A bibliometric analysis of innovation-related research of the former Soviet Union five ''Stans'': are there distinct patterns?

Master Thesis in Master in Information Engineering 2015/2016 A bibliometric analysis of innovation-related research of the former Soviet Union five ‘‘Stans’’: are there distinct patterns? Sohibjon Tuychiev Supervisor: Aurora A.C. Teixeira June 2016 i Acknowledgements I would first like to express my sincere gratitude to my advisor Professor Aurora Amélia Castro Teixeira of the Faculty of Engineering of University of Porto for the continuous support and for her patience, motivation, and immense knowledge. She steered me in the right the direction whenever she thought I needed it. The door to Prof. Teixeira office was always open whenever I had a question about my research. I would like to acknowledge my sincere thanks to Faculty of Engineering of University of Porto for providing me with all the necessary facilities for the research. Also, I take this opportunity to express gratitude to Director of this master degree António Pedro Rodrigues Aguiar and to all of the Department members for their help and support. Finally, I must express my very profound gratitude to my parents, wife, and my sweet daughter and for myself for providing me with unfailing support and continuous encouragement. This accomplishment would not have been possible without all of us. Sohibjon Tuychiev ii Abstract The present study provides a general bibliometric overview of the last thirty years (1987June 2016) of the innovation research produced on the former Soviet Union ‘Five stans’. Central Asia related research has been marked by a steady growth with increasing publications. However, innovation related studies on Central Asia only very recently received some attention by the scientific community. Of the 172 studies considered, 84% were published after 2011. In this sense we might considered an emergent field of research. These studies focused mainly on Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan are still underexplored in this regard. Moreover, quite few studies within innovation of the ‘Five Stans’ focused on industries (15% of the total). These latter refer mainly to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Interestingly, albeit unfortunate, almost seldom focused on core industries where these countries are specialized (e.g., Oil, Gas, Banking or Automobile). Thus, in order to inform public policy authorities on innovation related matters further studies focusing on industries are on great demand. The research produced was published in rather low visible and ranked journals, outside the innovation core journals. By far Irrigation and Drainage, a journal devoted to the science and art of irrigation, drainage and flood management, is the most important outlet publishing the studies on innovation in the ‘Five Stans’, comprising 37% of the papers published. The highest impact journals publishing innovation related research in the ‘Five Stans’ include Health Affairs, Social Science and Medicine, and Waste Management Journal. However, these journals lay outside the core innovation area/journals. Summing up, our analysis showed that studies related to innovation on the ‘Five Stans’ are scarce, although rapidly emerging, and lack scientific influence and visibility, failing to address practical issues regarding ‘Five Stans’ economic specialization. Keywords: Bibliometrics; Innovation; Central Asia; Five Stans JEL-Codes: K11; O34. iii Index of Contents Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................ i Abstract ............................................................................................................................. ii Index of Tables ................................................................................................................ iv Index of Figures ................................................................................................................ v 1. Introduction ............................................................................................................... 1 2. A literature review based on bibliometrics ................................................................... 4 2.1. Studies that analyze the scientific production over time of countries and regions ............ 4 2.1.1. Worldwide countries and regions ................................................................................ 4 2.1.2. Bibliometric studies that focus on the scientific production of Central Asia countries/regions ................................................................................................................... 7 2.2. Studies that analyze the scientific production regarding Innovation ................................. 9 2.3. Filling the gap: a bibliometric account of the Five Stans on Innovation studies ............. 11 3. Methodology ............................................................................................................... 13 3.1. Initial considerations ........................................................................................................ 