Alternative Perspectives 2: Quality Publications & Indexing

By: Dr. Salihu Lukman

This is part 2 of the interesting engagement I had with Dr. Usman Isyaku in his posts about how to publish freely, where to publish, and whether university-based journals should be avoided entirely. I will reproduce his posts which are available on his Facebook wall, and my comments for context. In the end, I have added one comment by Olusegun and replied to it here because Facebook has restricted me from commenting for 13 days. Happy reading.

Dr. Usman Isyaku

I understand your optimisation, Prof. My condemnation is from my experience in making a change in that direction and was vehemently rejected. In theory, we can strive to change the way university based journals operate. In practice, it is an impossible task because the gatekeepers have more incentives to maintain the status quo than to change it. I have tried and failed, and am yet to see anyone who has succeeded in bringing quality to a junk journal. Kindly let me know if you know anyone.

My Response

While I acknowledge that there exist some shady practices affecting some of our journals, we can still make them better like the good old days. The new breeds of academics with excellent international exposure are gradually taking over the academe. No Nigerian university has made it to the list of the top 500 or 1000 universities based on the 2 prominent ranking bodies, THE and QS, in the last 10 years. With the infusion of competent academics with international experience, this has already changed. You can now find Nigerian universities among the top 1000 or 500 on THE list. Change is always a very slow process, especially when the existing structures have too many defects. Demolishing these defective structures and erecting standard ones in their places is an impossible task. These so-called junk journals that did not have any online presence, are now getting online presence starting with Google Scholar indexation. These are journals that were hitherto only purchased by authors whose articles appeared in them and kept these copies for promotion’s sake alone, they are now available online for a larger audience to read, cite, and critique. Some of them follow Google Scholar indexation with Scopus and ultimately ISI indexation. I can almost say that we have always had some of our local journals indexed by Scopus and ISI.

Dr. Usman Isyaku

Prof. Salihu Lukman and I have exchanged insightful opinions on academic and publication quality in Nigerian academia. I share his optimism that things will change in time. But I am not satisfied with the speed at which things are changing. In my opinion, the system cannot correct itself because the gatekeepers have too much vested interests to allow change to happen rapidly. The system can only be changed by outside elements, such as changes in funding policy (privatisation), creating a new knowledge economy that will demand quality research skills from graduates, and incentives to reward academic excellence beyond promotions and certification.

Additionally, if students are continously informed about research quality, they will demand it from the system, which will force the system to adjust itself to meet this new student orientation. Allowing existing and upcoming research students to remain in the dark, totally incapable of distinguishing between excellence and mediocrity, will continue to produce the results we are aiming to change.

I hope this conversation will continue.

My response

I share your sentiments. However, in my opinion, privatization of Nigerian public universities will remain a mirage that cannot produce water. There may be some school fee increments from time to time by the university administrations to increase their IGR. As promising as privatization may appear to be for uplifting the standard of our educational system, it will not be an option for our governments. Why? Because we operate a social economy rather than a capitalist one and I don’t foresee us going the capitalist way any time soon. Now, there is an upsurge of many private universities, especially in the North which had hitherto very few private institutions. Accordingly, the patronage of private universities is increasing exponentially. With the incessant strike actions that different governments force ASUU to embark upon to press home their demands before they can get a listening ear, public universities are no longer appealing, especially to those parents who can afford private universities. This has strengthened the private universities to outperform many of our premier universities. Take the case of Covenant University, usually, only UI and sometimes Unilag rank higher than it on THE ranking. Again, the remunerations offered by some of these private universities are many times more than what is obtainable in public universities. This imbalance could cause a massive migration of good brains from public universities to private ones. As they say, self-preservation is the first law of nature.

Olusegun (Commentator)

as a graduate student in 2012, I only got to know of ISI or Scopus while attending one of the sessions you organised upon your return from KSA. I reckon same for other members of faculty at the event.

The challenges you highlighted above will resonate with anyone who has gone through our system.

We had sparing access to ScienceDirect that year, though I’m not so sure of the availability of this database currently.

