ISSN

2310-4988 (PRINT)
2306-5133 (ONLINE)

Focus and scope

The journal publishes high quality peer-reviewed articles merit on any subject related to evaluation, and provide targeted information of professional interest to members of AfrEA and its national associations.  

Aims of the African Evaluation Journal (AEJ):

• AEJ aims to be a high-quality, peer-reviewed journal that builds evaluation-related knowledge and practice in support of effective developmental policies on the African continent.
• AEJ aims to provide a communication platform for scholars and practitioners of evaluation to share and debate ideas about evaluation theory and practice in Africa.
• AEJ aims to promote cross-fertilisation of ideas and methodologies between countries and between evaluation scholars and practitioners in the developed and developing world.
• AEJ aims to promote evaluation scholarship and authorship, and a culture of peer-review in the African evaluation community.

Historic data

Evaluation was established as a trans-disciplinary practice nearly 40 years ago following the growth in government social programmes during the 1960s in the USA. Since then evaluation has evolved as a worldwide discipline central to efforts to hold governance structures and systems accountable, learn from experience and improve policies and programmatic interventions. Evaluation in developing countries has historically been externally promoted and guided. But over the past decade evaluation thinking and practice has taken root in developing countries; with relatively little documentation of how it is evolving through indigenisation and institutionalisation in different contexts. In spite of the increasing number of evaluation journals over the past 20 years, there has been very little scholarly work on evaluation theory and practice in the developing world, and the voices of evaluation practitioners from developing countries have barely found their way onto the pages of evaluation journals. Without writing about their work and ideas it is not surprising that they have not exerted much influence on evaluation scholarship, theory and debate; which is still largely led by scholars and practitioners from Europe, North America and Australasia. Yet evaluation in developing countries is an exciting and fast-developing field, and as evaluation capacities in developing countries have grown, the need for home-grown scholarship and critical reflection has become ever more apparent. This is plainly the case in Africa and it is a concern that AfrEA has committed itself to addressing.

This encompass the following aims:

1. To build a high quality, useful body of evaluation knowledge for development.

• Promote original, high quality and useful research on evaluation theories and practices in Africa, for Africa, by Africans, for the benefit of development on the continent;
• Share good practices in the evaluation of policies, interventions and organisations;
• Encourage and draw together contributions across disciplines, professions and countries;
• Promote meta-analyses and meta-evaluations that can accelerate learning and improve practice.

2. To develop a culture of peer-reviewed publication in African evaluation.

• Challenge African evaluators to engage in, and publish results that establish new frontiers in evaluation theory and practice;
• Challenge international specialists to contribute to the African evaluation knowledge base;
• Encourage and empower young and more experienced specialists working in Africa to publish their work.

3. To stimulate Africa-oriented knowledge networks and collaborative efforts.

• Define and lead networking among scholars and practitioners within Africa and across continents.

4. To strengthen the African voice in evaluation.

• Contribute to national and international debates and scholarship on evaluation for development;
• Actively support the development of African evaluation scholarship;
• Inform and showcase the work of country evaluation associations and professional institutions undertaking evaluation in Africa.

Publication frequency

The journal publishes at least one issue each year. Articles are published online when ready for publication and then printed in an end-of-year compilation. Additional issues may be published for special events (e.g. conferences) and when special themes are addressed.

Types of articles published

Read full details on the submissions guidelines page.

Open access

This is an open access journal which means that all content is freely available without charge to the user or his/her institution. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author. This is in accordance with the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) definition of open access. Learn more about the journal copyright, licensing and publishing rights.

Review process

The journal has a double-blinded peer review process. Manuscripts are initially examined by editorial staff and are sent by the Editor-in-Chief to two expert independent reviewers, either directly or by a Section Editor. Read our full peer review process.

Marketing

AOSIS has a number of ways in which we promote publications. Learn more here.

Membership

AOSIS is a member and/or subscribes to the standards and code of practices of several leading industry organisations. This includes the Directory of Open Access Journals, Ithenticate, Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, CrossRef, Portico and the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Learn more here.

All articles published in the journal are included in:

• AGORA
• Chartered Association of Business Schools Academic Journal Guide 2021
• Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
• EBSCO Host
• GALE, CENGAGE Learning
• GOALI
• Norwegian Register for Scientific Journals, Series and Publishers, Level 1
• SCOPUS

We are working closely with relevant indexing services to ensure that articles published in the journal will be available in their databases when appropriate.

The full text of the journal articles is deposited in the following archives to guarantee long-term preservation:

• AOSIS Library
• Portico
• SA ePublications, Sabinet
• South African Government Libraries

AOSIS is also a participant in the LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) initiative. LOCKSS will enable any library to maintain their own archive of content from AOSIS and other publishers, with minimal technical effort and using cheaply available hardware. The URL to the LOCKSS Publisher Manifest for the journal is, https://aejonline.org/index.php/aej/gateway/lockss. Please inform us if you are using our manifest as we would like to add your name to the list above.

A journal's Impact Factor was originally designed in 1963 as a tool for libraries to compare journals, and identify the most popular ones to subscribe to. It was never intended to measure the quality of journals, and definitely not the quality of individual articles.

The Impact Factor is a journal-level measurement reflecting the yearly average number of citations of recent articles published in that journal. It is frequently used as a proxy for the relative importance of a journal within its field; journals with higher Impact Factors are often deemed to be more important than those with lower ones. Therefore, the more often articles in the journal are cited, the higher its Impact Factor.

The Impact Factor is highly discipline-dependent due to the speed with which articles get cited in each field and the related citation practices. The percentage of total citations occurring in the first two years after publication varies highly amongst disciplines. Accordingly, one cannot compare journals across disciplines based on their relative Impact Factors.

We provide several citation-based measurements for each of our journals, if available. We caution our authors, readers and researchers that they should assess the quality of the content of individual articles, and not judge the quality of articles by the reputation of the journal in which they are published.