More than half or the respondents (106; 53.3%) have said that their journals are indexed in AJOL and half of them are discoverable via Google Scholar. Those indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) account for nearly one-third (65; 32.7%), while the share of those indexed in the Web of Science and Scopus is considerably smaller – 10.1% and 13.1%, respectively. The analysis of free-text responses reveals a long tail of indexing venues relevant in the African context and throws light on national (Portail des Revues Scientifiques Marocaines) and continental platforms (e.g. the South African journal platform
Sabinet African Journals). It is reasonable to assume that many more surveyed journals are indexed by these services but did not mention it in the survey. Therefore, the data presented in the table are merely illustrative.

Table 13. The presence of the surveyed journals in databases / indexing services

Although the majority of journals are indexed or merely discoverable in multiple databases or services, the number of those indexed with only one indexing service is not insignificant (82; 41.2%; see table below), and in most cases this single service is usually AJOL.

Table 14. Journals indexed in only one database / indexing service

The most common challenges faced by journals when applying for indexing include satisfying the technical criteria and membership fees (42; 21.11%), followed by satisfying the metadata requirements (34; 17.1%) and non-technical participation criteria (30; 15.1%). The language used in the application process does not seem to be a major issue. 

Although insufficiently detailed, free-text responses provide more information about the challenging non-technical requirements: some journals are rejected because of their local, i.e. African focus, low citation rates in citation databases, authors coming from limited geographic areas and endogeny (too many papers authored by editorial board members or the reviewers working for the journal). A few respondents also mentioned the unresponsiveness of the indexing services, who have never provided feedback about their applications. 

Table 15. Challenges faced by journals applying for indexing in databases / indexing services