The recent African Universities Summit at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa, reflects a new interest in university rankings in Africa and also growing concerns about the quality of the continent’s universities. The release at the summit of a ranking according to a single indicator, field normalised citations per paper, showed that South African universities were well ahead of the rest of the continent with Egypt coming a distant second. There were, however, some unexpectedly strong performances from places such as the University of Port Harcourt, Nigeria, the University of Nairobi, Kenya, and Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia. More...