Research performance of Khalifa University of Science and Technology, Abu Dhabi

Purpose Khalifa University of Science and Technology (KU) is one of the prominent Universities in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), of the Government of Abu Dhabi. The new Khalifa University was re-constituted in the year 2017 by merging three higher education institutions in Abu Dhabi, the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology, Khalifa University of Science, Technology and Research and the Petroleum Institute. The objectives of these institutions and their research areas were entirely disparate in the pre-merger era and hence the evaluation of the research performance of its pre-merged entities in the past is vital for Khalifa University to plan for the future course of actions. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach This study analyzes and visualizes scholarly publications of Khalifa University of Science and Technology (KU) using SCOPUS data. There are various qualitative and quantitative methods to measure research performance. This study adopted citation analysis, one of the widely recognized quantitative metrics to measure the citation impact of scholarly publications. Findings Khalifa University leads in productivity compared to other UAE universities but the citation impact of its publications is less in comparison to United Arab Emirates University and New York University, Abu Dhabi in terms of citations per publication. The majority of KU publications are not highly cited. The majority of the KU publications (80 percent) received fewer citations and few papers (20 percent of the KU publications) attracted 80 percent of the total citations received for KU publications. Analysis results indicate that publishing in top-ranked journals would improve the chance of getting more citations. On average, eight percentage difference is seen in the h-index of KU authors when removing self-citations. Research limitations/implications The study considered only publications that are indexed in SCOPUS. It covered a limited set of sources as per the SCOPUS editorial policy. Most of the covered sources are journals and conference proceedings. Books’ data coverage in Citation Index is comparatively low, which may affect results regarding social sciences and humanities publications because book publication is more prominent in these subject areas. Khalifa University is a science and technology university, and the majority of its academic departments fall in science and technology domains. Even though there are few arts and humanities departments in the University, it will not affect the overall findings of the results of the analysis. Originality/value This study is original research conducted to study the impact of research publications of Khalifa University using Scopus data.