Measurability
AFROCite first checks whether the minimum public evidence, journal identity, accessibility, and metadata required for a reliable assessment are available.
The project
About AFROCite
A diagnostic tool for assessing the open citation readiness of African university journals.
AFROCite provides a transparent and verifiable view of how prepared journals published or hosted by African universities are to participate in open citation infrastructures. It brings together measurability, readiness, and visibility across open scholarly infrastructures within a transparent and reproducible methodological framework.
Why AFROCite?
Research visibility, discoverability, and traceability depend on more than the quality of scholarly content. They are also shaped by metadata quality, persistent identifiers, reference deposits, contributor and affiliation data, and the ability of these elements to connect with open scholarly infrastructures.
AFROCite is grounded in the view that the visibility of African research should not depend exclusively on closed commercial databases. It also requires open, interoperable, reusable, and verifiable citation and metadata infrastructures.
What does AFROCite do?
Readiness
It assesses the elements that support effective participation in open citation systems, including persistent identifiers, metadata, structured reference deposits and machine linkability, and contributor and institutional attribution.
Open infrastructures
It places these results in a wider context by examining journal visibility, metadata retrievability, and citation-related evidence across open scholarly infrastructures.
How should the results be read?
AFROCite is a development-oriented diagnostic tool, not a ranking of universities or journals. Its results are intended to identify strengths and areas where infrastructure and practices can be improved, helping institutions and journals strengthen their open citation readiness.
The current results represent a methodological pilot application of the index and should not be interpreted as an estimate of the condition of all African journals or universities.
Who is AFROCite for?
AFROCite is designed for universities, academic libraries, journal offices, editors, research support and scholarly communication units, policymakers, and researchers interested in open science, scholarly communication, research visibility, and responsible research assessment.
About the Researcher
A’laa J. El-Sadek
Associate Professor of Information and Technology Sciences, Alexandria University.
She is Executive Director of the Digital Library Unit at Alexandria University. Her research interests include scholarly communication, open science, digital libraries, research integrity, and research assessment.
She developed AFROCite as part of a research project exploring how African university journals can strengthen their readiness for open citations and improve their participation in open scholarly infrastructures.