A comparative study of the coverage of African journals in Web of Science, Scopus, and CrossRef
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Direct model labels (unvalidated)
Per-model category and study-design labels from the labeling rounds. They are machine output, unvalidated, and the disagreement between models ships as data. No study design here is MEDLINE-validated yet.
| Model arm | Categories | Study design | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| gemma | BibliometricsMetaresearch Domain: Evaluation · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Observational | high |
| gpt | BibliometricsScholarly communication Domain: not available · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Other design | high |
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.016 | 0.146 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.050 | 0.054 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedLabeled directly by 2 models reading the full record.
The models disagree on parts of this classification; every voice is preserved in the section at the end of the page.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".