Institutional identity is continental: all 4,545 institutions across all 55 African countries are listed, enumerated from the ROR data dump. Research output is not. Sweeping a country’s works takes roughly eleven minutes of pipeline time and a great deal of care, and 1 countries have been through it so far.
Countries swept
1 of 55
Institutions
4,545
228 of them sit in a swept country.
Publications
65,070
Counted once each, including works that cross a border.
Last sweep
September 11, 2026
The graph is rebuilt from staged records, so a fix can be replayed.
Research crosses borders. When Ghana was swept, every work with a Ghanaian author came in — and so did that work’s Egyptian, Kenyan and South African co-authors, with their institutions. The graph therefore holds real, correctly-attributed publications for countries it has never swept.
Those figures are correct about the works and catastrophically wrong as a statement about the country. Egypt produces tens of thousands of papers a year; the few thousand here are only the ones that happened to have a Libyan or Ghanaian collaborator. So an unswept country is never ranked, never compared on the same axis as a swept one, and never presented as research output. It is labelled, in words, everywhere it appears.
These countries can be ranked, compared and presented as research output.
Works the graph holds for these countries without having swept them — reached through co-authorship, or left by a sweep that did not complete. Real works, badly incomplete as a national figure.
Open indexes split one researcher across several profiles — the worst case in this graph is a Libyan researcher who arrived as thirty-two. They also attribute one institution’s works to another with a similar name. Both failures are visible rather than hidden: a scholar page says how its identity was established, and an institution whose attribution could not be corroborated says so on the page.
If a figure here is wrong about your institution, that is worth knowing and worth telling us.
Swept from 2022 appears wherever a figure can be trusted as national output.