Black Africa in the science citation index

Abstract

According to a quantitative analysis of the publications of the Black African Countries indexed in the SCI between 1992 to 1998, Nigeria seems to be the leader in scientific production on the black continent during that period (the term ‘Black Africa’ refers to all African countries excluding South Africa, Maghrebi, and Egypt). However, an analysis that only takes into account the number of publications does not necessarily disclose very much about neither the dynamics of the respective scientific community nor about the representativity of the country’s production with respect to its total population. Therefore, the number of publications per country is compared with the respective total population. According to this method, Kenya turns out to be the leader in scientific-publication production and several other countries get higher ranks. Additionally, any evaluation of scientific production in that part of the world should also take into account the specific features of these countries, e.g. the difficulties in publication and the existence of a large number of unpublished texts.