A nugget in the City of Gold

The University of Johannesburg’s share of South African scholarship has grown consistently for nearly a decade. Research Africa takes a closer look at what’s behind this rise.

In 2006, when the University of Johannesburg was created from the merger of Rand Afrikaans University, the Technikon Witwatersrand and the Soweto and East Rand campuses of Vista University, its nascent faculty of engineering did little research.

Today, the engineering faculty accounts for a quarter of the university’s total research output—the largest share of any discipline. And that’s a lot. UJ’s total research output, according to the Department of Higher Education and Training’s latest data, was the country’s fifth largest in 2017, overtaking the University of Cape Town in that year.