PRESERVING THE LEGACY OF AFRICA'S ANALOG SCHOLARS

Some of you need to understand the difference between having done academic work and having your academic work available on Google Scholar.

I keep seeing people make the argument that if you search for a professor on Google Scholar and cannot find their publications, then the professor was probably not productive, not highly rated, or did not do substantial academic work.

No. That is not how scholarship works.

Google Scholar is a digital discovery tool. It is not a universal archive of everything every scholar has ever published.

There are professors whose careers began decades before Google Scholar existed, before ResearchGate, before Academia.edu, before institutional repositories, and, in many cases, before academic publishing itself became predominantly digital.

Someone, often the scholar, their students, collaborators, family members, institution, or even a librarian, has to digitize, scan, upload, index and correctly attribute those old materials before a search engine can find them.

And many people simply never did.

Take my dad, for example.

During his academic career, my father published over 200 articles across books, journals, guides and periodicals.

Some of his research was done before computers were commonplace.

He used a manual typewriter.

I remember his last promotion to Professor that I witnessed before he retired. He had Ghana-Must-Go bags filled with papers, publications, research work, academic materials and documentation, which were packaged and waybilled to his assessors for his promotion.

This was scholarship in the analog era.

But today? You won’t find a Google Scholar profile for my father.

You won’t find him sitting there with thousands of citations neatly aggregated by an algorithm.

He didn’t create a ResearchGate profile.

He didn’t create an Academia.edu profile.

He didn’t spend his career uploading PDFs to institutional repositories.

And no, that does not mean he didn’t do the work.

It means he lived and worked in a different academic infrastructure.

Some of his collaborators have uploaded some of their old work, so you can occasionally stumble across publications connected to him. But a significant portion of his scholarship is still sitting in physical form.

And I am currently trying to trace it.

After retirement, my father donated his books and academic materials, including proceedings and journals, to libraries. So now I am trying to locate these materials, retrieve them, scan them and begin putting this scholarship online.

Think about what this means.

A professor could spend 40 years producing scholarship in Nigeria and leave behind almost no digital footprint.

Not because the scholarship didn’t exist.

Because the internet wasn’t where the scholarship lived.

This is one of the reasons we need to be extremely careful when judging older African scholars using today’s digital metrics.

A young academic today can have every paper automatically indexed, an ORCID profile, Google Scholar, ResearchGate, Scopus, Web of Science, institutional repositories, DOI links and a beautiful digital CV.

An academic from 1975 might have a typewritten manuscript; a publication in a physical journal; a chapter in a book sitting in a university library; conference proceedings nobody has digitized; research reports sitting in departmental archives; newspaper and periodical publications that were never scanned; and boxes of documents in their homes.

One has a digital footprint. The other has an archive. Those are not the same thing.

And this is particularly important when discussing African scholarship.

We have an enormous body of intellectual work that exists in libraries, personal archives, departmental cupboards, physical journals, conference proceedings and old books rather than online databases.

Somebody has to digitize it.

Somebody has to preserve it.

Somebody has to create the metadata.

Somebody has to connect the scholar to the publication.

And until that happens, Google may know nothing about it.

Google Scholar cannot tell you what was never digitized.

So the next time you search for a professor and don’t find much online, don’t immediately conclude that the person did not do much work.

You may simply be looking at a scholar whose 40-year academic career happened before scholarship acquired a digital footprint.

There are entire generations of African scholars whose work we need to rescue from paper before it disappears.

And perhaps one of the most important academic preservation projects we can undertake is not producing new scholarship, but making sure that the scholarship already produced by our predecessors does not disappear simply because nobody scanned it.

Picture attached is that of my dad and my mom. They were both researchers in their time. They don’t have google scholar profiles. But they have footprints their fields.