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

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Asubiaro, Toluwase Victor, Onaolapo, Sodiq·2023·Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology
DOI 10.1002/asi.24758
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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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  • Studies from LMIC and non-Western countries remain underrepresented in large databases like PubMed and EBSCO.

    “Although large databases like PubMed and EBSCO make efforts to index publications of diverse languages and geographic origins, studies from LMIC and non-Western countries remain underrepresented.35”

    From Systematic Review and Meta-Analyses of Time-Use, Productivity, and Labor Outcomes Among Unpaid Cancer Caregivers (2026) · cites this paper as [35]

    Section 2.2 reports that only 2.7% of Nigerian biomedical journals were indexed in PubMed/MEDLINE, supporting a narrower version of the underrepresentation claim. The paper’s broader findings concern African journals in Web of Science, Scopus, and CrossRef; the cited passages do not establish underrepresentation in EBSCO or the claimed indexing efforts by PubMed and EBSCO. (LLM, conf=0.86)

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Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Asubiaro, T. V., & Onaolapo, S.
Affiliations
  • Western University (CA)
  • Alberta Bible College (CA)
Corresponding author
Asubiaro, Toluwase Victor
ORCID
Venue
Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology
Publisher
Wiley
Published
2023-04-11
Volume
74
Issue
7
Pages
745-758
ISSN
  • 2330-1635 (ISSN-L)
  • 2330-1643
DOI
10.1002/asi.24758
OpenAlex
W4379364963
Cited by
77
References
3
Citations by year
2026: 28 · 2025: 27 · 2024: 17 · 2023: 5
FWCI
14.27
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
Locations
Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (publishedVersion, cc-by)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty › scientometrics and bibliometrics research
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Library Science and Information
  • Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › History and Philosophy of Science › Publishing and Scholarly Communication
Keywords
African journals, journal coverage, Web of Science, Scopus, Crossref, bibliographic databases, journal indexing, African Journals Online

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