13 3.2. Search procedures ............................................................................................................ 13 3.2.1. Scopus ....................................................................................................................... 13 3.2.2. Web of Science ......................................................................................................... 15 3.3. Procedures for getting a workable bibliometric database (NETDATA) .......................... 15 4. Empirical Results ........................................................................................................ 17 4.1. Initial considerations ........................................................................................................ 17 4.2. Evolution of publications on innovation research in Central Asia ................................... 17 4.3. Most prolific authors ........................................................................................................ 19 4.4. Top journals and research areas in innovation on five “stans” ........................................ 20 4.5. Main topic and industry analyzed .................................................................................... 24 5. Conclusions ................................................................................................................. 26 5.1. Main results and contribution ........................................................................................... 26 5.2. Limitations and avenues for future research .................................................................... 27 iv Index of Tables Table 1. Synthesis of studies that analyzed the scientific production of given areas using bibliometrics.................................................................................................................................. 7 Table 2. Most ten prolific authors ............................................................................................... 19 Table 3. Top country and affiliation of authors developing research on five “stans”. ................ 20 Table 4. Most influential journals in innovation research on five “stans .................................... 22 Table 5. Most influential journals in innovation research on five “stans” .................................. 23 Table 6. List of five “stans” sorted by industry and frequent topic of research .......................... 25 v Index of Figures Figure 1. Number of publications on innovation related research ............................................. 10 Figure 2. Annual number of studies on innovation in the five "stans" ....................................... 17 Figure 3. Evolution of innovation related research vis a vis all Science in Central Asia (annual growth rate, %) ............................................................................................................ 18 Figure 4. Innovation related research in Central Asia vis-à-vis worldwide innovation (annual growth rate, %) ............................................................................................................ 18 Figure 5. Most frequently publishing journals in the innovation related literature on the Central Asia. ............................................................................................................................. 21 Figure 6. Top research areas (in percentage of total papers)....................................................... 24 1 1. Introduction Innovation is one of the most significant topics of research since the late 20th century (Sarwar & Hassan, 2015). Innovation can be defined as the application of new ideas for the products, processes, or other aspects of the activities of an organization that lead to increased value and meet the needs and desires of consumers (Cancino, Merigo, & Palacios-Marques, 2015). It is therefore a fundamental issue for the development of a country’s economy (Zhu & Guan, 2012). Interesting bibliometrics accounts, involving the statistical analyses of quantitative aspects of scientific publications (Broadus, 1987) have emerged in the last few years (Cancino et al., 2015).Some authors have developed bibliometric analyses in a wide range of fields: Management (Podsakoff, MacKenzie, Podsakoff, & Bachrach, 2008), Entrepreneurship (Landström, Harirchi, & Åström, 2012) ,Finance (Merigó & Yang, 2014), Engineering (Guan & Ma, 2007; Wang, Yang, Yanga, Long, & Li, 2014), Medicine (Betancourt & Silvente, 2014; Singh, Handa, Kumar , & Singh, 2016). Innovation related research is becoming very significant during the last decades due to the strong development of research and technology worldwide (Owen, 2014). In the field of innovation the bibliometric exercises encompass various studies (Toivanen & Ponomariov, 2011; Seol & Park, 2008; Werker, 2006). As mentioned, there are a few studies on Innovation research that resort to bibliometrics, but their focus is not on assessing and analyzing of ‘Five stans’. Rather, their main contribution centered on empirically analyzing the structure and the key components of the African regional innovation systems, European regional innovation policy in the light of