Open Access & Research Practice

Home › Open Access & Research Practice › Explainer Researcher Guide · Open Access One number is supposed to sum up a researcher’s whole career — how much they publish and how much it gets cited. That number is the h-index. Here is exactly what it means, how to work yours out, why three databases will give you three different answers, and why no committee should judge you by it alone. By the FRELIP Editorial Team · Open Access & Research Practice · Reviewed against Hirsch (2005), DORA & the Leiden Manifesto, 2026 1 number productivity + impact combined 3 values Scopus, Web of Science & Google Scholar differ Free Google Scholar shows yours 2005 introduced by physicist J. Hirsch What this guide covers What the h-index is — and why it matters How to calculate it (worked example) Where to find yours — and why the numbers differ What the h-index can’t tell you The African researcher’s context Using it responsibly & how FRELIP helps FRELIP fact-check report Sources What the h-index is — and why it matters The h-index is a single number that tries to capture two things at once: how much a researcher has published, and how often that work is cited. It was proposed in 2005 by the physicist Jorge E. Hirsch (hence its other name, the Hirsch index), and it has since become one of the most widely quoted figures in academic careers — appearing in CVs, grant reviews, and promotion files. The definition is precise: The h-index, defined A researcher has an h-index of h if h of their papers have each been cited at least h times — and their remaining papers have no more than h citations each. So an h-index of 20 means: 20 papers, each cited 20 or more times. The appeal is that it resists two kinds of distortion. A researcher can’t inflate it with one wildly-cited paper (that lifts the count by only one), and they can’t inflate it by publishing dozens of papers nobody cites (those never reach the threshold). It rewards sustained, cited output — which is exactly why evaluators reached for it. Understanding it matters because, fairly or not, this number will be read as shorthand for your standing as a researcher. How to calculate it (worked example) To find an h-index by hand, list every paper’s citation count from highest to lowest, then walk down the list until the citation count drops below the paper’s position number. The last position where citations still meet or beat the rank is the h-index. Take a researcher with seven papers cited 10, 8, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 times: 10#1 · 10≥1 ✓ 8#2 · 8≥2 ✓ 5#3 · 5≥3 ✓ 4#4 · 4≥4 ✓ 3#5 · 3<5 ✗ 2#6 · stop 1#7 · stop The cut-off falls at position 4: four papers have at least 4 citations each, but there is no fifth paper with at least 5. h-index = 4. You will almost never need to do this manually — the databases compute it for you (see next section). But doing it once makes the number concrete, and shows why adding a brand-new paper, or picking up a few more citations on your lower-ranked work, is what actually nudges an h-index upward. Where to find yours — and why the numbers differ Three major databases each calculate an h-index — and they will give you three different numbers. This is not an error. Each database only counts the publications and citations it indexes, and their coverage differs enormously. Source Access Coverage & typical h-index Google Scholar Free — public profile Broadest net (journals, conferences, preprints, theses, repositories, and self-citations) → usually the highest h-index. Also shows the i10-index. Scopus (Elsevier) Subscription Curated journal set → intermediate value. Web of Science (Clarivate) Subscription Most selective coverage → usually the lowest h-index. Studies comparing the three find Google Scholar’s h-index runs, on average, roughly 1.4× a researcher’s Web of Science value, with Scopus a little above Web of Science — though the exact ratio varies by person and field, so treat those as tendencies, not constants. The practical upshot: always state which database an h-index came from. An “h-index of 12” is meaningless without knowing whether it is a (generous) Google Scholar figure or a (conservative) Web of Science one. The free route: a Google Scholar Profile You can see — and show — your own h-index for free by creating a Google Scholar Profile. It displays your h-index and your i10-index (the number of your publications with at least 10 citations each, a Google-Scholar-only metric), and updates automatically as citations accrue. For researchers without a Scopus or Web of Science subscription, this is the accessible option. What the h-index can’t tell you The h-index is useful, but a single number hides a great deal. Every one of these limitations is well established — and every committee member should know them. Limitation What it means for you It only ever rises The h-index never decreases, even if a researcher stops publishing. It measures accumulated standing, not current activity. It is field-dependent Citation cultures differ hugely — biomedicine cites far more than mathematics. An h-index of 15 can be exceptional in one field and average in another. Never compare across disciplines. It favours long careers Because it can only grow, senior researchers almost always out-score early-career ones. It penalises people with less “academic age.” It ignores your role It counts a paper the same whether you were sole author or fifteenth of twenty. Author position and contribution vanish. It can be gamed Excessive self-citation can inflate it, so the raw number isn’t tamper-proof. It flattens your best work Once a paper passes the h threshold, extra citations on it don’t help. A landmark 2,000-citation paper counts the same as one just over the line. Two variants try to patch specific gaps. The m-quotient (Hirsch’s own idea) divides the h-index by the number of years since your

