Enhancing the Quality and Visibility of African Medical and Health Journals

Are most journals published in Africa too weak to be useful to local practitioners, researchers, and policy makers? Might a new method for scholarly communication on the African continent improve the utility of these journals? According to a provocative article published in Learned Publishing (Smart 2007), the answer to both questions is yes. Smart argued that the African research and education communities need to rethink their tendency to “slavishly . . . follow the Western model of academic promotion based on publishing in journals.” In an earlier article, Horton (2000a) voiced concerns that researchers, policy makers, and philanthropic organizations in developed countries believe simply providing access to Western information will solve many of the problems of developing nations. On the contrary, he wrote, in Africa “there is already a well-developed local information culture that needs support, not swamping,” noting, moreover, the lack of African journals in MEDLINE (Horton 2000a). According to a survey conducted in 2005, about 158 medical journals were published in 33 African countries, but most had circu­ lations <1,000, were published ≤ 4 times per year, and were excluded from major bibliographic indexes (Siegfried et al. 2006). African Journals Online, an online repository of African scholarly abstracts hosted by the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP), lists 111 health and medical journals from 18 African countries in 2008 (African Journals Online 2008). However, compared with those of other continents, African medical and health journals continue to be poorly represented in international indexing services: among 5,000 journals indexed in MEDLINE, 38 are from Africa (13 countries), and among 6,700 journals in the Institute for Scientific Information’s Science Citation Index, only 20 are from Africa (4 countries), including just 1 medical journal. Even within Africa, there is a disparity in research publication, with South Africa, Egypt, and Nigeria producing 60% of the total number of articles indexed by PubMed between 1996 and 2005 (Uthman and Uthman 2007). Moreover, there are gaps in research information published in leading Western and Northern journals on conditions and diseases that are most relevant to low-income coun­ tries in Africa (Horton 2000b). Thus, despite the recognized benefits of medical journals to health practitioners (Gross 2000; Lamas 1992), Africa’s medical journal and research production and distribution are low, and as a result, research from Africa is not readily available to colleagues on the continent or in the international scientific community. Quality journals are needed throughout Africa to help raise the visibility of African science to researchers, practitioners, and policy makers in countries within Africa, especially sub-Saharan Africa, and to the wider international community (Ofori-Adjei 2006). Both Smart (2007) and Horton (2000a, 2000b) provide insights into the troubling issue of scientific and medical communications within Africa. Although there is no doubt that many of the medical and health journals published in Africa are weak, it would not be appropriate to declare them moribund and give up on the traditional peer-reviewed journal model for these medical, health care, and research communities (Ofori-Adjei 2006). In fact, substituting another communication vehicle for this specific subset of journals would need to be undertaken with extreme caution, if at all. Scientific