A hearty welcome to you! This guide is your starting place for research. The UJ Library has a range of services and facilities dedicated for helping researchers to work efficiently. Whether you are a postgraduate student starting to work on your thesis , an early career researcher or an established academic, the guide will be your friendly companion to finding and effectively using the library and other resources for your research project.
The research cycle is rarely linear and often some (or all) stages will need to be revisited. Remember that different disciplines and research topics may employ different approaches to research, which will impact on the process. Please note some key considerations for each stage on the table below the research cycle.
Image courtesy of the Curtin Library
| Develop a research question |
A research question provides a focus and specifies the purpose of the research:
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| Select Methodology |
The methodology establishes how you will conduct the research:
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| Design data collection and/or instruments |
This design determines how you will collect the required information:
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| Collect, test and analyze data |
This process is often iterative and repeated many times:
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| Use findings |
The results from the analysis need to be interpreted and discussed:
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| Submit document for publication or examination |
Once your manuscript has been prepared:
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Each campus Library has a dedicated Research Commons space for registered Postgraduate students at Master's and Doctoral level as well as Academics. This facility contributes directly to the university’s goal to promote research and support postgraduate and postdoctoral studies. This facility encourages research, social and intellectual dialogue.
Need help with your submission? Please see contact details below:
Mutali Lithole 
mlithole@uj.ac.za 
011 559 3374
Tyson Mabunda ttmabunda@uj.ac.za 011 559 2688
Accredited journals are recognized research output which meet specified criteria and therefore qualify for subsidization by the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET). To receive subsidy or recognition for an article you have written, you should select a journal which is accredited as on the list at the UJ Research Office's website. Here is a quick step-by-step guide on how to find the list:
Different metrics have been developed to quantify the quality and impact of a journal. Each metric has its strengths and weaknesses and should be used in combination with other factors when evaluating a journal. Impact Factor, developed in the 1960s, remains a commonly used measure of journal quality.
An author impact can help scholars not only identify significant voices in their field but also provide one indicator of an author's perceived value - by demonstrating where and how one's work has been cited. There are a few ways to measure impact.
Author impact indicators can be found in the databases such as Scopus, ISI Web of Science and Google Scholar.
Citation tracking is used to discover how many times a particular article has been cited by other articles. As a general rule, high quality articles attract a greater number of citations.
ISI Web of Science is one of the standard tools for tracking citations. It includes a number of citation indexes for the purpose. They are the:
Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED) --1981-present
Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) --1981-present
Arts & Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI) --1981-2016
Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) --2015-present
Scopus is the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature: scientific journals, books and conference proceedings. When using Scopus, you can discover : how many citations a particular article or author has received, citation information for particular journals and the main journals and authors that publish in your area of interest.
SciVal is an online tool that offers quick, easy access to the research performance of 7,000 research institutions and 220 nations worldwide using bibliometrics. It enables you to visualize research performance, benchmark relative to peers, develop collaborative partnerships and analyze research trends
Google Scholar offers citation totals for journal articles and other items in its database. If an article in Google Scholar has been cited by another source, a cited by link will appear below the article entry in Scholar's search results. Clicking the cited by link will display a list of articles that have cited the original article as many of these articles are also likely to display a cited by link. This process can be repeated many times.
Publish or Perish is a software program that retrieves and analyzes academic citations. It uses a variety of data sources (including Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic Search to obtain the raw citations.
The Faculty Librarians will help you with all your queries. See the contact details from the Faculty Subject Guides.
For those new to the research process or new to the University of Johannesburg, the video clip below provides a few library essentials to get you stared. Please contact your Faculty Librarian if you have further questions. See the contact details to the right of this page. Additionally, the Subject LibGuides also provide useful links to subject-specific resources and research tools, as well as contact details for the Faculty Librarians.
Bibliographic management tools (also known as citation or reference management tools) help you organize your research sources and generate bibliographies in multiple citation formats. The University of Johannesburg Libraries subscribe to a tool known as RefWorks which can be accessed on and off-campus. We also offer support for a free bibliographic management tool knows as Mendeley.
Tutorials on how to use RefWorks are available at this YouTube channel. More information is also available at the ProQuest LibGuide. Please note that we offer individual training (contact the Faculty Librarian Research for a booking) and group training sessions for both RefWorks and Mendeley. When considering a tool to use, it is important to note that all of the tools will help you organize your research references and all include a plug-in for word processing programs to format citations and create bibliographies. However, the difference between the tools is that the one offers other features, such as support for collaboration, a web-based interface, and mobile applications.
Your researcher profile is an individual Internet profile that provides a user friendly and efficient way of showcasing your work.
Having a unique profile:
How does a Researcher Profile help you?
In an increasingly competitive research and scholarship environment, how do you distinguish yourself from someone? If your institutional affiliation and/or contact information changes, how is the link between you and your scholarly work maintained? The solution is creating a researcher profile.A profile pulls all your research in one place, mitigating common problems that often arise in searching. Such problems can include variations in authors' names or difficulty in narrowing a search down easily when an author has a common name.If a researcher has worked with multiple granting agencies, research groups, or institutions, a research profile will also make their research easier to find.
Unique author identifiers are useful for the following reasons: