Impact of African journals in ISI databases

• Main Authors: P., Sainul Abideen, Gregorio, Orlando, Hamwela, Virginia, Kabyema, Ngenjo, Kubaiza, Rahma, Legesse, Henock, Mabuza, Happiness Sibongile, Mahasin, Balla Elnour, Manglal-lal, Mendoza Christine, Masele, Juma James, Mendoza, Daisy, Mutsungi, Irvine, Nakasagga, Juliet, Rousseau, Ronald, Benavides, Manuel Soto
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2021
• Subjects: Library and information science
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/152608
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

The calculation of percentile impact factors and their use are illustrated for all ISI-covered journals published in Africa or carrying the words Africa or African in their title. For each African journal we selected a Western journal (defined as a journal published in North America or Western Europe) belonging to the same journal category in ISI’s Journal Citation Reports® and having a similar ISI impact factor. For the groups of journals studied here, we did not find a significant difference between any of the studied impact factors for African journals and for matched Western ones. Surprisingly, for these journals we did not even find a statistically significant difference between the average ISI impact factor, the first quartile impact factor, and the median impact factor. These results indicate that for journals with relatively low impact factors there is little difference between the various ways in which synchronous impact factors are calculated.