This repository contains code and data querying the OpenAlex and Crossref APIs to check for presence of African Journals Online (AJOL) journals in OpenAlex and Crossref by ISSN. For OpenAlex, both the ISSN and ISSN-L field were queried.
The current check was done on February 19, 2022.
ISSNs were retrieved for 533 of 546 journals from the AJOL website. Of these, 467 journals were found in Crossref, and 488 in OpenAlex.
All titles with ISSNs in Crossref were also found by ISSN in OpenAlex, with one exception (Caliphate Journal of Science and Technology). Twenty-two (22) journals not using Crossref DOIs were found by ISSN in OpenAlex. All of these only had an ISSN-L identifier in OpenAlex, with null values in the ISSN field.
Of the 466 titles present in Crossref and OpenAlex, OpenAlex has more records than Crossref for 247 titles, while Crossref has more records for 105 titles. This could be due to not all articles from a journal having DOIs (e.g. when a journal only started assigning DOIs from a certain year onwards) and incomplete detection by OpenAlex, respectively, but warrants further checks.
Scripts:
00_AJOL_journals.R
01_AJOL_OpenAlex.R
02_AJOL_Crossref.R
03_AJOL_analyze.R
Resulting dataset:
AJOL_OpenAlex_Crossref_2022-02-19.csv
Limitations / next steps:
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Two journals (South African Family Practice (SAFP) and South African Journal of Clinical Nutrition (SAJCN) have the same ISSN/eISSN. Both ISSNs resolve to SAFP in OpenAlex and Crossref. Currently, this is not corrected in the dataset, which therefore contains duplicate data for SAFP and SAJCN.
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A small number of ISSNs retrieved from the AJOL website (4 out of 667 unique ISSNs) were found to contain typos/errors (e.g. additional or missing digits). No API results were returned for these ISSNs.
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No additional information was collected on e.g. type of publication or publication year to investigate differences in record count in OpenAlex and Crossref for journals included in both.
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It was not checked whether OpenAlex includes additional AJOL journal titles when searched not by ISSN, but e.g. by journal name.
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OpenAlex is actively improving the quality of its coverage. OpenAlex metadata (included in AJOL_OpenAlex_2022-02-19.csv) show that 237 of the 488 AJOL journals found in OpenAlex have been added as 'Venues' on February 3, 2022.