the scientific findings. In addition, their analysis on innovation related research performed mostly in advanced countries (e.g. China, Germany, USA etc.). As such, it also appears that the applicability of bibliometric techniques to the study of innovation is quite well established (Teixeira, 2013). Accordingly, bibliometrics helps to establish and reflect the innovation capability of a country, as a tool for the analysis of the scientific production of a country (Seol & Park, 2008). The results of this analysis might be used for many purposes, for example, to determine the patterns and latest innovation used or invented among specific countries, evolution of publications on innovation, citations and journal coverage with the hope to provide an insight in to the dynamics of the Innovation. Therefore we can use this knowledge for further innovative activities of the countries. 2 Despite the interesting results the above mentioned studies achieved, such analyses were focused mainly Western and well developed countries. To the best of our knowledge no such studies on the scientific production on innovation have been focused on Central Asia countries. This is unfortunate as Central Asia countries’ development rely substantially on their innovation capability both at firm and research levels (Sakata, et al., 2012). Central Asia is the core region of the Asian continent which has no outlet to the ocean region (Wang, et al., 2015). It is sometimes referred to as Middle Asia and includes Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, also known as the ‘five stans’ (Wang, et al., 2015). It is a region rich in natural resources, including oil and gas, and water, and has a surprising variety of animals and plants (ADB, 2010). 1 Inclusively, all countries in Central Asia have a long tradition in cotton cultivation (Rho, 2015). The reform of the Soviet Union (or USSR - Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) summoned deep changes in the scientific research of Commonwealth of Independent States countries (further, the CIS), 2 including those from Central Asia (Alimov, 2004). Indeed, the separated budget devoted to research decreased invariably with scientists experiencing difficulties on undertaking their research (Alimov, 2004). Moreover, following by disintegration of the USSR, international scientific publications were continued to be written in Russian language. Notwithstanding, from 1991 herein a rapid shift occurred with a substantial number of studies being written in English language (Kirchik, Gingras, & Larivière, 2012). The few bibliometric studies that exist focusing on Central Asia document a decrease in the scientific publications and lower international visibility of Central Asia between 1992 and 1999 (Wang, et al., 2015; Hamidov, Balla , & Helming, 2014; Purnell & Reuters, 2013). Although in the period of 1992 to 1999 research outputs have decreased, from then on it might had increased a lot. Evidence in this regard, however, is missing for the most recent period. Extant studies on Central Asia, analyzed fields such as: Agricultural (Hamidov, Balla , & Helming, 2014), Engineering (Purnell & Reuters, 2013), Science (Wang, et al., 2015; Karamourzov, 2012). However, no study exists on the research production in the 1 The Asian Development Bank (ADB) is a regional development bank established on 22 August 1966 to facilitate economic development of countries in Asia. 2 CIS was a regional organization formed during the breakup of the Soviet Union, whose participating countries are some former Soviet Republics. 3 ‘Five Stans’ regarding the innovation field. It would be illuminating to assess the scientific performance of these countries in the innovation area because they are developing countries and in fact, nowadays these countries face genuine obstacles for innovation and this is precisely why they remain underdeveloped (Aubert, 2005). This context is important for Central Asia as their development reliable on innovation (Aubert, 2005). However, they are attempting to channel the proceeds into research and innovation in order to provide a sustainable future for their future generations (Purnell & Reuters, 2013). We expect that the analysis of innovation research will provide some clues about real life innovation patterns and economic specialization of the countries in study. Resorting to bibliometric techniques, the present dissertation aims at responding to the following main questions: 1) How do scientific publications on Innovation regarding the Five Stans evolved in the last decades? 2) Are there any distinctive pattern of research among these countries that might be associated with their economic profiles/industrial specialization? In terms of structure, the dissertation is organized as follows. Section 2 presents a literature review on bibliometrics analyses focusing regions and countries. The methodology used and the sources of the data are described in Section 3. Section 4 presents the empirical results followed by a conclusion in Section 5. 