Public defence of doctoral thesis: Rui José António
Doctoral student Rui José António will within library and information science, publicly defend his thesis: Making impact, crafting policy: Agricultural research and its impact on policymaking in Mozambique
Link to Diva (available 3 weeks before the defence)
The defence will be held in English.
Opponent is professor Tove Faber Frandsen from University of Southern Denmark.
The examining committee members are associate professor Jonas Lindahl from Umeå university, professor Göran Sundqvist from University of Gothenburg and professor Merle Jacob from Lunds University.
Chair: Ola Pilerot
Supervisor is Björn Hammarfelt.
The defence is publicly open and can be followed on campus, room: C203. It can also be followed online, here is the zoom link: (will be presented later on)
Abstract
This thesis investigates the production, visibility, and use of agricultural research in Mozambique by focusing on three interconnected dimensions: (i) the coverage of African scientific literature in major bibliographic databases; (ii) the thematic and structural characteristics of agricultural research in Sub-Saharan Africa, with a specific focus on Mozambique; and (iii) the degree to which this research is cited and mobilized in agricultural policy-related documents. Using a combination of bibliometric methods and content analysis of policy documents, the study analyses how agricultural research is generated, represented in major databases, and mobilized in policy-related documents.
The study consists of three linked empirical analyses. The first analysis compares the coverage of a dataset of 837 African journals drawn from African Journals Online (AJOL) across Web of Science (WoS), Scopus, Dimensions, and OpenAlex. The second part focuses on the analysis of the production of research on agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa and Mozambique between 2000 and 2020, with special attention to a comparison between WoS and OpenAlex data for conducting bibliometric analysis in the case of Mozambique. The third part analyses 98 policy and policy-related documents collected from the Ministry of Agriculture and other agricultural institutions to examine whether and how academic literature is cited and mobilized in these texts. It combines content analysis with citation context analysis to identify the types of sources referenced and the functions performed by cited academic literature in policy documents.
The findings show that African research remains underrepresented in selective international databases such as WoS and Scopus, while more inclusive platforms such as Dimensions and OpenAlex capture a wider range of African journals indexed in African Journals Online (AJOL). Of the 837 AJOL journals, Dimensions covers 663 and OpenAlex 477, compared with 147 in Scopus and 94 in WoS. However, broader coverage does not substantially alter the trend identified in previous research on African science: South Africa, Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Kenya continue to dominate production, collaboration, and visibility. In agricultural research specifically, the regional landscape remains marked by international collaboration and thematic focus on farming, food security, and climate-related topics. In Mozambique, Eduardo Mondlane University (UEM) stands out as the main actor in agricultural research, sustaining collaboration networks with regional partners and European countries and institutions.
The analysis of agricultural policy documents reveals that technical reports and grey literature play a central role alongside academic sources. Of 1,216 references identified in the policy corpus, 103 (8.5%) were academic sources. Citations appear mostly in organic and confirmative roles, while direct engagement with local academic publications is limited. Citations provide observable traces of research use, but they do not by themselves demonstrate how research agendas or policy decisions were shaped.
By combining database coverage analysis, bibliometric analysis, and citation context analysis, the thesis examines how agricultural research is made visible in bibliographic databases and represented in policy documents in Mozambique. The thesis also contributes to discussions of research use beyond academia by showing that policy documents are spaces where academic, technical, and institutional knowledge are brought together and mobilized, rather than simple channels through which scientific findings are transferred into policymaking.