The Salience of African Scholars in Education Research

The aim of this article is to investigate the authorship of Education research in Africa, within the framework of global Education research production. The negative effect of a low scholarly output in the global pool is explicated. The 2012 volumes of all Thomsons Reuter (previously called the ISI, or Institute for Scientific Information) indexed journals in the field of Education were taken as data pool. The authorship of the 18 523 articles published in this pool was studied. Africa contributed in total 395 authors, representing only 2.13 per cent of the author pool; but taken as a whole. The distributions of authors as per journal, per nations in Africa, and per sub-field of Education knowledge are analysed and recommendations for raising the profile of African scholars in the global circuit of publishing in the field of Education are made.