10 Miyazaki (2011) discussed embedded software related research activities in Asian countries regarding innovation focusing on outputs of scientific research for years 20022006, where main selected Asian countries were China, India, Japan, Korea, Singapore and Taiwan. Similarly, (Haslam, Jupesta, & Parayil, 2012) also focused to three Asian key car-manufacturing countries, such as, Japan, Korea and China. They use literature review and bibliometricsand patent analysis to analyze fuel cell vehicle technology and suggest how the particular innovation systems and policies adopted in these countries have influenced the development of fuel cell vehicle. Figure 1. Number of publications on innovation related research Source: Scopus, data gathered in 15 of May 2016. Paper by Seol & Park (2008) deals with the concept of knowledge flow in innovation studies in Korea where their main contribution consist of investigation of the knowledge sources of Korean innovation studies using citation analysis, based on a Korean database during 1993–2004. However, in conclusion they mentioned about not being sure what stages the overall level of Korean innovation studies are currently at. Toivanen & Ponomariov (2011) organized a study to investigate the collaborative structure of the African innovation systems research. Their main approach includes to empirically identifying clusters of scientific activity on the African continent as well as the structure of the collaborative linkages between them. Later, Sakata et al. (2012) used bibliometrics for journal information analysis, citation network analysis to create the academic landscape in service innovation. Their result shows that there are two main groups of research relating to service innovation have 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 11 been growing rapidly in recent years: where one consist of fields such as health and medical care, IT and Web and the others are management, ecosystem. In addition, they showed that the research competencies of Asian countries lags behind that of the US and European Union. Similarly, other authors have analyzed service innovation research where their works also based on citation network analysis (Zhu & Guan, 2012). However, according to their result there are were more researchers who did investigation about service innovation in the category of Business and Economics, Engineering, Management Science than those in other categories. As we see none of these studies analyzed or focused on region under this study. Also Aubert, (2005) mentioned in his research of not much of experiences accumulated in the field of innovation policy is directly applicable to developing countries. Verily, limited research has been conducted to sort out innovation approach specific to ‘Five stans’. Therefore, there is a need on research about such area adapted to the needs and capabilities of ‘Five stans’. Respectively, taking benefit from this, in this study, we choose Central Asia as a region consists of five developing countries where research in the field is indeed needed. The research described in this paper was motivated by, and seeks to address these important issues. 2.3. Filling the gap: a bibliometric account of the Five Stans on Innovation studies As such, there are already some evidences certainly appears to be a high level of activity in Innovation research in the literature. However, there does not appear to have been a similar level of interest in using these tools for analyzing research in Central Asia. Have been found that research related innovation none studies devoted to reviewing and examining such publications. Thus, the present study aims to overcome this gap by focusing on Central Asia centering research to Innovation-related publications. It also would be useful to see if there are distinct patterns between them, because after independence each “stans” developed within different statistical flow (Suleymenov et al., 2011). Previous recent study on Central Asia has analyzed the research publications on Central Asia from 1990 to 2014 based on Global Science (Wang, et al., 2015). In this study, we explore same period with different databases and focusing only on specific research filed like Innovation. This approach distinguishes our study from all previous empirical research and in the present study, we resort to a similar methodology of these later 12 studies, namely by categorizing an area of research (Innovation) but focusing on a rather unexplored context, the Central Asia related research. Respectively, bibliometric analyses, content analyses of publication were applied for this study, along with various above mentioned works. In spite of working with few publication of bibliographic material, it has been excellently analyzed and it helped to draw an accurate conclusion and understand the state of research up to now. 13 3. Methodology 3.1. Initial considerations Until 2004, the Web of Science (WoS) was the only international and multidisciplinary database available to obtain the literature of technology, science, medicine and other fields. Nowadays, there is another powerful database controls a wide range of refereed information. In 2004 Elsevier introduced Scopus which is become a good replacement (Vieira & Gomes, 2009). WoS includes 12,000 of the highest impact journals worldwide and of over 150,000 conference proceedings, while Scopus has a scope of approximately 19,500 peer-reviewed journals and more than 4.6 million conference proceedings. Accordingly, two powerful databases control a wide range of refereed information; the WoS (created by Thomson-Reuters) and Scopus (created by Elsevier). Thus, our systematic database search was conducted using the two above mentioned databases. We built our database within search on 9 of June, 2016 based on Scopus and ISI Web of Science. Each data were retrieved in CSV format. The search strategies from two different sources used to retrieve the data were as follows. 