A number of graduate students and faculty members alike are unaware of these standards. You hardly get told, even in your research methodology module.

My response

The said workshop on ISI and other related publication issues took place in 2014 not 2012, just a year after completing my PhD at KFUPM. Those scholars and academics who had the privilege of getting both their MSc and PhD abroad will not resonate with the background story behind the paucity of the standard research methodology and expertise that had bedeviled Nigeria within those years and now. Those who earned their MSc in Nigeria and PhD abroad, like my humble self, will tell you that Nigerians are neither lazy nor incompetent. Give them the enabling environment and the sky will not be their limit but their starting point. This is not an exaggeration. I have seen many Nigerians with a 3^rd class or pass degree from a Nigerian university who were privileged to pursue their higher degrees in the UK or US only to graduate with distinctions and on top of their class. Our learning environment is generally far from ideal, hence, it suppresses our grit in no small measure. An excellent learning environment abroad takes our God-given gift, the grit, to the fullest.

Can you imagine that my first article which I submitted to our Faculty of Engineering journal, ABU, in 2007 was rejected by the reviewers, but we were able to get it published in a Scopus-indexed journal in 2009 and yet, I did not know anything about Scopus at the time? One of my mentors, Prof. Ibrahim Musa Jaro, Department of Geography, ABU, invited me to collaborate.

Can you also imagine that my first set of ISI and Scopus-indexed articles were also published in 2009 and 2010 when I had no idea about ISI or Scopus indexation? I was in Nigeria during all these years, doing my MSc which I finished in 2009, and left for my PhD in Saudi Arabia in 2010. My other mentor, with whom we still work together now, Prof. Isaiah A. Oke, a former lecturer of Water Resources and Environmental Engineering ABU, but transferred to OAU, spearheaded the research. Again, I published part of my MSc thesis results in 2010 in a Scopus-indexed journal.

Do you see where I am heading? In 2009 as an MSc student, I had 2 papers, one was indexed by both ISI and Scopus, and the other one by Scopus only from research conducted in Nigeria, yet, we had no idea about these indexations. These were followed by another set of 2 papers in 2010, with similar indexations as the first 2 above. I started hearing about ISI when I came to KFUPM in 2010, only to realize that I already had 4 Scopus-indexed and 2 ISI-indexed papers when other students were struggling to get their first ISI-indexed papers. During that time, nobody talked about Scopus, ISI was the target, being the gold standard for scientific journals. That was what informed my decision to share with my colleagues and other postgraduate students the few things I felt could improve their research and I organized a series of 3 workshops in 2014 among which I discussed the ISI indexing.

Salihu Lukman is an Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Hafr Al Batin, Saudi Arabia

Alternative Perspectives 1: Quality Publications & Indexing
By: Dr. Salihu Lukman

I want to share an interesting discussion I had with my friend, Dr. Usman Isyaku in his posts about how to publish freely, where to publish, and whether university-based journals should be avoided entirely. I will reproduce his posts which are available on his Facebook wall, and my comments for context. Happy reading.

Dr. Usman Isyaku
Post 1
I often get this question: “where can I publish my research without paying?”. Journals that are indexed in the Scopus database (Elsevier, Springer, Taylor and Francis etc) are entirely free. I mean zero article processing and review fees. All you need is to submit something original, and they have a software called iThenticate to check it line by line. The publishers make their money through access subscriptions by individuals or universities. You can pay up to 10-100 US dollars to access a single paper if the journal has a high impact factor ranking and the content is extremely useful.
In some cases, some of these journals can offer Open Access options, where the author(s) can pay fees for the paper to be openly accessible to everyone for free indefinitely. Prices can be prohibitively expensive ranging from 500-3000 US dollars for a single paper. This is not a mandatory payment, and the paper can still be published if authors cannot afford it.
Any journal that is asking for money from authors beyond open access fees is a money grab that must be avoided if authors want to publish with impact. I personally do not publish in those journals, and will not read or cite their contents in my publications. 99.9% of everything written therein is a plagiarised junk or unimportant information that nobody needs. They are targeted at those who are desperate for academic promotions and nothing else. Excellent publications can be extremely rewarding in many ways. Publish wisely!

