Cybernating the academe: Centralized scholarly ranking and visibility of scholars in the developing world

Abstract

This article uses a metaphor of social cybernetics to explain the neoliberal science politics manifest in the deployment of information technology to homogenize, centralize and globalize scholarly performance criteria, a development that benefits the developed regions of the world that already have a competitive advantage in the use of the technologies. The international citation indexes collect, organize and analyse skewed proportions of the world’s scholarly publications mainly from the North and make generalizations about the state and structure of global scientific knowledge, thus exerting undue control and discipline on global intellectual discourse. The databases do not accord any deference to the global diversity and complexity in human and other resources. However, autonomous databases that have regional, national and organizational focuses are beginning to emerge, but such an infrastructure is not yet available in Africa and many other developing regions. It is envisaged, however, that the current African Citation Index Project of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa will contribute in bridging this gap.

Open Research Data in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Bibliometric Study Using the Data Citation Index

“…An investigation into governments' role in ensuring that data generated through publicly funded research is shared is another area proposed for further research in SSA. It is no secret that international databases and other online tools used to share knowledge are inclined to cover research publications emanating from developed nations and more specifically Europe and North America (see [20], [16], [25], [28]). It is perhaps this bias in the coverage of research publications that has led some regions to develop autonomous databases similar to the Web of Science.…”

“…This study has further revealed that the situation is worse when it comes to the indexing of data records in the DCI. In view of these circumstances, there is need to not only explore the possibility of developing an African Citation Index (see [25]) for publications, but also to consider a system that can integrate data into the African Citation Index or one that can separately index data generated in Africa.…”

Barriers to Open Access uptake for researchers in Africa

“…Journal Impact Factors are often a poor means of assessing African research (Ezema, 2010a). Concerning indigenous knowledge, often cited as a potential driver for OA, "(scholars) are totally eclipsed based on the weight of their research work on a global scale, irrespective of their impact on their immediate dependent communities" (Nwagwu, 2010).…”

“…In terms of research and publishing practice Nwagwu (2010) concludes that the emphasis on impact is wrong for Africa whereas emphasis on research relevance analysis, ensuring that impact at local level is given far higher precedence, would be more suitable.…”

African Researcher 2.0: Using New Technologies to Join Global Academic Conversations

“…With regard to its global competitiveness, she declares that " [w]hat is certain is that African research publication has fared badly in terms of the conventional measures of competitive, global publication performance" (Gray, 2009(Gray, /2010) because, as she notes in another paper published in 2010, publications that issue from development-focused research -pretty substantial in Africa -have been slighted by what she terms the "highly competitive and exclusionary" system of measuring impact (Gray, 2010, slide 11). Indeed, multiple studies, which show how poorly African content is indexed in benchmarking citation indexes such as the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) and Scopus (see for example, Nwagwu, 2005Nwagwu, , 2010Tijssen, 2007), back her assertion.…”