3.2. Search procedures 3.2.1. Scopus 1. The search criteria performed using the executed query TITLE-ABS-KEY (‘‘innovation’’) AND TITLE-ABS-KEY (‘‘Central Asia’’) considering all type and up to present documents within checking every subject areas (Life Sciences, Health Sciences, Physical Sciences and Social Sciences) . Total 74 publications appeared in a result to extract. 2. On the other hand, we carried a search within TITLE-ABS-KEY (Kazakhstan) AND TITLE-ABS-KEY (Innovation), TITLE-ABS-KEY (Uzbekistan) AND TITLE-ABS-KEY (Innovation), TITLE-ABS-KEY (Tajikistan) AND TITLE-ABS-KEY (Innovation), TITLEABS-KEY (Kyrgyzstan) AND TITLE-ABS-KEY (Innovation) and TITLE-ABS-KEY (Turkmenistan) AND TITLE-ABS-KEY (Innovation). Generally, collected 160 documents regarding on Kazakhstan, 35 on Uzbekistan; 11 on Tajikistan, 8 on Kyrgyzstan and 10 on Turkmenistan. 14 3. Finally, we repeated above two search strategy, but instead of Innovation term Technical change and Technological change keywords were used as synonyms. TITLE-ABS-KEY (‘‘technical change ’’) AND TITLE-ABS-KEY (‘‘Central Asia’’) and TITLE-ABS-KEY (‘‘technological change’’) AND TITLE-ABS-KEY (‘‘Central Asia’’). Unfortunately we could not find related data. Also search followed within TITLEABS-KEY (‘‘technical change’’) AND TITLE-ABS-KEY (‘‘Kazakhstan’’) and TITLEABS-KEY (‘‘technological change’’) AND TITLE-ABS-KEY (‘‘Kazakhstan’’). Respectively, same search conducted for rest countries where found out 3 papers related to Kazakhstan, 1 on Uzbekistan and 1 on Turkmenistan. Regarding to Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan no papers found within the search date In this way, 303 related studies extracted from Scopus. However, this data included various documents which may not relate to present study. Extracted data were passed to procedures of analyzing relevant papers within the following criteria:  Repetition  Document type  Language (only English studies were considered)  ‘Five stans’ related studies The distribution of papers per repetition and document types is as follows: Duplicate papers of 33 (10.8 % out of 303 papers) and 2 unknown literatures sorted out and delated. The rest of 268 publications were consist of Conference Paper (26; 9.6 %), Article (211; 78.4 %), Review (10; 3.4 %), and Book Chapters (21; 9.3 %). From remaining data 155 retrieved studies as none related in the field with the base that most studies were analyzing ‘Five stans’ on topic different than innovation where later wecategorized them as studies related to: different regions than ‘Five stans’ (30; 17.9%) and different field than Innovation (125; 82.1%). Thus, from Scopus we selected only 113 (37.3% out of 303 papers) Net publications to extract the information for examining the current progress of Innovation related research in Central Asia. 15 3.2.2. Web of Science During the same time period, we carried out a similar search, which is available through WoS. Our inquiry searched for all the articles published in a broad range of journals within search keywords TOPIC (“innovation”) AND … TOPIC (“Central Asia”): 44 documents were obtained; … TOPIC (“Kazakhstan”): 124 documents were obtained; … TOPIC (“Uzbekistan”): 18 documents were obtained; … TOPIC (“Tajikistan”): 9 documents were obtained; … TOPIC (“Kirgizstan”) 4 documents were obtained; … TOPIC (“Turkmenistan”) 6 documents were obtained. Succeeding search with replacing keyword “innovation “ with “technological change” and “technical change” for every above conducted search queries found only 2 publications regarding to “technological change” AND “Kazakhstan”. Regarding Central Asia and other ‘Five stans’ no data captured within the result. A set of 207 preliminary papers were then extracted for subject area to exclude irrelevant publications. Sum of 16 (7.3%) duplicate papers delated where remaining 191 papers broke down based on document type. In the data, only 151 (79%) articles and reviews, 25(13%) proceedings and 15(7.8%) conference Papers were nominated as eligible data. However, from 191 papers 109(57%) of them considered as irrelevant and later ejected. Decisively, 82 (43% out of 207) articles and review were selected as a Net data from WoS. Combining final made dataset from two sources (Scopus and WoS) faced 23 matched papers and ruled out that in total set of 172 publications (NETDATA) selected for analyzing of present study. 