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Niven Library - FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology Library Guide: Selecting a suitable journal

The library supports a number of themes - African ornithology, conservation biology, Antarctic and sub-antarctic biology, specifically birds.

Accredited Journals

Considerations when selecting a journal

Wiley's tips on choosing the right journal in which to publish

Click on the image to view the infographic.

 

 

 

 

 

Postgraduate students are encouraged to publish in peer-reviewed journals which are approved by the DHET (Department of Higher Education and Training). There are two categories of approved journals - those published in South Africa and those published internationally which appear on the Thomson Reuters Science Citation Index list.

UCT's Research Support Hub publishes an updated DHET accredited journals list every year. Visit their site to download it.

Journal suggesters

Some publishers have made databases available that allow you to enter keywords about your research in order to find a suitable journal in which to publish:

Find an Open Access Journal

The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) indexes "high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals". 

Use the box below to search the directory for an open access journal:

 

bioRxiv

bioRxiv (pronounced "bio-archive") is a free online archive and distribution service for unpublished preprints in the life sciences. It is operated by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a not-for-profit research and educational institution. By posting preprints on bioRxiv, authors are able to make their findings immediately available to the scientific community and receive feedback on draft manuscripts before they are submitted to journals.

Articles are not peer-reviewed, edited, or typeset before being posted online. However, all articles undergo a basic screening process for offensive and/or non-scientific content. No endorsement of an article’s methods, assumptions, conclusions, or scientific quality by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory is implied by its appearance in bioRxiv. An article may be posted prior to, or concurrently with, submission to a journal but should not be posted if it has already been published.

Authors may submit a revised version of an article to bioRxiv at any time and can update the bioRxiv record with a link to a version of an article that has been published in a journal. Once posted on bioRxiv, articles are citable and therefore cannot be removed.