Home › Open Access & Research Practice › Explainer Researcher Guide · Open Access A web link can die. A DOI does not. It is the string of characters that keeps a paper, a dataset or a thesis findable for good — no matter how often the website behind it moves. Here is what a DOI is, how you get one (including the free routes for African research), and why journals now expect it. By the FRELIP Editorial Team · Open Access & Research Practice · Reviewed against DOI Foundation, Crossref & DataCite documentation, 2026 10. every DOI begins with this prefix ~275M DOIs registered worldwide ₦0 free DOI routes for Nigerian research 1 link that never suffers link rot What this guide covers What a DOI is — and why it matters What a DOI looks like How you actually get a DOI DOI vs a plain URL: the link-rot problem The cost barrier — and the free routes for Africa DOIs, ORCID & how FRELIP helps FRELIP fact-check report Sources What a DOI is — and why it matters A DOI — Digital Object Identifier — is a unique, persistent identifier for a research object: a journal article, a dataset, a book chapter, a thesis, a preprint. Once assigned, it never changes, and it always points to wherever that object currently lives online. The DOI Foundation, which governs the system, is careful to say a DOI can identify “any object — physical, digital or abstract,” so although the name says “digital,” the idea is broader: a permanent name tag for a piece of scholarship. The value is easiest to see through its opposite. You have almost certainly clicked a citation’s web link and hit a 404 — page not found. Journals redesign their sites, repositories migrate servers, universities restructure their domains, and the URL you cited last year quietly dies. This is called link rot, and it silently corrodes the scholarly record. A DOI is the cure: the identifier stays constant while the publisher updates the address behind it. Cite the DOI, and your reader still reaches the paper a decade later. Technically, a DOI resolves through the Handle System. When you open https://doi.org/ followed by a DOI, the doi.org proxy looks up the current registered location and forwards you there. The persistence comes from two things working together: the technical resolution service, and a social commitment — the Registration Agencies and their members are obliged to keep the target link current. At the scale of scholarship this now matters enormously: the DOI Foundation reports roughly 275 million DOIs assigned, across more than 155,000 prefixes, resolving about a billion times a month. What a DOI looks like Every DOI has the same two-part shape: a prefix and a suffix, separated by a forward slash. The prefix always starts with 10. and identifies the organisation that registered it; the suffix is chosen by that organisation to identify the specific object. https://doi.org/10.1000/182prefix — the registrant · suffix — the specific object · (this is the DOI Handbook’s own example) A few practical rules follow from this. Always cite the DOI in its full web-link form — https://doi.org/10.xxxx/yyyy — not the old doi: or dx.doi.org styles. APA 7 makes this explicit: standardise every DOI to the https://doi.org/ form, however the source displayed it. Written that way, a DOI is both a citation and a working, permanent hyperlink. Try it yourself Paste any DOI after https://doi.org/ in your browser’s address bar and press enter. It will resolve to the publisher’s current page for that work. That single behaviour — a link that follows the content wherever it goes — is the whole point of the system. How you actually get a DOI Here is the most common point of confusion: you do not get a DOI from doi.org. The DOI Foundation only runs the system. DOIs are issued by Registration Agencies (RAs) — and which one applies depends on what you are identifying. Route 1 — most researchers Your publisher assigns it via Crossref When a journal accepts your article, the publisher (a Crossref member) registers a DOI for it at publication. You do nothing — it appears on the published version. Crossref is the RA for scholarly literature, with 24,000+ member organisations. Route 2 — data, theses, preprints A repository assigns it via DataCite For a dataset, thesis, report or preprint, you deposit it in a repository that is a DataCite member (many university repositories are). The repository mints the DOI as part of the deposit. Route 3 — do it yourself, free Self-deposit in Zenodo No institutional repository? Upload your work to Zenodo (run by CERN). It registers a DataCite DOI for every deposit at no cost — the simplest way for an individual African researcher to mint a citable DOI for a preprint, dataset or report. Behind every one of these routes, the RA member registers metadata alongside the DOI — title, authors, publication date, and more. Crossref and DataCite then make that metadata openly queryable through public APIs (REST, OAI-PMH and others), which is what powers citation linking, indexing and discovery across the whole research ecosystem. DOI vs a plain URL: the link-rot problem Why not just cite the journal’s web address? Because a URL and a DOI are fundamentally different kinds of thing. A plain URL A DOI Persistence Breaks when the site moves or restructures (link rot) Stays constant; the registrant keeps the target updated Metadata None attached — just an address Carries registered, queryable metadata (authors, date, title) Managed? No one is obliged to keep it working An RA member is obliged to maintain resolution Citation-ready Discouraged by most citation styles Required by APA 7 and expected by journals & indexes That is the core value proposition in one line: a URL is where something is right now; a DOI is what something is, forever. For a researcher whose work must remain citable and discoverable years after publication — and whose citations must still