3.3. Procedures for getting a workable bibliometric database (NETDATA) Next, generated data was categorized and analyzed by: author, journal, country, industry, research area and topic. Primarily, we analyzed the evolution of publications related innovation in Central Asia based on the number published each year. 16 Second, the analysis process began with the name of the authors recovered in the selected publication records. We performed delamination processes using software MS Excel (HOME-TEXT TO COLUMNS) where “comma” was as delimiter between each author’s names. Later, we sorted out separate columns with list of the individual authors’ names which then we merged them all in one column. This column ordered out with alphabetical list of the authors’ names (DATA-SORT). Reordered list of authors checked for repeated authors name using specific technique (HOME-CONDITIONAL FORMATTING-HIGHLIGHT CELLS RULES-DUPLICATE VALUES) in order to find out top frequent authors in the field. In some cases, the author’s names were duplicated with a slight difference. Therefore, we developed a manual overview of the whole list of author’s names; however it was quite possible to check each data attentively as existing database for our study is not quite big. Thus, the top authors were fused directly from the list. Finally, we analyzed most prolific authors within following criteria: affiliation, country, core research area, number of publication in overall based on both database, number of citations, h-index. Based on this analyses also top country and affiliation of authors were detected. Also, same strategy applied for analyzing top journals within area in Central Asia. Some repeated journals in both databases highlighted and check for ranking . We found out most frequently repeated journals within the number of publications. Later to find out top journal we compared with impact factor of each journal and accordingly, sorted out the leading journal within innovation related research in Central Asia. In addition, according this information also frequent research area separated within study. Finally, the study processed analyzing industry and topic of the related studies. Based on abstract we retrieved information regarding the industry and topic of each study. Later, this result was used to analyze the matching between the industries analyzed and the patterns of economic specialization of the ‘Five stans’. 17 4. Empirical Results 4.1. Initial considerations As mentioned in the previous section, we used 172 publication recordsto assess the current progress of Innovation research in Former Soviet Union five "stans'. This section presents the results of the paper. First, the study analyses the publication evolution of innovation research in Central Asia during the last thirty years (1987June 2016).. Next, the article sorts out the most top research areas, industries, countries, topics and contribution of leading authors and influential journals based on their h-index and impact factors within innovation research according to Scopus and ISI Web of Science and compares the results obtained with previous studies. 4.2. Evolution of publications on innovation research in Central Asia Over the last thirty years, 172 documents have been published on innovation research on the ‘Five stans’. Figure 2 presents the evolution of the number of papers published annually involving innovation. Of the 172 studies considered, 84% were published after 2011. It is evident that most of the research has published quite recently. Figure 2. Annual number of studies on innovation in the five "stans" Source: Scopus and Web of Science, 9 of June, 2016 In order to see the effective and relative growth of the field, Figure 3 presents the evolution of innovation research on the ‘Five stans’ comparing it with studies published on these countries in the science overall. The number of innovation research is quite 18 small comparing to the papers that exist in science targeting on Central Asia topic; however despite a very small number of publications shown in figure, last years the weights increased a lot. Barely, no one was really interested to target their analysis on Central Asia innovation before 2011, but after the number of papers increased a lot in absolute and relative (vis a vis Science) terms. Figure 3. Evolution of innovation related research vis a vis all Science in Central Asia (annual growth rate, %) Source: Scopus and Web of Science, 9 of June, 2016 Comparing to worldwide innovation related research the picture is similar (Figure 4). Figure 4. Innovation related research in Central Asia vis-à-vis worldwide innovation (annual growth rate, %) Source: Scopus and Web of Science, 9 of June, 2016 19 4.3. Most prolific authors The analyzed listed 284 authors, among whom 256 (76 %) had produced only by one paper, however, considering in average each paper had at least 3 authors about 256/3 papers had produced. A total of 76 (90 %) had produced ≥ 2 papers. Thus 10 most prolific authors altogether developed 38 papers, accounting for 5 % of cumulative publications. Among these top authors, 9 were from Kazakhstan and only one was from Germany. The three most prolific authors were Aubakirova Gulnar from Karaganda State Technical University, Kazakhstan, Mukhtarova Karlygash