Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses data on authorship across the field of African Studies, as well as submission, acceptance, peer review and usage data for the T&F African Studies journals portfolio.

Paper long abstract:

Research can only be truly inclusive and global if voices from all locations, genders, ethnicities, backgrounds and areas of experience are heard and represented across all stages of knowledge production and academic publishing. The publishing process plays a key role in supporting the dissemination and impact of high-quality research within the research lifecycle, but it can also be a propagator of inequality. In this paper, I analyse data on authorship across the field of African Studies from a range of publishers, as well as in-house submission, acceptance rates, peer review figures and usage data for the Routledge, Taylor & Francis African Studies journals portfolio, exploring how we currently gauge diversity within knowledge production, whether journal networks have become more diverse in recent years, and how else diversity could be assessed going forward.