Enhancing the Quality and Visibility of African Medical and Health Journals

doi:10.1289/ehp.12265 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 circulations <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 fro