Accredited journals - the missing piece of your research puzzle?

Quite a few lecturers have been asking me how they can limit their results in a database to accredited journals only.

It is important to remember that you can limit your searching in a database to include only scholarly, peer-reviewed or academic journals - accredited journals is not a searching option.

Some of the reasons for this are that accreditation changes year on year and while there are international lists, countries also have their own local list of accredited journals. This makes it difficult for databases to keep such lists as search options.

How do you go about getting articles from accredited journals then?

To only search in accredited journals, you would have to have the names of those journals and then limit your searches in the databases to those specific journals only. (You simply add the name of the accredited journal in the search box and choose Journal title/Publication title/Source from the field box.)

The list of SA accredited journals is not too long and it fairly easy to read through and then identify the journals that would suit your topic.

The internationally accredited journals (ISI or IBBS), however, present a problem as the lists has over 15 000 journals covering all research disciplines and is searchable only with the ISSN, title or part of the title of the journal.

In other words it is extremely difficult to identify all the journals within a specific topic. It is much easier if you already have a reference to a journal to then look up the title in the accreditation list.

So in a nutshell:

• get the name of accredited journals from the lists and search by that journal only, or
• get articles you like and then check if they journals they are published in are accredited

Unfortunately, as with research, there is no easy or quick way.