Takeaways from the Times Higher Education MENA Universities Summit
Over the last year the MENA (Middle East and Northern Africa) region has seen very exciting developments in terms of research growth. This was further established at the inaugural Times Higher Education MENA Universities Summit that was recently held in Doha, Qatar. M'hamed Aisati (Director Content & Analytics, Elsevier) was there to talk about Scopus content and the breadth of coverage in the region.
M'hamed’s presentation gave a broad overview of the interdisciplinary scientific information available in Scopus, while stressing the value of research metrics in order to assess efficiently ongoing research and current developments – an area where Scopus plays a key role given its breadth of content and focus on quality through content selection by the independent Content Selection and Advisory Board (CSAB).
M’hamed Aisati presenting about the Scopus Content Selection and Advisory Board
A proof of concept for a top-30 MENA ranking was also presented by Phil Baty (editor at large, Times Higher Education), considering all universities within a country in the MENA region (including international branch campuses, e.g. Texas A&M University at Qatar) and all articles, reviews and conference papers published in the period 2009-2013 in all subject disciplines. The purpose of this proof of concept ranking (which focused solely on citation score) was to trigger debate and engage stakeholders at the conference to further discuss and share their feedback - which was exactly what followed.
Phil Baty at the summit opening