Page 19 - Law Academic Newsletter 2015

Law librarians can assist academics with NRF applications
The NRF (National Research Foundation) website states “NRF ratings are allocated based on a researcher’s recent research outputs and impact as perceived by international peer reviewers. The rating system encourages researchers to publish high quality outputs in high impact journals/outlets”. The word impact in the quote has been underlined because this is where our work, as law librarians, can play a most helpful role. There are a number of ways to measure this impact or citation rates, for academic’s publications.
It is important to point out that the Law academics in South Africa do not have much international exposure because so much of what they publish is really only locally applicable. Publications are generally in local journals and are about South African legal issues.
However, we suggest that to start with, one uses the h-index methods used by other academic librarians. These one can obtain from Web of Science and Scopus. An Author search in Web of Science creates the opportunity to “Create citation report” for that author. The report includes the h-index information. In Scopus an author search will give an h-index and numbers of citations. Academics can use this information to satisfy the impact question in their application to NRF.
In addition to this one can supply more information on citations by searching more databases for the author’s name. In our library we would use the following:
• Juta’s law reports
• LexisNexis Butterworths law reports
• General searches in the online material in the Juta
and LexisNexis databases
• Sabinet’s “SA ePublications” allows one to search
for the author’s name in the full- text of the articles. • Heinonline - full-text search
• Westlaw - full-text search
• any other full-text database that you have available
in your library.
It is important to search for all the forms of the name that could possibly be used, e.g. Frans Viljoen; F Viljoen; F H Viljoen and so on.
These searches are time consuming, but often reveal a lot of citation information which is very valuable to the academic in his/her NRF application.
The searches produce lists of citation records that must be checked for duplications and so on. However, it is well worth the effort and time put in.
Shirley Gilmore
Head: Oliver R Tambo Law Library - University of Pretoria
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