Objective This study aims to find out the coverage of biomedical journals published in Sub-Saharan Africa in four authoritative international databases-Web of Science, Scopus, MEDLINE and EMBASE and two Africa-focused scholarly databases-Africa Journals Online (AJOL) and African Index Medicus (AIM). Methods Lists of active journals that are published in the 46 Sub-Saharan African countries were retrieved from the Ulrich periodical directory to create master journal lists. Unique journals from other databases that were not found in Ulrich were added to the master journal list. The six databases included in this study were searched for journals on the master lists. Results Only 23 of the 46 Sub-Saharan African countries had at least one biomedical journal. Only about one-quarter (152) of the 560 biomedical journals from Sub-Saharan Africa were found in at least one of the biomedical databases. South African journals accounted for more than 50% of all the Sub-Saharan journals in the international scholarly databases. AJOL contains the highest number of biomedical journals from Sub-Saharan Africa, followed by Scopus and EMBASE. AJOL asserts its importance by covering the highest number of unique journals and having a representative number of journals in all biomedical sub-disciplines. Conclusion The majority of studies from Sub-Saharan Africa are left out when biomedical evidence-based researchers only retrieve studies from authoritative international databases. Searching Google Scholar and the African research databases of AJOL and AIM would increase the number of studies from the region.

中文翻译：

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撒哈拉以南非洲地区学术数据库中的生物医学期刊覆盖率：Web of Science、Scopus、EMBASE、MEDLINE、African Index Medicus 和 Africa Journals Online 的比较。

目的 本研究旨在了解四个权威国际数据库（Web of Science、Scopus、MEDLINE 和 EMBASE）以及两个以非洲为重点的学术数据库（Africa Journals Online (AJOL) 和 African Index）中撒哈拉以南非洲地区出版的生物医学期刊的覆盖情况。医学（AIM）。方法 从 Ulrich 期刊目录中检索 46 个撒哈拉以南非洲国家出版的活跃期刊列表，以创建主期刊列表。Ulrich 中未找到的来自其他数据库的独特期刊已添加到主期刊列表中。在本研究中包含的六个数据库中搜索了主列表上的期刊。结果 46 个撒哈拉以南非洲国家中只有 23 个拥有至少一本生物医学期刊。来自撒哈拉以南非洲地区的 560 种生物医学期刊中，只有约四分之一 (152 种) 在至少一个生物医学数据库中找到。在国际学术数据库中，南非期刊占所有撒哈拉以南地区期刊的50%以上。AJOL 包含来自撒哈拉以南非洲地区的生物医学期刊数量最多，其次是 Scopus 和 EMBASE。AJOL 通过覆盖最多数量的独特期刊并在所有生物医学子学科中拥有具有代表性的期刊数量来彰显其重要性。结论 当生物医学循证研究人员仅从权威国际数据库中检索研究时，来自撒哈拉以南非洲的大多数研究都被排除在外。搜索 Google Scholar 以及 AJOL 和 AIM 的非洲研究数据库将增加该地区的研究数量。