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scientific societies

A lot of periodicals are redirects to the learned/scientific society that published them. e.g. Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society.

Stubs: {{sci-org-stub}}
Categories: Category:Scientific societies and Category:Learned societies

Does anyone know of a project that covers those societies; if not, do we want to include them within our scope? John Vandenberg 06:42, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

We certainly should include the journals they publish. I'm sure this will attract editors to the articles on the societies and we can see how it develops. The societies do have a wider role than publishing. However, where as in your example the article contains material about a journal, it should be in on of our categories. --Bduke 08:01, 2 September 2007 (UTC)
Wikipedia:WikiProject Organizations has some coverage of learned societies. --Bduke 08:03, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

Redirects should still be categorized as journals. See this edit for an example, and look at how it appears in Category:Philosophy journals. It is also an idea to keep track of these redirects, as eventually they should be turned into redirects to a section (ie. the section in the society article about the journal) or into their own articles. A "redirects with possibilities" category is often the most useful way to keep track of redirects like that. Carcharoth 00:31, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

Looks good. I would like to automate tagging any redirects in this way. Any idea's how to compile a list of all redirect titles that a likely to be "journals"? The best approaches I can think of are:
  • look for any redirects to society pages and manually cull that list down.
  • google search for journals on wikipedia and filter that down to only contain redirects
John Vandenberg 02:10, 4 September 2007 (UTC)

some cleanup work..

Im doing some automated and manual fixes to the pages that use the journals infobox, and coming across some work to be done so I'll list them here until I have time to work on them (unless someone beats me to it :-) ):

John Vandenberg 02:04, 4 September 2007 (UTC)

unanswered humanities help desk question

In case anyone is keen to hit the stacks, here is an unanswered journal related question that I asked: Wikipedia:Reference_desk/Archives/Humanities/2007_August_4#Southern_Literary_Journal_and_Monthly_Magazine. There are two others that google can find: [1]. John Vandenberg 11:19, 5 September 2007 (UTC)

Don't have access to a library with those, but I've replied over there with some thoughts. Carcharoth 12:27, 5 September 2007 (UTC)

Specifically, the threads are:

The other one wasn't really about a journal. Someone should search the other desks as well. That was just the Humanities reference desk. Carcharoth 12:31, 5 September 2007 (UTC)

Academic society at AfD

Not sure if this is the right place to raise this, but the Society for Cryobiology, which publishes the journal Cryobiology, is currently at AfD: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/International Society for Cryobiology.

This reminds me that I've been meaning to raise the idea of thrashing out guidelines to notability for academic journals, societies etc. If articles on more obscure journals/societies etc are created by the activities of this WikiProject, then defending them at AfD is going to become a major concern. Espresso Addict 13:58, 13 September 2007 (UTC)

The article on the society is I think being adequately defended. But on the broader question ,we can try to set up a deletion notification as for other projects. However, keep in mind that this is not a question of always defending the articles, but rather of seeing they have sufficient informed discussion, pro or con. Please see Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting; we now need to figure out how to do it. I suggest we include not just academic journals but societies as well, as the articles are often connected or combined, and that we treat "academic' very broadly. EA, do you volunteer to check Afd? Can you run one of the tools listed there?--it is much more difficult otherwise. I will offer to keep an eye on PROD--at present there are not more than one or two a week there. DGG (talk)
I take your point about 'defending'; I meant that I believe this WikiProject needs to think carefully about what it considers to be notable, with reference to the views of the broader Wikipedia community & the general notability guidelines. I find it hard to see community consensus favouring adding every academic journal, no matter how low impact/shortlived/low circulation, and I'm not in favour of doing lots of writing that gets zapped at AfD.
I could check out AfD most days if that would be of use. I don't usually track the full page these days, but skimming for journals/academic conferences/societies wouldn't be nearly as difficult as checking for academics. Unfortunately, I've never managed to get any of the delsort tools to work for me. I run IE 6 and it seems to be becoming less and less compatible with editing Wikipedia. There may be some mileage in my switching to Firefox, but I'd need to discuss it with my sys admin. Espresso Addict 05:04, 14 September 2007 (UTC)
There are automatic procedures for generating notices. The most used one requires that all articles be tagged with a work group banner. Doing this would be a formidable undertaking, and I am not sure the results would pay. There are relatively few such deletions at present. It can probably be done with a bot using the categories, but this is an area I have no expertise in.
I call your attention however to User:AlexNewArtBot/AcademicSearchResult and the other pages there. There is also a log view--User:AlexNewArtBot/AcademicLog, with the successive days visible in the history--this view has the advantage of showing the terms matched by the grep expression. I do not regularly scan this one, but I sometimes scan the corresponding one for Education, in the log view. WW could probably try to set up a similar one for journals. It is possible to have this linked and transcluded onto one of the project pages. You'lll see from the main page there how other projects do it. DGG (talk) 04:54, 15 September 2007 (UTC)
I've manually checked 12-15 Sept without finding anything relevant beyond the society mentioned above, so I suspect creating a delsort category would be overkill. I'll keep on scanning for the moment, and create a project subpage when more articles turn up, unless anyone has a better solution.
A variant of the AlexNewArtBot would definitely be useful, although assuming it's only scanning new articles it wouldn't sort the problem of patrolling AfD. Espresso Addict 23:40, 15 September 2007 (UTC)

