Since the scholarly platforms and academic research from the African continent and much of the Global South are largely invisible on the global stage, measures for dismantling bibliometric coloniality and promoting African knowledge platforms must be explored, including the creation of an African scholarly index and the building of a comprehensive African bibliometric platform.

This is a key message of a study titled ‘Bibliometric coloniality in South Africa: Critical review of the indexes of accredited journals’, published recently in the journal Education as Change.

The study was authored by Dr Savo Heleta from the Durban University of Technology and Dr Pedro Mzileni from the University of Zululand in South Africa.

Bibliometric coloniality

Bibliometric coloniality refers to the system of domination of global academic publishing by bibliometric indexes based in the Global North, which serve as gatekeepers of academic relevance, credibility and quality, according to the study.

“These indexes are dominated by journals from Europe and North America,” it said.

Bibliometric data on Africa’s share of global scientific publishing is just over 3% of all indexed articles, and this is mostly dominated by South Africa, Egypt and Tunisia, according to the 2023 book, Who Counts? Ghanaian academic publishing and global science, which also showed that only about 50 of the 26,000 active journals in the Scopus database are published in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The study analysed the geographic coverage of five international indexes that are part of South Africa’s Department of Higher Education and Training’s (DHET) lists of accredited journals and unpacked systemic and structural factors behind the DHET list.

It showed that the DHET’s lists of accredited journals propagate and value academic journals based in the Global North as credible platforms for dissemination of knowledge, while sidelining the African continent and Global South.

“This way, the DHET is directly reinforcing global bibliometric coloniality and contributing to the maintenance of Euro-American epistemic hegemony,” the study emphasised.

Creating an African scholarly index

The study noted that “South Africa, as Africa’s top producer of scholarly output, should lead the process of dismantling bibliometric coloniality and promoting African knowledge platforms”.

This could be done by working closely with other African countries and the African Union on the creation of an African scholarly index, the study recommended.

“However, neoliberalisation of higher education and the lack of political will to tackle coloniality of knowledge are preventing this from happening,” the study’s authors said.

Building a comprehensive African bibliometric platform

Lead author of the study Heleta told University World News: “The possible solutions for tackling bibliometric coloniality require, firstly, the awareness of the problem, the political will to tackle the problem, and commitment of resources to bring about change.

“The models that can be used to build a comprehensive African bibliometric platform exist,” Heleta pointed out.

“In the study, we wrote about the Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO). SciELO promotes bibliometric diversity and plurality, and aims to provide visibility to the scholarship from the Global South that the Global North-based indexes often exclude. It includes a number of countries in Latin America, as well as South Africa, Spain and Portugal.

“SciELO South Africa has been operational since 2009. However, while SciELO provides an opportunity to begin to tackle bibliometric coloniality, in South Africa, the DHET only includes a small SciELO South Africa list of journals within its list of accredited journals, while excluding the rest of the platform in Latin America,” Heleta said.

“In addition, while SciELO South Africa has an aspiration to expand and work with other African countries on building a continental bibliometric index, we have found no evidence in the public domain of this being something that is prioritised or supported on the continent,” he added.

Africa’s year of education

Professor Goski Alabi, the consulting president of Laweh Open University College in Accra, Ghana, told University World News: “As we mark 2024 – the Year of Education in Africa – the African Union (AU) and Coalitions of African Research and Academic networks should set the agenda for prioritisation of bibliometric decoloniality, which is a crucial step towards achieving socio-economic development and epistemic justice that require the dismantling and rethinking of existing policies, practices, and incentives.

“African governments and accrediting or regulatory bodies will have to revise policies that currently prioritise Global North journals. Universities should be encouraged to recognise and reward publications in African journals, [and should be] aligning their research output policies with decolonisation goals,” added Alabi, who is also the chair of the International Network for Internationalisation of Education.

“African journal platforms would have to be mindful of quality and ensure that global standards are adequately maintained. Accessibility to the journals is key, and technology can be leveraged to enhance access through open-access publishing to ensure that African research is freely available to a global audience,” she said.

“Digital repositories could be made available to libraries of universities in Africa and around the globe. This can increase citations and greater academic impact for African researchers,” Alabi suggested.

“Capacity-building and resource allocation should be considered a strategic option for the development of the African journals index, including funding and editorial training.

“Partnerships will also have to be established worldwide to enhance the quality and reach of African journals. These reforms, among others, can shift the focus from Euro-American journals to African-led research, promoting a more balanced and inclusive academic environment, fostering home-grown research and innovation and driving sustainable development in the academic sector,” Alabi concluded.

David Mills, the director of Oxford University’s Centre for Global Higher Education in the United Kingdom, told University World News that bibliometric coloniality “traces back to the way colonial-era knowledge hierarchies were built into Garfield’s citation index”.

The Science Citation Index (SCI) was first published in 1963 by the Garfield’s company, the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), and was followed by the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), and the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI). Originally in print, the three indexes now form the core content of Web of Science.

“Despite post-independence African universities launching many new journals, most of them were not indexed,” Mills said.

Journals published in Sub-Saharan Africa were the most under-represented and were four times less likely to be indexed than those published in Europe, according to a 2024 study entitled, ‘Regional disparities in the Web of Science and Scopus journal coverage’ with Mills as one of the authors.

“The answer is to rebuild the continent’s journal and publishing cultures, seeing these as integral to a vibrant research ecosystem. Changing this will take time, political commitment, and funding,” Mills indicated.

Challenges

“In terms of the challenges, in our study, we argue that there is a lack of political will to work together across the African continent and develop an African bibliometric platform or index.

“There is a lack of interest and a lack of political will within the AU, among African countries, among higher education networks and associations, and among universities and other institutions,” Heleta said.

“Another key challenge is the low investment in higher education and research in most African countries. If the continent is to see changes and improvements in higher education, countries will have to invest more in the sector. That investment can also help in building an African bibliometric index,” he noted.

Expanding on this point, Mills said that the biggest challenge confronting efforts to tackle global bibliometric coloniality in Africa remains higher education’s fixation with global rankings.

“African universities measure themselves against the metrics and data collated and curated by ‘information analytics’ businesses, such as Elsevier,” Mills said.

“These companies make money out of selling data services – as well as indexes like Scopus – to universities.”

Mills’ view is supported by the 2024 study, ‘University rankings in the context of research evaluation: A state-of-the-art review’, which indicated that rankings should not be used in research assessment or to guide policy initiatives – and that calls for collective action to reject it.

“Ideally, African universities need to prioritise what matters to them and what they do well, rather than looking elsewhere for inspiration,” Mills stressed.

“The continent needs to develop its own definitions of what it sees as ‘impactful’ and important research. South Africa could lead the way by not relying solely on global indexes to judge the region’s scholarly work,” he added.

Looking ahead

“In the study, we call on scholars, students and activists across the continent and elsewhere in the Global South to work together, organise and pressurise their institutions, associations, networks and governments to begin to meaningfully tackle coloniality of knowledge and bibliometric coloniality, and work on epistemic decolonisation,” Heleta said.

“There are no easy answers and solutions. The changes that are needed are systemic and structural, on the national and African continental levels,” Heleta pointed out.

“As highlighted by Professor Seye Abimbola from the University of Sydney in Australia in his 2023 commentary, ‘Knowledge from the Global South is in the Global South’, we need to put pressure on our institutions, governments and policymakers to provincialise the Euro-American-centric indexes and platforms while, at the same time, building, strengthening, and promoting African and other Global South platforms,” said Heleta.

Source: https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20240821211953279