Post 2
How about our university based journals?
1. Politically correct answer: they are reviewed by our researchers and are accepted in our university system. It is good to publish locally to demonstrate local knowledge and engagement with our experts. They are more recognised by the promotion committee and are highly recommended.
2. Non-politically correct answer: they are not properly peer reviewed and indexed for experts to access, read, cite, and critique. Contents are often disconnected from state of the art knowledge and methods. They are operated by a small circle of friends and well wishers. Avoid them.
Choose your answer!

My 1st Comment
While I agree with some of your positions on this matter, I would like to make some clarifications that I feel are important to this discussion based on my little experience in research publications in Nigeria and abroad.

There are 2 distinct categories that we need to accept, each having its own peculiar properties as follows.

(1) Nigerian-based researchers
This category includes those Nigerians whose research experience is only limited to Nigeria. In other words, they have never been abroad for any postgraduate degrees or postdoctoral fellowships. You can find in this category, those never heard about Scopus or ISI, which is the the gold standard for scientific journals, and they are not to blame entirely. Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), formerly under Thomson Reuters and now under Clarivate Analytics, primarily focuses on highly-cited, peer-reviewed journals in science, technology, medicine, and social sciences. While Scopus covers more journals and areas than ISI due to the latter’s stricter criteria for including a journal in the ISI core collection, ISI indexation is considered superior, especially in science and engineering fields. Most of the ISI-indexed journals are also indexed by Scopus. Many Nigerian-based researchers now know about Scopus and ISI journals. But the million-dollar question now is the access to these worlds of the highest quality journals. Nigerian universities either do not have the money to subscribe to these databases or it is not their priority to do so or fail to renew subscriptions in some instances. For someone who does not know the kind of quality information he is missing without these databases, it would be business as usual, and open-access journals from Google Scholar and Google Search engine suffice. He would patronize local journals and other international journals with questionable quality and move on with his life. Others who are very passionate about the quality of their research, could make a list of some good articles without open access that they came across, and ask their friends abroad who may have access to these articles to get them to improve the quality of their research.

I can remember when I was doing my master’s degree research work in the late 2000s, one of my mentors, Prof. @Nafiu Abdu (from ABU), introduced me to the HINARI (launched by WHO) and AGORA (launched by UN) databases for developing countries where I freely accessed high-quality journals. This was in addition to the numerous other resources that my other mentor, Prof. @Nuhu Muazu Dalhat sent me from KFUPM, Saudi Arabia.

Exposure to these high-quality research materials had a profound impact on my quest for a PhD in that I had resolved NEVER to earn my PhD from any Nigerian university. If I could not find any scholarship abroad, I was determined to utilize my meager salary if it would be sufficient to pay my way to Ghana to earn my PhD there, but not in Nigeria. In Allah’s mercy, I got the KFUPM scholarship to study in Saudi Arabia. And the rest is history.

Another major challenge for researchers whose area entails elaborate laboratory experimental study and adequate material characterization is the lack of the requisite equipment either to perform the lab experiments or test the results to such a standard that the research outcome could be published in those high-quality Scopus or ISI-indexed journals. There are 2 problems here. One is the lack of research funds to purchase these equipment, and in a few cases where some of these equipment are available, the tests may be prohibitively expensive for the researcher or they may not be properly maintained. I know this for a fact because I supervise MSc and PhD students in Nigeria. In this unfortunate situation, one has to make do with what is available as well as affordable.

However, I assure you that even in the absence of a conducive research atmosphere in Nigeria, some researchers are doing excellent and original work despite publishing them in local or non-Scopus-indexed journals to the extent that some are getting patents for their inventions. Patent signifies the highest level of originality. Nigeria also has a couple of local journals indexed by ISI. The awareness of publishing in high-impact factor journals is on the rise despite the above challenges.

