Accredited / approved journals are defined by the National Department of Education as being:
"peer reviewed periodical publications devoted to disseminating original research and new developments within specific disciplines, sub-disciplines or fields of study. These include original articles, research letters, research papers and review articles."
Only approved/accredited journals earn subsidy. Articles published in approved journals receive subsidy which is provided by the Department to institutions. In the case of UKZN, authors receive productivity units (PUs) for articles published in approved journals which translates into a portion of the funds being made available for researchers.
Database vendors use particular criteria to decide if a journal should be included in their collection. If a journal you publish in is not in any list it probably means it has either not been submitted to that vendor for evaluation or does not meet the criteria of that particular vendor. Many South African journals do not appear in these large international collections, hence the DHET list.
What are these lists and where to find them
These lists are from the following core databases and the actual lists are provided on the UKZN Research Office website:
DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals)
Science Citation Index (Web of Science core collection)
Social Science Citation Index (Web of Science core collection)
Arts and Humanities Citation Index (Web of Science core collection)
International Bibliography of the Social Sciences (IBSS)
SciELO (Scientific Electronic Online library) - South Africa's premier online open access - free to access and publish full text database of the SA research community)
DHET list (The Department of Higher Education has created its own list of approved South African publications that do not appear in the above lists)
NOTE: These lists are updated every year. Please see the UKZN Research Office site for the latest lists
UKZN Library Services subscribes to the ISI and Scopus collections from whence these lists come and these databases are searchable by author, title, keyword, journal etc. They also provide metrics such as H index, journal impact factors, author information etc. These two collections are accessible from the Databases A-Z list under the Resources option on the UKZN Library site. They are considered two of the world's leading collections.
ISI / Web of Science is publsihed by Clarivate and used to be known as ISI or Institute for Scienctific Information and is now known as Web of Science. Much full text is available.
SCOPUS is published by Elsevier and includes over 34 000 peer reviewed journals. This collection covers life sciences, health and physical sciences and increasingly the social sciences. Scopus is quite sophisticated in terms of author and instituitonal information and metrics. Much full text is available.
SciELO is South Africa's open access full text database of peer reviewed journals. SciELO is managed by ASSAf - the Academy of Scinece of South Africa; funded by the South African Department of Science and Technology (DSI) and endorsed by DHET.