European Conference on Artificial Intelligence on AFD

Copied from an announcement by Lambiam in Wikiproject CS: European Conference on Artificial Intelligence is on AFD: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/European Conference on Artificial Intelligence. —David Eppstein 23:00, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

Sorry, I've got a bit behind on checking AfD. Both Music Theory Spectrum & Symbolic Interaction (journal) were kept. Espresso Addict 05:54, 4 October 2007 (UTC)
And again I think you're heroes, defending treasures the rest of the community don't realize they're sitting on. Alastair Haines 14:02, 4 October 2007 (UTC)
The discussion on that AfD on European Conference on Artificial Intelligence is going as keep, but it is a relatively week and poorly documented article. we really need to do considerably better and the ease of this AfD may not hold as more people notice. To a certain extent AfD often accepts articles on computer science and technology if some well known people speak for them strongly enough, even if the references are deficient; this does not happen as easily on most other subjects. DGG (talk) 00:11, 5 October 2007 (UTC)
Science and medicine in general seem to do better than humanities and arts at AfD. I suspect it reflects the balance of backgrounds of contributors to Wikipedia. Espresso Addict 08:21, 5 October 2007 (UTC)
Lol, and the perhaps the personalities of people in the disciplines also. An old theory that's been exploded (unless useful in teaching) gets scrapped in the sciences. In the humanities, there are a thousand ways to analyze dead issues. I spend my life reading languages no one has spoken for 3,000 years! I try to understand why people who were wrong disagreed with other people who were also wrong, but in a different way, then show that medieval commentators misunderstood the disagreement. No wonder I'm wrong headed about notability. ;) Alastair Haines 16:55, 10 October 2007 (UTC)


Update on monitoring deletion

The deletion monitoring subpage has now been in operation for a month, during which time 19 AfDs & 11 PRODs have been listed, though some have been of only marginal relevance. (The latter is probably an underestimate of the total, as I don't think PRODs have been continuously checked.) Does anyone have any idea whether this is enough to justify a separate deletion sort page?

I suspect it would be easier to monitor related deletions if more people were involved, and also probably more equitable to have a community deletion sorting page, rather than a specific subpage of this WikiProject. One problem would be coming up with an easily understandable title for the page, as "academic journals" excludes conferences and societies, which come up for deletion more commonly than journals. Espresso Addict 23:18, 19 October 2007 (UTC)

A community sorting page sounds like a good idea to spread the load. How about Academic journals, societies and conferences for a title, the first two words give people the idea, and context will suggest their inter-relatedness. Alastair Haines 10:51, 20 October 2007 (UTC)
I agree that there is sufficient need for a proper delsort page; all that is required is a pagename that encompasses it all. Alastair's suggestion is a good one. Academia is the simpler, provided everyone understands that adacemics are listed on "Academics and educators". Another option is Academic organisations, or Learned organisations in order to catch organisations that are not strictly academic. John Vandenberg 12:26, 20 October 2007 (UTC)
I agree with "Academic journals, societies and conferences" as a title. Hopefully people will look at the page if they think the deletion debate/notice they want to sort should go there, and there can be a bit of text explaining that related articles (eg. awards) can go here, but that other related articles (eg. university-related stuff and academics and educators) should go elsewhere. The only worry I have is that we should really have some clear notability guidance, as setting up such a page might conceivably increase the number of nominations, and there should be arguments in place to defend articles if needed, or support the deletion if needed. Carcharoth 13:04, 20 October 2007 (UTC)
I too agree with Academic journals, societies and conferences as the title; I think Academia would confuse too many people over what gets listed there and what at Academics and Educators. Either way, the text needs to make absolutely clear what is listed where. Some of the grey areas I recall encountering in the past month are student newspapers, student clubs, amateur societies, literary publications, publishing companies of educational material and academic libraries.
Re Carcharoth's point, we've had no success in deciding notability guidelines -- I suspect the project members are in reasonable agreement at least as regards journals, but external comments have not been possible to incorporate. It might be easier to write them once some more relevant items have been gone through the system. Espresso Addict 19:29, 20 October 2007 (UTC)

