SCIENTOMETRIC ANALYSIS OF ENGINEERING AND BUILT ENVIRONMENT PUBLICATIONS OUTPUT OF PUBLIC UNIVERSITIES

Globally, research publications output has become one of the yardsticks for ranking research institutions, universities, faculties, and departments. Notable bodies such as the Times Higher Education (THE), Centre for World University Rankings (CWUR), Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) and the Cybermetrics Lab collates and publish world university rankings yearly. The rankings are a result of rigorous evaluation of university performance based on predefined criteria such as research outputs, student enrollment, and graduate employability amongst others. As a result, these rankings have been adopted by relevant government agencies and authorities as one of the ways of evaluating the performance of universities in their domain. As one of the fields of study generating the highest rate of employment opportunities around the world, this study is aimed at analyzing and visualizing research publications within the Engineering and the Built Environment faculties of South African universities. A quantitative method was utilized to analyze the bibliometric datasets extracted from Scopus. The datasets are research publications output from 2018 – 2020. The results revealed the trend, citations, document sources, most-cited, and co-occurring keywords of research publications. It is recommended that relevant stakeholders responsible for the management of the higher education sector implement policies that will improve the research performance of universities in the country.