Sankore holds every African research institution — 4,581 of them across all 55 countries — and the research they publish, from 1900 to today. Every figure is computed by Sankore from the individual works, the same way for every institution, so any two can be compared.
Countries
55
Every African country
Institutions
4,581
Publications
3,730,007
Counted once each, including works that cross a border.
Updated
October 2, 2026
Sankore is built on open research information. It reconciles the open scholarly record — OpenAlex for works and authorship, Crossref for publishers’ own records, ORCID for researcher identity and ROR for institutional identity — with the public profiles researchers keep themselves, into one record for each work, researcher and institution.
A source’s own totals are never copied. Publications, citations, h-indexes and shares are all recounted from the works, so a figure on one page agrees with the list beneath it and with the same figure everywhere else.
Journal articles, reviews, books and chapters, conference papers, reports and dissertations count. Preprints, datasets, abstracts and editorials are listed on a researcher’s page but not counted, so a working paper and the article it became are not counted twice. A work with authors in several countries counts once for each country and once in a continental total.
Field-weighted citation impact (FWCI) compares a work’s citations with the world average for works of the same field, type and year: 1.00 is the world average, and 2.00 is twice it. The top 10% share is the share of works among the world’s most-cited tenth for their field and year. Both are computed over the works that have been scored.
An institution is ranked on impact only where enough of its works are scored that no single paper can carry the figure, and only where no one person accounts for most of it — otherwise the figure would describe them rather than the institution.
Rankings and comparisons cover the last five complete years. The current year is shown on charts but marked as in progress: it has not finished, and a paper takes months to reach the record, so its figures grow for some time after it ends.
Each work is classified into subject fields — four domains and twenty-six fields beneath them — and often into more than one, so field figures overlap rather than add up to the total. Each work is also matched to the UN Sustainable Development Goals it addresses, from its title and abstract.
Each researcher is one profile, assembled from the author names on their works, their ORCID record and their public profiles. A researcher’s figures count the publications Sankore holds for them; Google Scholar, which also counts theses, books and web pages, usually shows more. Where a university uses Sankore, its research office confirms who its people are.
Universities on Sankore curate their own record: their staff, their departments and their output. A correction a university makes — a paper credited to the wrong institution, two profiles that are one person — is reviewed, and then improves the record everywhere it appears.