One of the core purposes of any university is research, which invariably means producing knowledge for consumption within and outside the university environment. In the continuation of our analysis of the issues and needs in the Nigerian higher education sector, we have found that the University of Ibadan, Nigeria’s first University, and other 9 oldest Universities in the country have produced 568 institutional publications [deposited on the Internet according to the Google Scholar].
Institutional publications as revealed by our Google and data collection tools we appropriated entails publications authored by Faculty members but solely owned by the Universities. In this context, the 10 Universities are publishers. Further checks reveal that a number of these publications are monographs, convocation materials, policies and plans of the Universities including research reports.
Analysis indicates that on average 51 years of publications, these Universities have published 63 publications with average 1 and 0.016667 scores for H-index and H-annual index respectively. H-index and H-annual index are measures being used to know the extent to which a publication by an author is impactful within the academic community. The impact is usually tied with the number of times such publication is cited by other scholars in the same field or across disciplines.
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Exhibit 1: Years of Publications versus Number of Publications
We equally discovered that the University of Ibadan has published 153 publications since existence. These publications have attracted 29 citations with 3 scores for impact status. With 133 publications, the Ahmadu Bello University is following the University of Ibadan. The institution’s 133 publications have only attracted 4 citations and insignificant impactful score [H-index=1]. Despite the insignificant publications [when one looks at the years of existence of the institutions], a strong connection between the years of publications and the number of publications exists. We found 91.1% connection.
Exhibit 2: H-index versus Citations
With this result, one would expect that the long years of existence translate to high publications and archive them on the Internet for a global audience. This position is further supported when we discovered that one citation increases H-index scores by 85.5%, meaning that these Universities need to intensify their institutional publication efforts and archive them on the Internet.