A Bibliometric Analysis of the Scientific Literature on African Refugees

Abstract

Millions of people are displaced every year inAfrican countries such as Burundi, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, and Somalia due to increasing number of conflicts and lack of fundamental human rights such as food and safety. There are many research studies focused on the African refugee crisis with a special emphasize on physical and psychological consequences of migration. The purpose of this current study is to examine the scientific literature indexed in Scopus from 2001 and 2015 in order to present the trends on African refugees. Bibliometric data extracted from 826 documents and analyzed to present data on various variables including but not limited to type and annual distribution of documents, country of origins, affiliations of authors, most productive authors, subject domains, and the top journals publishing research on African refugees. It is hoped that the results of this study will expose the depth of research on this specific refugee population and therefore will enlighten the future projects involving any other refugee populations. Although Scopus database does not contain all the research on the chosen population, it samples a variety of published works and it clearly presents the evolution of the topic for the last two decades.