A comparative study of the coverage of African journals in Web of Science, Scopus, and CrossRef

Toluwase Victor Asubiaro and Sodiq Onaolapo

Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, 2023, vol. 74, issue 7, 745-758

Abstract: This is the first study that evaluated the coverage of journals from Africa in Web of Science, Scopus, and CrossRef. A list of active journals published in each of the 55 African countries was compiled from Ulrich's periodicals directory and African Journals Online (AJOL) website. Journal master lists for Web of Science, Scopus, and CrossRef were searched for the African journals. A total of 2,229 unique active African journals were identified from Ulrich (N = 2,117, 95.0%) and AJOL (N = 243, 10.9%) after removing duplicates. The volume of African journals in Web of Science and Scopus databases is 7.4% (N = 166) and 7.8% (N = 174), respectively, compared to the 45.6% (N = 1,017) covered in CrossRef. While making up only 17.% of all the African journals, South African journals had the best coverage in the two most authoritative databases, accounting for 73.5% and 62.1% of all the African journals in Web of Science and Scopus, respectively. In contrast, Nigeria published 44.5% of all the African journals. The distribution of the African journals is biased in favor of Medical, Life and Health Sciences and Humanities and the Arts in the three databases. The low representation of African journals in CrossRef, a free indexing infrastructure that could be harnessed for building an African‐centric research indexing database, is concerning.

Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24758

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:jinfst:v:74:y:2023:i:7:p:745-758

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=2330-1635

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology from Association for Information Science & Technology
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().