The Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is the best-known bibliometric indicator of academic journal prestige and influence. However, the JIF is not appropriate for measuring the quality of academic work, especially in African Studies.
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What are the benefits of ‘preprints’?
In academic publishing, a preprint is a version of a research paper that precedes formal peer review and publication in scholarly journal.
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Unicode – Characters (Part 6)
The ever-increasing number of additional characters meant that Unicode had to be expanded again and again. The set of characters is now divided into several levels ("planes"). The practical thing is that in this way you can arrange a certain number of additional characters on each of the now 17 levels (with a 16-bit coding…
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Survey on research data!
Funding institutions increasingly require scientists to make their research data accessible and reusable in research data repositories. However, the management of research data in African studies is just in its beginnings, and in part accompanied by uncertainties about how it should be implemented. Not least, in African studies, research data are particularly sensitive with regard…
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Unicode – Characters (Part 5)
An interactive scrolling of all previously recorded 137,374 Unicode characters, which are listed in 285 blocks and currently include 146 fonts from around the world (as of 2018), can be viewed on the website of Babelstone. (The hexadecimal encoding of the characters also runs through the scroll.) Further Search Options An approximate idea of where…
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Unicode – Characters (Part 4)
Even more common than encoding in the decimal system is encoding in the hexadecimal system in Unicode. Now you may wonder why you cannot just stick to working with decimal codes. The world of computers, however, is a world of bits and bytes; it works mainly with binary numbers. Unicode in the hexadecimal system In…
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Unicode – Characters (Part 3)
Once you have found, in one of the various Unicode tables, the decimal codes for the characters of different writing systems that you would like to insert into your document, you can start "typing" the characters on the computer keyboard. This only requires a few steps. Keyboard inputs in the Unicode decimal system ("Windows Alt…
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Unicode – Characters (Part 2)
Creating and editing foreign-language documents is one of the tasks scientists often are engaged with. It is thus convenient, if they may enter their texts also in the original languages and use for that purpose the appropriate characters. The character codes of the Unicode standard offer the means to do so. But where, for example,…
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Unicode – Characters (Part 1)
If you work a lot with foreign languages, you might also wish to enter characters from other writing systems into your word processor, whether it be Arabic characters, special characters developed from Latin, African writing systems like Adlam or Bamum, Ethiopian characters or Meroitic hieroglyphics. However, this is not always easy, since the preinstalled software…
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Green Open Access or Self-Archiving Rights (Part 4)
Since not all academic authors exercise their right to secondary publication, some universities and other institutions now want to commit their employees to self-archiving. However, the idea of a "duty of secondary publication" is met with criticism from some scholars. Secondary publication as a right or a duty? The secondary publication right, i.e. the right…
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