh,saudi arabia,from june 2014 to february 2015.all research documents related to the 1996-2013 period having an affiliation with gulf cooperation council countries,including saudi arabia,the united arab emirates,kuwait,qatar,bahrain and oman,were tracked. the main source for data-gathering was world association of universities,sci-mago journal and country ranking and web of science institute of scientific information (isi)thomson reuters. results: of the 544 institutions produced research papers,141(25.92%) were universities or degree-awarding institutes,372(68.38%) were research institutes and 31(5.7%) were institute of scientific information-indexed scientific journals. the number of degree awarding institutes were 68(48.23%) in saudi arabia,33(23.4%) in the united arab emirates and 12(8.51%) in qatar. the total number of publications contributed by the region was 133638 (mean � sd: 22273 � 26302.20); citable documents 127739 (mean � sd: 21289.83 �25241.22); self-citations 105,716 (mean � sd: 17619.33 � 23328.44); total citations 756141 (mean � sd: 126023.5 � 143260.95) and citations per documents 33.22 (mean � sd: 5.53 � 1.09).the overall and mean hirschindex was 513and 85.5� 35.39. conclusion: among gulf cooperation council countries,saudi arabia was the most productive country producing adequate number of research publications,citations and holding the highest hirsch index value. � 2016,pakistan medical association. all rights reserved.