and Zhuparova Aziza from Al Farabi Kazakh National University, Kazakhstan with 6, 5 and 5 publications respectively (Table 2). Table 2. Most ten prolific authors Authors Research Area Affiliation No. publicatio ns in the field No. publicat ions in overall Citations hindex Anna Hornidge Social Sciences Universitat Bonn 3 20 79 6 Shuakhbay Zamanbekov Biochemistry Kazakh State Women's Pedagogical University 4 5 10 2 Aziza Zhuparova Economics Al Farabi Kazakh National University 5 8 2 1 Karlygash Mukhtarova Multidisciplinary Al Farabi Kazakh National University 5 3 2 1 Nurzhan Alzhanova Economics Almaty Management University 4 6 1 1 Rimma Sagiyeva Social Sciences Al Farabi Kazakh National University 3 2 1 1 Gulnar Aubakirova Economics Karaganda State Technical University 6 3 0 - Rauan Danabayeva Business Management Al Farabi Kazakh National University 3 4 0 - Alla Kireyeva Economics Institute of Economics of the Ministry Education and Science 3 1 0 - Aygerim Abeldanova Social Sciences Turar Ryskulov New Economic University 2 2 0 - Source: Scopus Sci Verse, 10 of June, 2016 Considering the total citations and h-index comprehensively, Hornidge Anna from University of Bonn, Germany, Zamanbekov Shuakhbay from Kazakh State Women's Pedagogical University, Kazakhstan and Aziza Zhuparova from Al Farabi Kazakh National University, Kazakhstan were leading in this review. As for Hornidge, he is a German researcher within Social Science area where he published in overall 20 papers and was cited 79 times by 54 documents 26 5. Conclusions 5.1. Main results and contribution The article provides a general bibliometric overview of innovation research on former Soviet Union ‘Five stans’, over a period of almost thirty years (1987-2016). Central Asia research was marked by steady growth with a rapid increasing in publications on innovation in the last four years. A total of 172 papers were published in 49 distinct journals, with 70 papers published in journals indexed in Web of Science and 102 in Scopus. Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan are the ones attracting more research on Innovation. Although, research collaboration was quite frequent within the ‘Five stans’, Germany stood as the main foreign collaborator in the field. In terms of authors, countries and affiliations, of the top most prolific authors, nine were from Kazakhstan and one from Germany. Kazakhs State University, Kazakh Economic University and Karaganda State Technical University emerged as the most productive studying innovation in the ‘Five stans’. The study also presents a journal analysis with a list of the 10 most frequent journals in the field based on their number of publication, such as Irrigation and Drainage, Actual Problems of Economics, Life Science Journal and Middle East Journal of Scientific Research. These, however, have in general low scientific impact and visibility in their corresponding area. Moreover, the very few high impact journals that published research on innovation in the ‘Five stans’, including Health Affairs, Social Science and Medicine and Waste Management Journals, fell outside innovation core area. When comparing the results with the leading innovation journals, the specialized ones tend to publish more studies in the field while the leading ones publish less but received more cites and high impact factor. This result is quite logical because the leading journals are very selective regarding the articles published in the journal. Thus, top leading innovation worldwide journals are not interested in publishing ‘Five stans’ related research on innovation. Therefore, most publications managed to be published but in very far from core field journals rather than native ones. Summing up, innovation related research in the ‘Five stans’ is not receiving a lot of attention by the scientific community, despite its recent upsurge. 27 5.2. Limitations and avenues for future research When developing bibliometric analysis, some limitations occurred due to the specific nature of the research in the certain region. As we know Central Asia is former Soviet Union region and Russian is mostly used language concerning research. It might be a limitation that we only concerned our research only within English language, however while searching related papers on Google and Google Scholars itself, we did not face as much papers even within Russian language. As usual, further studies in this direction are needed in order to obtain more general view of the state of the art in this field. This article has considered innovation related studies based on the Scopus and ISI Web of Science databases. However, future works should be developed by retrieving some other databases. Nevertheless, this bibliometric study used indispensable research tool to get a global overview of the current state of innovation related research in Central Asia. In spite of the limitation, this paper provided a good starting point to understand the evolution of research in the field and might serve as a potential basis for future research. 28 References Abramo, G., D’Angelo, C. A., & Caprasecca, A. (2008). 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