Choosing Wisely

Features of Legitimate OA Journals

 There are things to look out for when trying to decide if a free publication journal
is legitimate:

1. Mission statement—The mission statement for an OA journal should be

available on their website.

2. Publication history—Is the journal well established? How long has it been
available?

3. Editorial board—Who are the members of the editorial board, and what are
their credentials?

4. Indexing—Can the journal be found in a reliable database?

5. Peer review—What is the peer review process? Does the journal allow
enough time in the process for a reliable assessment of quality?

6. Impact factor—What is the average number of times the journal is cited

over a two-year period?

Features of Illegitimate OA Journals

There are predatory publications that take advantage of the OA format, and they
are something to be wary of. Here are some things to look out for:

1. Contact information—Is contact information provided? Can it be verified?

2. Turnaround—If the journal makes dubious claims about the amount of time
from submission to publication, it is likely unreliable.

3. Editorial board—Much like determining legitimacy, looking at the editorial

board and their credentials can help determine illegitimacy.
 4. Indexing—Can the journal be found in any scholarly databases?

5. Peer review—Is there a statement about the peer review process? Does it
fit what you know about peer review?

How to Find Scholarly Articles

Identify Keywords
Keywords are included in an article by the author. Keywords are an excellent way
to find content relevant to your research topic or area of interest. In academic
searches, much like you would on a search engine, you can use keywords to
navigate through what is available to find exactly what you're looking for.

Authors provide keywords that will help you easily find their article when
researching a related topic, often including general terms to accommodate
broader searches, as well as some more specific terms for those with a narrower
scope. Keywords can be used individually or in combination to refine your
scholarly article search.

Narrow Down Results

Sometimes, search results can be overwhelming, and searching for free articles on
a journal database is no exception, but there are multiple ways to narrow down
your results. A good place to start is discipline.

What category does your topic fall into (psychology, architecture, machine
learning, etc.)? You can also narrow down your search with a year range if you're
looking for articles that are more recent.

A Boolean search can be incredibly helpful. This entails including terms like AND
between two keywords in your search if you need both keywords to be in your
results (or, if you are looking to exclude certain keywords, to exclude these words
from the results).

Consider Different Avenues

If you're not having luck using keywords in your search for free articles, you may
still be able to find what you're looking for by changing your tactics. Casting a
wider net sometimes yields positive results, so it may be helpful to try searching
by subject if keywords aren't getting you anywhere.

You can search for a specific publisher to see if they have OA publications in the
academic journal database. And, if you know more precisely what you're looking
for, you can search for the title of the article or the author's name.

The Top 21 Free Online Journal and Research

Databases
Navigating OA journals, research article databases, and academic websites trying
to find high-quality sources for your research can really make your head spin.
What constitutes a reliable database? What is a useful resource for your discipline
and research topic? How can you find and access full-text, peer-reviewed articles?

Fortunately, we're here to help. Having covered some of the ins and outs of peer
review, OA journals, and how to search for articles, we have compiled a list of the
top 21 free online journals and the best research databases. This list of databases
is a great resource to help you navigate the wide world of academic research.

These databases provide a variety of free sources, from abstracts and citations to
full-text, peer-reviewed OA journals. With databases covering specific areas of
research and interdisciplinary databases that provide a variety of material, these
are some of our favorite free databases, and they're totally legit!

1. CORE
CORE is a multidisciplinary aggregator of OA research. CORE has the largest
collection of OA articles available. It allows users to search more than 219 million
OA articles. While most of these link to the full-text article on the original
publisher's site, or to a PDF available for download, five million records are hosted
directly on CORE.

CORE's mission statement is a simple and straightforward commitment to offering

OA articles to anyone, anywhere in the world. They also host communities that
are available for researchers to join and an ambassador community to enhance
their services globally. In addition to a straightforward keyword search, CORE
offers advanced search options to filter results by publication type, year,
language, journal, repository, and author.

CORE's user interface is easy to use and navigate. Search results can be sorted
based on relevance or recency, and you can search for relevant content directly
from the results screen.

Collection: 219,537,133 OA articles

Other Services: Additional services are available from CORE, with extras that are
geared toward researchers, repositories, and businesses. There are tools for
accessing raw data, including an API that provides direct access to data, datasets
that are available for download, and FastSync for syncing data content from the
CORE database.

CORE has a recommender plug-in that suggests relevant OA content in the

database while conducting a search and a discovery feature that helps you
discover OA versions of paywalled articles. Other features include tools for
managing content, such as a dashboard for managing repository output and the
Repository Edition service to enhance discoverability.

Good Source of Peer-Reviewed Articles: Yes

Advanced Search Options: Language, author, journal, publisher, repository, DOI,

year

https://www.scribendi.com/academy/articles/
free_online_journal_and_research_databases.en.html