It is not new for African academics to gather and discuss various issues related to conducting research and presenting results. Thousands of academic conferences, workshops, and seminars have been held across the continent by institutions, groups, and centers since January 2022. According to our analyst, the majority of the events concentrated on how academia will continue to make significant contributions to African society.

The Centre for Multidisciplinary Research and Innovation hosted a roundtable discussion as one of these gatherings.  “CEMRI is a group of researchers who want to make impact from research and innovative activities. The group aims to share knowledge, orientate youth, proffer solutions to problems in businesses and government sector, also to empower young scholars on contributing actively to innovative research. Members of CEMRI comes from various research discipline and countries.”

Early career and established researchers from Africa and other continents attended the Zoom event. The discussion was started by Professor Olumuyiwa Asaolu from the University of Lagos, who presented a paper on measuring African scholars’ publications using the U-index. The paper was co-authored with some academics at the University.

It is “a new Universal metric as unique indicator of researcher’s contributions to academic knowledge.

“U is an indicator of an author’s impact over career-span, which appropriately aggregates how well their articles actually perform (TCIs) relative to projection (JIFs). It inherently normalizes for time and field without imposing a benchmark Expected Citation Rate that is burdensome to estimate or lacking in worldwide acceptability. Different entities use arbitrary weights for scoring co-authorship and a major contribution in our model is a prescription of simple formulae for general weights that fairly addresses three basic scenarios. U-index measures a researcher’s academic impact based on the contributions that such individual has made in authoring scholarly articles with or without citations. It will bring some relief to scholars in the emergent era of ‘publish, be cited or perish’ that is indirectly stimulated via institutional rankings.”

According to Professor Asaolu, the idea for researching the metric arose when it became clear that existing metrics for ranking African scholars did not accurately reflect the characteristics of African academics. Participants, for example, discussed the differences between social scientists and natural scientists. Google scholar was used as an example, considering its limitations.

Professor Ebo Hinson, pro-Vice Chancellor of Ghana Communication Technology University, however, urged Professor Asaolu and his team to consider how the metric could compete with the existing one by presenting its unique selling propositions. He believes that when this occurs, scholars and ranking organizations in the global north will accept the metric.

Professor Hinson emphasizes the importance of intra-citation and networking in increasing African publications and making research outcomes impactful on the continent and beyond in his paper titled Scholarly metrics beyond impact factor for Africans by Africans. According to Professor Hinson, it is extremely rare for scholars in the global north to cite those in the global south. As a result, African scholars must collaborate and cite one another. Furthermore, before the global north can reckon with Africa, it must produce and publish good articles. He, on the other hand, objects to African students’ attitude of ignoring African scholars in their works.

Professor Hinson emphasizes the importance of networking during academic events, noting that many scholars rarely engage with other scholars outside of conferences. Conferences and other academic events, he believes, should not be solely for presentation. “Scholars from other regions need to be really engaged. African scholars should not forget that the connection (within Academia) can compliments their theoretical presentation.”

“I agree with you Professor, we need to be proud of innovation from Africa. We should cite colleagues working in our area of expertise often as possible,” one of the participants says. One of the conclusions of the discussion was a call for the creation of a reliable African ranking database and/or the enhancement of the 1998-founded “African Journals Online.”