Scholarly publishing in a developing nation

The scholarly literature from the developing world is low, and the scientific impact in some countries, including Libya, is much lower compared with their peers. This study explores the editorial practices and editors’ perspectives to gain insight into the standard of scholarly publishing in Libya.

Methods
Between January 21th 2022 and February 12th 2022, the editors-in-chief (EC) of Libyan academic journals were identified and invited to participate in this study, with a self-administered questionnaire that includes questions on the editorial practices, the degree of satisfaction with the submitted and published manuscripts, the review process, and the journal's performance, as well as the challenges facing the journals. The websites of the journals were also examined for journal quality and indexation coverage and citations were assessed. Moreover, we examined the number of citations in Google Scholar for all articles published in 2019 in each journal. Descriptive statistics were used to quantitatively summarize the data and thematic analysis were used for the narrative text.