Home › Open Access & Research Practice › Explainer Researcher Guide · Open Access Two researchers can share a name; one researcher can publish under half a dozen name variants across a career. ORCID fixes that with a single, free, permanent iD that follows you for life. Here is what it is, how to set one up in minutes, and how to make it actually work for you. By the FRELIP Editorial Team · Open Access & Research Practice · Reviewed against ORCID primary documentation, 2026 Free for every researcher, for life 16 digits one persistent iD as a web link <1 min to register — name, email, password 10M+ active researchers worldwide What this guide covers What ORCID is — and why it matters How to register your ORCID iD How to add your publications How to link institutions, funders & systems Common mistakes Nigerian researchers make How FRELIP helps you use your ORCID FRELIP fact-check report Sources What ORCID is — and why it matters ORCID stands for Open Researcher and Contributor ID. It is a unique, persistent identifier — free of charge — that connects you, the researcher, to everything you produce: journal articles, book chapters, datasets, grants, peer reviews, patents and theses. Think of it as a permanent digital name tag that no two researchers share and that never changes, even when your name, your institution or your field does. The problem it solves is older than the internet. In Nigerian scholarship especially, names collide constantly — how many A. Okafor, M. Bello or C. Eze entries sit in the world’s databases? At the same time, one person may publish as Chidinma A. Nwosu, then C. A. Nwosu, then Chidinma Adaeze Nwosu-Bello after marriage. Search engines and indexes cannot tell which papers belong to whom. ORCID cuts through this: your iD stays the same through every name change, every move to a new department or university, and every shift in country or discipline. An “Also known as” field even holds your name variants in one place. An ORCID iD looks like a 16-digit number, split into four groups of four and expressed as a web address: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1825-009716 digits · four blocks of four · the last character may be an “X” Those 16 digits are always required in full — you cannot drop the leading zeros. The final character is a checksum computed under the ISO/IEC 7064 (MOD 11-2) standard, which is why it is occasionally a capital X rather than a digit; that is normal, not a typo. Anyone can click your iD and land on your public ORCID record, a single page that shows your verified affiliations, funding and works. ORCID itself is a global not-for-profit organization, sustained by fees from its member institutions — universities, publishers and funders — and governed by a board that represents that membership. Researchers never pay. As of ORCID’s 2025 Annual Report, more than 10.6 million researchers were actively engaged with the registry across 192 countries, with over 20 million iDs issued in total. It has quietly become part of the plumbing of global research — and increasingly, the price of entry. Why it matters now, not “someday” ORCID has moved from “nice to have” to “expected.” More than 3,000 journals — including PLOS, Nature and Elsevier titles — now use ORCID in their submission and peer-review systems, often requiring it for corresponding authors. Major funders such as the US National Institutes of Health, UK Research and Innovation and the Wellcome Trust capture ORCID iDs in grant applications. For a Nigerian researcher aiming at international journals, collaborations or fellowships, not having an iD increasingly means friction at exactly the moment you can least afford it — mid-submission, mid-application. How to register your ORCID iD Registration is genuinely fast — ORCID’s own guidance says it takes less than a minute — and you only need a name, an email address and a password. Here is the whole flow. Step 1 Go to orcid.org/register Open orcid.org/register in any browser. Use an email you will keep long-term — ideally add both your institutional and a personal address later, so you never lose access when you change jobs. Step 2 Enter your name, email and a password First name and email are required; last name is optional but you should add it. Choose a strong password. That is the minimum — no fees, no documents, no institutional approval needed. Step 3 Set your default visibility ORCID asks who can see new information you add — Everyone, Trusted parties, or Only me. Choose Everyone as your default so your record is publicly discoverable (you can still hide individual items later). Step 4 Accept the terms and verify your email Confirm the terms of use and data-processing consent, then click the verification link ORCID emails you. Your record is not fully active until the email is verified. Step 5 Record your iD — and use it everywhere Copy your new 16-digit iD. Add it to your email signature, your CV, your university profile and every manuscript submission from now on. Consistency is what makes the iD work. Before you register: search first You may already have an iD — some publishers or institutions create one on your behalf. Search the ORCID registry for your name, and try registering with an email you have used for journal submissions. Catching this now avoids the single most common ORCID problem: ending up with two records (more on that below). How to add your publications An empty ORCID record does little for you. The value comes from a well-populated record — one that actually lists your works so that reviewers, editors and collaborators see your track record at a glance. You have two routes, and you should prefer the second. The slow way: manual entry You can type each work in by hand under Works → Add → Add manually. This is fine for a book chapter or a local publication that no index carries, but it

