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

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. | INTRODUCTIONResearch indexing databases such as Web of Science, Scopus, MEDLINE, EMBASE, Dimensions, CrossRef, and Open Alex are searchable electronic collections of scholarly communications metadata. The research indexing databases are integral to the development of scholarly communication as they foster the evaluation, preservation, and dissemination of research findings. The research indexing databases can be categorized into two based on their policy on the assessment of information sources they index. The first category of research indexing databases curates all the sources that are available to them without any mechanism of assessment; examples include Google Scholar, Open Alex, and CrossRef. The second category of research indexing databases, such as Web of Science, MEDLINE, Scopus, and EMBASE have mechanisms for assessing sources before they are curated and are, therefore, usually more trusted and authoritative. The first category of research indexing databases are usually more exhaustive because they index more sources (

Exploring research quality and journal representation: A comparative study of African Journals Online, Web of Science, and Scopus

“…As English predominance is well-known in the academic publishing system, it is unsurprising that most journals in the master list publish in this language. Previous research has found similar results in all of the JIS: WoS and Scopus (Vera-Baceta et al,2019), AJOL (Asubiaro et al, 2023), and Ulrich (Morris, 2007). Results here show that although active journals covered by AJOL have doubled since the previous analysis (Asubiaro et al, 2023), the proportion of non-Anglophone journals remains low.…”

“…Recent studies that studied African coverage of different JIS empirically confirm the limited coverage of mainstream indexes (WoS and Scopus), although highlighting the possibilities of alternative bibliographic sources, like Crossref (Asubiaro et al, 2023). The study presented here tries to overcome some of the limitations of this previous work.…”

“…Based on its perceived objectivity, WoS and Scopus have been largely perceived as sources of journal authority (Lillis & Curry, 2010). However, its status has recently been contested due to its linguistic, geographical, and disciplinary biases (Archambault et al, 2006;Chavarro et al, 2017;Asubiaro et al, 2023). Moreover, in recent years, WoS and Scopus status has been contested by new JIS that support a more inclusive global research system -ex.…”

Global visibility of publications through Digital Object Identifiers

“…2 It is true that there are DOI registration agencies beyond Crossref . 3 However, Crossref is among the largest ones, providing millions of DOIs (Hendricks et al, 2020 ) and having a significant representation of publishers from developing countries (Asubiaro and Onaolapo, 2023 ). This is why restricting our analysis to Crossref provides reliable results for our analysis.…”

Sub-Saharan Africa's Biomedical Journal Coverage in Scholarly Databases: A comparison of Web of Science, Scopus, EMBASE, PubMed, African Index Medicus and AfricanJournals Online

“…Major global rankings and reports, including UNESCO's World Science Report, QS, and THE university rankings, and academic metrics like Scimago Journal Ranking and CWTS Leiden Ranking rely on Scopus and Web of Science data. These rankings significantly impact various facets of research evaluation, from university appointments and promotions to the allocation of research funding (Asubiaro & Onaolapo, 2023;Frenken et al, 2017;Haddawy et al, 2017). Despite alternative databases like Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic and Dimensions offering more comprehensive coverage, they have yet to match the influence wielded by Web of Science and Scopus in the policy and research landscape (Asubiaro et al, 2024).…”