Demonstrating African institutional repositories' contribution to global knowledge

In addition to preservation reasons, many African higher education institutions have particularly established Institutional repositories (IRs) to maximize access to their research output globally. However little empirical evidence exists that demonstrates the extent to which the content in African IRs is contributing to global knowledge. This poster reports on preliminary findings of a study that seeks to explore the extent to which African IR content is being cited by publications indexed in the Scopus citation database as a proxy measure of contribution to global knowledge. Scopus cited references search facility was used to mine for documents citing African IR content from 2000 to 2021. Base URLs of African IRs were extracted from the International African Institute dataset of African repositories and used to construct a Boolean logic search query within the Scopus cited references advanced search feature. Results showed that at least 88,430 publications indexed in Scopus cited African IR content. Among the heaviest citers of African IR content were researchers from Columbia, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico and United States. Results of the study suggest that African IR content is making contributions to global knowledge mainly in the subjects’ disciplines of medicine, agricultural and biological sciences, social sciences and environmental sciences.