Research Support Guide for Law Postgraduate Students and Academic Staff

Databases are essential because they:

• provide access to information that is often not available through web searches;
• help researchers locate information relevant to their needs.

Unfortunately, no. There’s still a huge amount of information that is not on the web due to privacy concerns, intellectual property rights, security issues, and many other reasons.

Good and Bad of the Web

A single search on the internet can link you to a thousand Web sites. The Web can be a good source for some information but the library is a more efficient place to search for scholarly materials including articles. On the Web, you may need to wade through many fragments of articles before you find full text that is freely available and appropriate for academic research. 

The web is especially useful for finding:

• Book and movie reviews
• Directories
• Statistics
• Travel information
• Government and non-profit websites

Disadvantages of the web:

• Copyright or ownership of content can be unclear
• Some content is edited on a minute-by-minute basis by non-experts
• Snippets of scholarly information (citations) seldom link to full text without the library's linking services

Online resources available to anyone with access to the internet

• WorldLII Africa

  Free Access to Law Movement. Find what databases WorldLII has by clicking on the name of individual jurisdictions.

• African Law Reporter

  OA database "ALR Online will publish legislation and judgments of the superior courts of African Countries, and superior courts of other countries, on subjects of general interest to African legal scholars, as they are made available. These judgments will be reported in their entirety with short introductory notes, and can be found under the country name, in alphabetical order. Arrangements will be made with the Registrars of the superior courts concerned to submit selected judgments, especially on constitutional law, public law, international law (including humanitarian law), International Commercial Law, African Law and other areas of general legal interest to lawyers in Africa and abroad. This site will also provide references to other sites with complete reports of individual countries, which need not be duplicated. The site also includes a model syllabus and materials for the study of African Law and Development recommended for Universities interested in advancing the study of African Law."

• Commonwealth iLibrary 

  The Commonwealth iLibrary comprises the Commonwealth Secretariat’s publications and covers such topics as globalisation and multinational trade issues, gender, education, law and human rights, and public service management and reform. It includes ebooks and working papers.

• Social Science Research Network (SSRN)

  Includes African Law eJournal

  Archive of social science papers including legal papers.

  The subscribed collections are:

  • Economics Research

  • Financial Economics

  • Legal Scholarship

  • Management Research

• Gazettes.Africa The largest digital collection of free African Gazettes

  Free site. As 2020 collecting: Angola, Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, Mauritius, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria
  Rwanda, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Eswatini, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe

  Gazettes.Africa is a project of Laws.Africa and AfricanLII.

• Connecting-Africa

  Free resource ".. a gateway to African research information and materials produced worldwide. It provides access to 81495 publications from 99 repositories as well as information on 55 Africa experts (researchers, policymakers, development practioners) and on 891 organisations (research or development-related institutes with expertise on Africa)." "The African Studies Centre Leiden in The Netherlands, facilitates Connecting-Africa by providing technical maintenance. Staff of the ASCL Library, Information and Documentation Department are responsible for the evaluation and selection of digital resources for inclusion in Connecting-Africa. This is an ongoing process, and new records are added each month"