Data for "Sub-Saharan Africa's Biomedical Journal Coverage in Scholarly Databases: A comparison of Web of Science, Scopus, EMBASE, PubMed, African Index Medicus and African Journals Online"

Journal lists of all the 46 Sub-Saharan African countries were retrieved manually from Ulrich periodical database using the "country of publication" field in the advanced search interface. Delimiters were used to limit the retrieved results to periodicals in the journal categories and with active status. Ulrich's database usually multiple records for the different formats (eg. online and print), or languages in which a single journal is published. Duplicates were removed from the retrieved results.

Master journal lists for Web of Science indexes comprising of the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE), the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) and the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI) and Emerging Sources Citation Index ESCI. Master journal lists for Scopus, EMBASE and MEDLINE databases were downloaded from their respective publishers' websites. Master journal lists for AJOL was not available on the publishers' website. Therefore, the master journal list from AJOL was created manually by extracting journal information from the publishers' websites. Only active journals were included in the study, where active journals were defined as journals that have published at least an issue in 2021 or 2020. The master journal list for AIM was not available as well. The whole database comprising of 18,949 articles were downloaded with the source (journal names). Journals were sorted to identify unique journal names, where only 15,279 articles had identifiable journal names. Five hundred twenty-four unique journals were identified, with only 74 active journals. Journals that were not indexed in the AIM database in 2020 or 2021 were deemed inactive and were not included in the study. This study was not considered for ethics review because data used was collected from publicly available records.

本研究通过高级搜索界面中的「出版国家」字段，从Ulrich期刊数据库（Ulrich Periodical Database）中手动检索了撒哈拉以南非洲全部46个国家的期刊列表。通过限定符将检索结果筛选为期刊分类下且处于活跃状态的出版物。由于Ulrich期刊数据库通常会为同一期刊的不同出版形式（如在线版与印刷版）或不同语言版本生成多条记录，因此对检索结果进行了去重处理。

Web of Science核心合集索引的主期刊列表涵盖《科学引文索引扩展版》（Science Citation Index Expanded，SCIE）、《社会科学引文索引》（Social Science Citation Index，SSCI）、《艺术与人文引文索引》（Arts and Humanities Citation Index，A&HCI）以及《新兴资源引文索引》（Emerging Sources Citation Index，ESCI）。Scopus、EMBASE及MEDLINE数据库的主期刊列表均从其对应出版商的官方网站下载获取。AJOL数据库的主期刊列表无法从其出版商官网获取，因此本研究通过从其出版商官网提取期刊信息，手动构建了AJOL的主期刊列表。本研究仅纳入活跃期刊，其中活跃期刊定义为在2020年或2021年至少出版过一期的期刊。非洲医学索引（African Index Medicus，AIM）的主期刊列表同样无法获取。最终下载得到包含18949篇文献的完整数据集，每条记录均附带来源期刊名称。对期刊名称进行排序以识别唯一期刊，其中仅15279篇文献可识别其来源期刊名称。最终识别出524种唯一期刊，其中仅74种为活跃期刊。2020年或2021年未被非洲医学索引（AIM）收录的期刊被视为非活跃期刊，未纳入本研究。本研究使用的数据均来自公开可获取的记录，因此无需接受伦理审查。