Analysis of e-visibility status of faculties in Africa

Google Scholar Citation index as a yardstick.

Abstract

Visibility ultimately increases citation counts as well as improving the research productivity of researchers. Analyzing the e-visibility status of faculties in Africa using Google Scholar Citation index as a yardstick is the objective of the study. Comparative causal- effect Ex Post Facto research design was employed in to achieving the desired objectives. With an estimate of eight hundred and forty-three thousand, five hundred (843, 500) academic staff in various African Universities as the population of the study; One thousand, six hundred and sixty-seven (1,667) academic staff was sampled from ten (10) universities. Two universities from each region of West Africa, Southern Africa, East Africa, North Africa and Central Africa that have GSC accounts formed the bases of the sample. Purposive quota sampling technique was used to select faculties who have account with google scholar that provides individual statistics of citation counts. Data was collected strictly using google scholar database. Google scholar database provided information on paper citation counts. Data was analyzed as follows: the research questions were analyzed using mean and standard deviation while One-way Analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to analyze the hypotheses. Among the findings were that University of Cape Town, University of Pretoria, Cairo University and University of Nairobi are most e-visible universities, also citation indexes of faculties among African universities are statistically significant. The study also established the importance of GSC as an open access source that can be utilized to evaluate and improve productivity and visibility of African faculties so recommended same researchers in Africa to take advantage of.