Deficits in the visibility of African scientists: implications for developing information and communication technology (ICT) capacity

Despite evidence of increasing presence of ICT in Africa's education and research front, the opportunities offered by ICT in controlling local scientific literature resources have not been adequately harnessed. As a result, African science is often assessed on the basis of the holdings of international databases. We show that a true assessment of African science cannot be reliably undertaken on the basis of the content of international indexing services. Factors related to information explosion, and social, economic and political considerations, often constrain of national databases from being as comprehensive of sources from other countries as they are of their host countries.