Authors - Cossi Blaise Avoussoukpo, Amara Camara, Babou Dione Abstract - Digital scholarly infrastructures increasingly shape academic visibility by supporting the creation, organisation, dissemination, and discovery of research outputs. Existing studies have advanced important dimensions of this domain, including bibliometric evaluation, persistent identiers, metadata standards, and indexing systems. However, they primarily examine these components independently and provide only a limited understanding of how their interactions inuence visibility in contemporary research ecosystems. This paper introduces the Academic Visibility Pipeline Model (AVPM). This conceptual framework conceptualises academic visibility as a sequence of interconnected stages linking research production, metadata structuring, scholarly indexing, identity and aliation aggregation, dissemination, and discovery. By integrating socio-technical coordination, interoperability, and cascading failure, the AVPM explains how visibility emerges and how upstream constraints inuence downstream outcomes. An illustrative application to the Guinea academic visibility ecosystem demonstrates the explanatory value of the framework by identifying structural bottlenecks and tracing their eects across the visibility pipeline. The proposed framework extends conventional publication- and citation-centred perspectives and provides a process-oriented foundation for institutional strategy, research governance, and digital transformation in emerging research ecosystems.
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