Identification and analysis of marine fisheries research

Abstract

During 2020, the ASFA Secretariat supported the CECAF-PESCAO project by compiling an inventory of marine fisheries research produced in nine countries (Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Guinea, Mauritania, Morocco, Nigeria, Senegal, Spain). A search methodology was agreed with the CECAF project team, with support from the EAF-Nansen Programme in order to identify relevant marine fisheries research. Further parameters, including publication date and author affiliation, were defined in order to conduct systematic and repeatable searches. In the first stage, online searches were conducted using four sources (ASFA database, Google Scholar, Web of Science and Scopus) resulting in 1 527 references being recorded on the inventory. The second stage involved searching local and nationally held collections (library catalogues, institutional websites or repositories) to identify further references. The second stage resulted in a further 884 unique references being identified. The results from these searches were then combined to produce an inventory of 2 411 unique references. A bibliometric analysis was then conducted on the inventory which revealed intensive publishing activity and strong collaboration across the region, however publishing in predatory journals and difficulty in locating grey literature on online sources were areas where further work is needed to ensure research produced in the area reaches a wide audience. A detailed analysis of research published by authors affiliated to Senegalese institutions was conducted which revealed a significant gender imbalance of authors (only 13 percent of authors identified in the study were female). Due to time constraints, it was not possible to expand this detailed analysis to other countries. Recommendations included in this report are to expand the inventory and analysis to other CECAF member countries and to take steps to ensure the grey literature produced by authors from the CECAF region is indexed by online sources. Two versions of the research inventory are available to download: a simplified version can be downloaded here: https://data.d4science.net/DAGA and a version with full metadata can be downloaded here: https://data.d4science.net/tvvn.