Citation impact of health and medical journals in Africa: does open accessibility matter?
| Pages | 934-952 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/EL-11-2016-0245 |
| Date | 02 October 2017 |
| Published date | 02 October 2017 |
| Author | Ifeanyi Jonas Ezema,Omwoyo Bosire Onyancha |
Citation impact of health and
medical journals in Africa: does
open accessibility matter?
Ifeanyi Jonas Ezema
Nnamdi Azikiwe Library, University of Nigeria, Nsukka,
Nigeria and Department of Information Science,
University of South Africa, Pretoria, South Africa, and
Omwoyo Bosire Onyancha
Department of Information Science, University of South Africa,
Pretoria, South Africa
Abstract
Purpose –The purposeof this study is to examine whether open accessibilityof medical journals published
in Africa mayinfluence journals’citation impact.
Design/methodology/approach –An evaluative informetric researchapproach was used to compare
134 health and medical (H&M) journals hosted in the African Journals Online (AJOL) database. Harzing’s
Publish or Perish (PoP) softwarewas used to extract the following publicationand citation data from Google
Scholar: citation counts, number of papers and the h-index of the journals. Three null hypotheses were
formulatedto guide the study.
Findings –A total of 65 open access (OA) and 69 non-OA H&M journals of Africanorigin were found in
AJOL. Only 20 African countries have journals hostedin AJOL, with more than 53% of them from Nigeria
and 13.4% from South Africa. Findings reveal that non-OA H&M journals performed poorly in terms of
citations compared withtheir OA counterparts. The t-test analysis revealed high significant differencein the
citationsand research impacts of OA and non-OA H&M journals published in Africa.
Practical implications –The study will assist in collectiondevelopment in medical and health libraries
globally and in Africa particularly. The study will also be a useful guide to journal publishers, health
researchersand health workers providing information on where to publish and the journalsto subscribe.
Social implications –Apart from addingto the body of knowledge in scholarly communication in Africa,
this studywill go a long way in influencing policies in H&M researchin Africa.
Originality/value –AJOL is the only online database hosting journals from all countries in Africa.
Unfortunately, the quality and research impact of the journals in the database have not been adequately
investigated.The paper adopted an informetric approach to evaluate H&M journalsin Africa so as to provide
wider insighton the contents and quality of the journals hosted in it.
Keywords Africa, Citation analysis, Bibliometric analysis, Open access, Scholarly communications,
Journal evaluation
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Open access (OA) publishing provides a new platform for scholarly communication among
researchers in different fields. Apart from researchers, communities of practice –rarely
producers but definitely consumers of the research results –benefit immensely from OA
publishing (Davis, 2011). For the researchers and their affiliations that often fund the
research, the greatest concern is how to make the research available to the global scientific
EL
35,5
934
Received4 November 2016
Revised4 November 2016
Accepted21 January 2017
TheElectronic Library
Vol.35 No. 5, 2017
pp. 934-952
© Emerald Publishing Limited
0264-0473
DOI 10.1108/EL-11-2016-0245
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/0264-0473.htm
community and to enhance its impact and visibility; a situation that will, by extension,
improve the impact and visibility of both the authors and their affiliate institutions.
Consequently, journals that would enable high impact and wider visibility are usually
selected as publication outlets by many researchers, and this trend has moved scholarly
publishing to online platforms. Since the 2001 meeting of the Open SocietyInstitute, which
resulted in the Budapest Open AccessInitiative (2002), the concept of OA has become a buzz
word in scholarly publishing.
OA entails online free availability of research literature usingtwo “G”approaches –the
gold and green routes. The gold model relies on the traditional journal publication system,
but shifts the financial burden to the authors or research funders, while the green model
relies on authors archiving their publications in repositories in the form of preprint or
postprint (Antelman, 2004;Craig et al., 2007;Turk, 2008). Therefore, OA proponents argue
that journals which are freely available to researchers attract higher readership and, by
extension, more citations, while critics of the OA model argue that there is no evidence to
support this claim as established non-OA journals continue to attract readership and
citations (Aronson, 2005;Eysenbach, 2006). An interesting study by Swan (2010)
underscored the following assumptionabout OA publishing: a proportion of researchers do
not have access to subscription-basedarticles; thus, such researchers have the opportunity
of reading OA articles if they are made freelyavailable. Additionally, such articles could be
relevant to the researchers’work and, therefore, would be cited, while those that are not
relevant would not be cited.
Several studies have shown that OA publishing enhances the research and citation
impact of journals (Atchison and Bull, 2014;Ezema and Ugwu, 2013), thus encouraging
research grantors to support the publication of funded research in OA outlets (Björk and
Solomon, 2012). Advocates of OA publishing also argue that OA increases citation impact
and contributes to the reductionof costs in subscribing to journals (Atchison and Bull, 2014)
in many disciplines, includinghealth sciences and medicine.
Health and medical (H&M) research is critical to the overall national development of
developing economies, suchas Africa. Access to research findings in the medical and health
fields is of great interest to health scholars and practitioners.The journal remains the single
most important channel through which research is communicated, disseminated and
consumed. OA publishing in H&M research is, therefore, critical to scholarly
communication and to the diffusion of knowledge, and for bridging the information gap
between the developed and developing countries (Mann et al., 2008). OA scholarly
publishing in the subject domain is also vital in terms of medical and health practice,
especially in countries whichdo not have access to research findings published and indexed
in restricted databases. Because H&M research requires the free flow of information, it is
necessary to investigatethe research impact of OA journals in the field in relation to non-OA
counterparts. This paper examines the influenceof OA on the research and citation impact
of H&M journals in Africa. The specific objectivesof the study are to:
determine the geographical distribution of OA and non-OA H&M journals in Africa;
examine the citation impact of the journals using various citation data; and
determine whether there is any significant difference between research and citation
impact of OA and non-OA journals published in Africa.
The study’s null hypothesesare:
There is no significant difference between the h-index of OA and non-OA medical
journals in Africa.
Does open
access matter?
935
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