A bibliometric study on the research outcome of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa.

Background: Publication is one of the quantitative measures of countries' contribution to research and innovation. This paper attempts to understand the publication related information of the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa). Methods: Detailed analysis of publications on the basis of collaboration, research area, number of publications, percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) spent on research, and citation is presented in the paper. An attempt is also made to understand the relations between each of the parameters and the overall performance of the country. Results: Times Higher Education global ranking is considered as a measure to validate the claims of this paper. This study shows that among the BRICS nations, China with the highest percentage of GDP spent on research has also the highest number of researchers and publication output whereas South Africa excels in terms of number of international collaborative publications and publications in high impact journals. This article has highlighted the distribution of publications as per the subject area with India leading in the area of Computer Science.  Discussion: Results showed a strong relationship between each of the parameters discussed on the research performance of a country.