Thread by @marcowenjones

[Thread] 1/ For #brismes2021 I did a survey of knowledge production on the Gulf, I analysed the top ranked 7000 google scholar hits to see what academic areas predominated. The below graph shows proportion of studies across Humanities, Natural science or Social Sciences

2/ Arts & Humanities is generally less common (perhaps in line with general fact these subjects tend to get cited less). Interesting to note that in Oman and Kuwait studies in the Natural Sciences & Medicine are ranked higher by Google Scholar. Below is a breakdown by discipline

3/ Health, Politics/Political Science, Energy & Environment, Accounting Business and Finance and Education are the top five disciplines (broadly speaking). As a side note, almost half the studies of Iraq related to the war. Even medical studies tended to focus on topics like PTSD

4/ Keyword analysis of 7000 abstracts on top ranked GS articles indicates that health, women, war (mostly related to Iraq), energy, oil and education are some of the most common terms. Further topical analysis would be useful.

5/ I also looked at case studies of Gulf countries in 9 different Middle East focused journals. As you can see, the fewest pertain to the UAE and Bahrain, the most to Iran and Iraq, placing UAE and Bahrain on the periphery of knowledge production in terms of ME area studies

6/ This is very formative. The plan is to analyse all case studies of Gulf countries across humanities and social sciences and do more fine grained analysis, and then to map sites (unis) of knowledge production and their outputs, as well as scholarly communities + gatekeepers

7/ Things like Google Scholar are interesting in terms of digital colonization of ME studies. They privilege the salience of knowledge based on proprietary algorithms , although we can assume dates, citations and 'quality' of citations play a role in ranking.

8/ Overall, preliminary analysis supports what many suspect of Gulf being dominated by studies involving energy and oil - certainly when non humanities and social sciences are considered. But education, health and business also remain salient. Watch this space #Brismes2021