(2) Diasporan researchers
This includes those with any foreign touch in research. It could be spending a few months abroad for benchwork, earning a degree, especially an MSc or PhD, or a postdoctoral fellowship, or working in a country with a conducive atmosphere for research. Those who belong to this category are more often than not exposed to some of the best resources for conducting quality research that can be published in the top-ranking journals available. Research funds, state-of-the-art laboratory equipment for experimental research and testing, subscription to all the top databases, technical expertise, relevant computer packages, and supercomputers for extensive simulations, and adequate remunerations are not lacking at all. With these resources, Nigerians would be churning out articles in some of the highest-quality journals available and obtaining US patents every now and then. This goes to tell you that the major problem necessitating those Nigerian-based researchers to publish in local or non-Scopus-indexed journals is not necessarily because they cannot perform high-quality research publishable in those journals, it has more to do with the lack of a conducive atmosphere to research bedeviling our institutions. Some of those in this category usually try to distinguish themselves by doing a quality job as much as possible when they go back to Nigeria, others are caught up by the Nigerian reality and blend as though they never had any foreign research exposure. But it is not something new that Nigerians are among the most intelligent and hardworking people on Earth. Just give them the opportunity and a conducive atmosphere, and see how they will outshine others in almost everything.

The bottom line here is that one has got to make do with what is available and affordable under given circumstances. At the same time, one can attain a renowned position in research, with a humble background.

Dr. Usman Isyaku’s Response

Prof, the only line of separation between the 2 categories you mentioned is the willingness to follow standards. I know Nigerian researchers who are publishing with impact and they have never trained abroad. Our desire to create a separate category for mediocrity, accepting their excuses, and recognizing them as equivalent to the competent ones will do more harm to our tertiary education. I have no academic respect for junk journals, irrespective of those who publish therein and the excuses that produced them.

My 2nd Comment

(1) I am not after creating a separate category for mediocrity. I am only providing another perspective so that readers can be well-informed with respect to the background problems and challenges that led us to where we are today.
(2) It is so easy to criticize a faulty system, but changing such a system entails having a thorough understanding of what corrupted the system in the first place with a view to bringing the necessary changes for improvement.
(3) Nobody should have any respect for junk or predatory journals, and I don’t want you to relax your position on that. However, I want you to understand that some universities, at least ABU for a fact – where you and I did our undergraduate from – are striving to stamp out these predatory journals by blacklisting them. Hence, they cannot be considered for promotion. The list is being updated periodically.
(4) On university-based journals and other local journals in Nigeria, it will appear inappropriate for one to simply advise that they should all be avoided, because according to your other post on the same subject matter, “they are not properly peer-reviewed and indexed for experts to access, read, cite, and critique.” This is a gross over-generalization and does not represent the facts on the ground.
(5) What are these facts? One, many university-based journals are available online now for experts to access, read, cite, and critique. Two, there are Nigerian journals (university-based or otherwise) that are indexed by both Scopus and ISI with the associated impact factor from each. This, I have known for almost a decade now. Below are just 2 samples of these journals, one is a university-based, published by the Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Benin, and the second one is a publication of the Medical and Dental Consultants Association of Nigeria (MDCAN).

ISI & Scopus-indexed Nigerian Journals
(a) Tropical Journal of Pharmaceutical Research.
Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Benin
(b) Nigerian Journal of Clinical Practice.
This is the official publication of the Medical and Dental Consultants Association of Nigeria (MDCAN).

(6) You see, getting indexation by either Scopus or ISI does happen overnight. Journals have to be up and doing, publishing for some time, applying, and awaiting the decisions from these bodies. This could take a very long time. In my view, rather than advising researchers to boycott all university-based journals some of whom are actually Scopus and ISI-indexed, Nigerian diasporan academics can strengthen and support our local journals to improve their quality and standards to such a level that we will have many more Scopus and ISI-indexed journals in Nigeria rather than condemning all of them to hell. This does not in any way imply that we should abandon the renowned international publishers for local ones.

Salihu Lukman is an Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Hafr Al Batin, Saudi Arabia