By the FRELIP Editorial Team Good research data management (RDM) means data that is organized, documented, preserved, and — where appropriate — shared. But much RDM guidance assumes fast connections, abundant cloud storage, and generous budgets. This briefing reframes RDM for low-bandwidth and intermittent-power settings: lightweight documentation practices, offline-first workflows, choosing storage and backup strategies that survive connectivity gaps, and applying FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) pragmatically rather than aspirationally. We will emphasize habits a researcher can sustain without specialized infrastructure, and explain how well-managed data strengthens both reproducibility and the long-term discoverability of African scholarship.

By the FRELIP Editorial Team Open access promised free knowledge, but the dominant “gold” model often shifts the bill from readers to authors through Article Processing Charges (APCs) that can reach thousands of dollars. Diamond open access offers a different path: journals that charge neither readers nor authors, typically sustained by institutions, scholarly societies, or consortia. This briefing examines why the no-APC model matters especially for the Global South, where author-pays publishing can quietly exclude the researchers it claims to serve. We will look at how Diamond journals are funded, the sustainability questions they face, and why equitable open access policy must account for regions with little funder muscle behind them.

Why the Journal Impact Factor is a poor proxy for research worth, and what to measure instead — a visual guide to DORA, article-level metrics, altmetrics, and societal impact for African researchers.

By the FRELIP Editorial Team Search a single FRELIP query and you may pull records from dozens of repositories at once. The quiet machinery behind that is OAI-PMH — the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. This briefing demystifies how harvesting works: how repositories expose their records as structured Dublin Core metadata, how an aggregator periodically requests new or updated records, and how those records are normalized and indexed for discovery. We will walk through the request-and-response cycle in plain language, explain why metadata quality at the source determines discoverability downstream, and show how this standard lets a thesis deposited at one university surface in a continent-wide search — turning isolated collections into a connected scholarly commons.

By the FRELIP Editorial Team “Predatory” journals charge authors to publish while skipping the peer review and editorial standards that give scholarship its credibility. For early-career African researchers under pressure to publish, the lure of fast acceptance can be costly — to careers and to the public record. This briefing will explain how to tell a legitimate open access journal from a predatory one, why blanket “blacklists” are an imperfect tool, and how curated whitelists such as the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) apply transparent vetting criteria around peer review, editorial process, and licensing. We will translate DOAJ’s standards into a practical checklist a researcher can run through before submitting, and point to FRELIP guides that reinforce these evaluation skills.

How to publish in open access journals for free – diamond OA journals, no-APC routes via DOAJ, and APC waivers for researchers in lower-income countries.