Reflecting on GIS-related research in South Africa: 1980–2012

Abstract

Since the early 1980s, geographic information systems (GIS) have increasingly been applied in research or used to support research in South Africa. The nature and extent of such research has not been investigated, and this paper seeks to address this hiatus. A number of academic databases were consulted to identify South African authored peer-reviewed academic papers and postgraduate dissertations referring to GIS in the title, keywords or abstract. A total of 468 papers and 238 dissertations were identified and analysed for temporal and spatial trends, fields of application and methods and techniques in GIS-related research. This paper shows that the use of GIS as a research technique in South African has increased considerably since the mid-1990s, reflected by continuing growth in peer-reviewed articles, but a decrease in postgraduate writings since 2005. Possible reasons for the observed trends are suggested.

Keywords:

• GIS-related research
• Geographic Information Systems
• South Africa

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments as well as Ms. Erika Rood for accessing information from other tertiary institutions.

Notes

^1. We use the term ‘GIS-related’ to include publications researching GIS as well as using GIS in support of other research, and the term ‘research writings’ to include peer-reviewed journal articles and graduate dissertations.

^2. For international readers: Afrikaans is the second academic language of South Africa, and it was useful that GIS has the same meaning in Afrikaans as in English.

^3. These institutions were similar to former polytechnics of the UK, with a stronger focus on technical training for the workplace.

^4. An article equivalent or unit is a term developed in South Africa to reward the contributions of individual authors to multiple-authored papers, by means of a subsidy to higher education institutions as outlined in the Funding Framework of the National Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) in South Africa (Government Gazette, No 25824 of 9 December 2003). The government subsidy for research output is linked to an annual unit value including a monetary value per unit for a peer-reviewed article (according to a DHET-approved list of journals). This unit value is apportioned to the authors' institution according to the article equivalent earned by each author. If an article has a single author, it represents one article equivalent for that author, and the institution receives the full subsidy, whereas for three authors from different institutions, each author earns one-third of an article equivalent, and one-third of the unit value subsidy is paid to each institution.

^5. No evidence could be found to explain this weak performance, indicating the need for further research.