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"

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Index Expanded (SCIE), the Social Science

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Index (SSCI) and the Arts and Humanities

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Index (A&HCI) and Emerging Sources

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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.