Are Nigerian universities ripe for Scopus and Thomson Reuters indexed journals?

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By Okechukwu Nwafor

Many years ago the University of Nigeria Nsukka introduced Thomson Reuters Indexed journals into the criteria for academic assessment and ruled that for any lecturer to ascend the promotion ladder, he or she must have a certain number of articles published in Thomson Reuters. It seems that Nnamdi Azikiwe University is considering adopting this policy. In this article, I suggest that UNIZIK, and indeed, the rest of Nigerian universities are not yet ripe for this western academic culture.

It is unfortunate that since the introduction of this policy in UNN, most lecturers have stagnated. For example, among all the lecturers that taught me since I left the Department of Fine and Applied Arts in UNN 23 years ago, only two made it to the rank of professor. In effect, while I am now a professor most of them, till this date, are still Senior Lecturers and Readers. The implication is that if such assessment criteria is eventually introduced in UNIZIK about 90 percent of our junior academics might not rise to the rank of Reader or Professor in the next 23 or more years. In other words, they may retire as Senior Lecturers.

It is important that we reexamine the unfortunate aftermath of this policy and know whether we, in UNIZIK, need such. I have my reasons. First, the Western world does not understand anything about journals outside their own established academic culture. They have instituted all research infrastructure that can enable academics to churn out quality articles for their own journals of which Thomson Reuters is just a part. Therefore, Thomson Reuters is a western intellectual initiative specifically intended to address a system as standardized as theirs. It is also an intellectual property that is essentially capitalist, just like other Western indexing bodies. Second, to publish an article in most of Thomson Reuters indexed journals, the process usually takes a minimum of one and half years and in certain instances as long as five years. I have been struggling to publish one article in the Journal of Material Culture (a Thomson Reuters indexed journal) for about seven years now. The process has been largely unsuccessful not because my article is not good but because the article has been trapped in a political process that is essentially racist. It is a long story I will reserve for another day. As an academic, I was able to publish more than 10 articles in Thomson Reuters indexed journals primarily because I had the opportunity to access western academic tradition. Those in the Sciences who succeeded like myself, I am sure, also accessed western academic spaces where labs are available for their groundbreaking researches. The question is how many of our colleagues in the humanities are as lucky as myself? It was sheer determination and personal struggle that made me decide even as a young student in UNN that I was going to access western academic space to enable me flow with their intellectual tide. In 2018, I studied a course that dwelled on the politics of journal publication in the University of Michigan. In this course, I understood that publishing an article is not so straightforward an endeavour. Many underlying politics come into play. For example, once a reviewer who is a White and located in, say, an American institution sees a paper from Africa he or she intuitively knows that the paper is not from a western space and in most cases, racial bias would jeopardize the chances of the paper making it. Again, most often, the paper is ‘killed’ at the level of the editorial board whereby it is rejected a few days after submission. When the editorial board is consitited by an all-white board, papers from Africa are oftentimes jeopardized because they’re treated with a high degree of racial bias, despite its strong contents or high quality. Below is my reply to the editor in one of the journals that treated my paper in this manner:

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“Dear Editor in Chief,
While I thank the editors for considering my article in the first place, I strongly think that the reviewers are in the Social Sciences discipline and as such ‘do not’ understand the methodologies of research in the Visual History discipline. Their decisions are highly subjective and clearly expose their lack of knowledge of scholarly writings that embeds all their concerns in the main text without adopting a rigid Social Sciences framework. If this is not the reason for their hasty, unprofessional conclusions then it is possible that they are blinded by some kind of racial prejudice. This is my strong opinion and I stand by it. I strongly reject their opinion about my work. I advise that you should choose reviewers that understand the disciplinary demands of the manuscript in question and who should be adjudged to be free from racism. However, “the outcome of this specific submission has already discouraged me from the submission of future manuscripts” and, on this note, I say goodbye and all the best.
Regards,
Okechukwu Nwafor, PhD., Author
Aso ebi: Dress, Fashion, Visual Culture, and Urban Cosmopolitanism in West Africa. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021).”

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Meanwhile the paper was returned the same day I submitted it with a poisonous comment.

Now let us assume that this policy is implemented in UNIZIK and one is required to get at least six papers from Thomson Reuters before becoming a professor. If each article takes at least two years to get published (for none of mine took less than two years) it means that one who is expecting a promotion in a year’s time will have to struggle for about twelve years to publish articles in Thomson Reuters. While this is only possible for a scholar who knows his or her onions, the timeline is not guaranteed for the majority of academics still wallowing in the wilderness of academic knowledge.

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We are not ready for this academic policy because we are invisible in the global politics of journal publication which is exactly the topic I will address in the next lecture.

What are your thoughts?

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