I'm afraid that I'm busy until the end of November and won't be able to systematically scan AfD/Prods for related articles. The last day that has been completely scanned is 27 October. I put in the request at delsort on 23 October, but so far there's been no feedback from those not involved in this project. Espresso Addict 12:08, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

Other stuff

While looking around, I found Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Infobox Journal Update Bot and Template:Infobox nursing journal. Just noting them here. Carcharoth 23:43, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

The template seems to be used on only one nursing journal article. Others listed in List of nursing journals seem to use the general template for journals, although the list is mostly redlinks. I suggest we put the nursing template up for deletion as redundant. --Bduke 23:56, 1 September 2007 (UTC)
I agree. Who wants to do the honours? Carcharoth 00:11, 2 September 2007 (UTC)
Done. John Vandenberg 06:01, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

I also found {{Journal-stub}}, which got moved to {{Sci-journal-stub}}. Which is unfortunate, as many humanities journals have the stub template on them. Around 210 article use the journal-stub template, and around 660 use either journal-stub or sci-journal-stub. I will list these below as well. Carcharoth 00:40, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

Found the discussion here, from about two years ago. I think a separate stub for non-scientific journals is definitely needed. Anyone here know enough about stubs? I'm going to drop a note to the people involved in that old discussion. Carcharoth 00:45, 2 September 2007 (UTC)
Looks to me as if a separate journal-stub would be very sensible, and indeed envisaged in that very discussion. Perhaps "upmerged" (i.e. feeding into a more general stub category) pro temps if there's still concerns about this being rather small for a full-fledged stub type. (60 or more articles is "traditional".) You might want to list this at WP:WSS/P given the prior deletion, just to avoid any confusion. Alai 00:58, 2 September 2007 (UTC)
Indeed so. When the stub type was changed, almost all the journals with stub articles were scientific - the few arts/humanities journals there were very probably got moved to magazine-stub, which isn't really appropriate. By normal stub sorting practice, x-journal-stub would imply that a parent journal-stub would exist, so it's surprising that we haven't got one, considering we have sci-journal-stub. A proposal at WP:WSS/P would very probably get quickly approved with no fuss, if there are indeed as many as you suggest (the usual guideline - as Alai points out - is 60 stubs, but that's reduced somewhat if it's the main stub type of a wikiproject, which it would be in this case). Grutness...wha? 01:22, 2 September 2007 (UTC)
D'oh, WPJ, I managed not to notice that. That, plus the existing subcat-to-be, essentially reduces the requisite number to the proverbial reasonable smattering. Alai 03:02, 2 September 2007 (UTC)
As someone who has recently shoveled out the Category:Magazine stubs (and found many a journal), I guarantee you at least 30+ if not 60. Cheers, Her Pegship (tis herself) 04:16, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

Previous discussions

Rather than re-inventing the wheel, can those who engaged in previous discussions list them here? The best places I've found so far have been Template talk:Infobox Journal, Wikipedia talk:List of missing journals and Wikipedia:List of missing journals/Queue and Wikipedia talk:List of missing journals/Queue. Could someone add notes to those places so people watching those pages become aware of this project? Carcharoth 00:18, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

I've just taken a snapshot of the pages transcluding Template:Infobox Journal, and a more imprecise snapshot of the articles in Category:Journals. This latter list is not in good condition, as the category structure needs a little tidying first. I've now also added a snapshot for the sci-journal stub template, which has some amount of overlap with the other lists.

All need to be updated regularly in order for the related changes link to cover new articles. Carcharoth 00:24, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

I've created a list of Google Search results on the word "journal" and filtered out all that I can find that are not journals. GoogleSearch-Journal (850 entries) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Jayvdb (talk • contribs) 15:20, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

bug 3663

Could I have some thoughts on bugzilla:3663, in regards to Template talk:Infobox Journal#Link to NLM and Wikipedia_talk:Book_sources#ISSN request (moved from ToDo). IIRC there are browser extensions that we can feed microformats to as a simple/initial solution to handle this. John Vandenberg 13:24, 4 September 2007 (UTC)

Microformats and other glue

Firefox extensions

German ISSN's

On de:Astronomische Nachrichten the ISSN is placed where the GEO coords are normally placed. This is done with de:Template:ISSN-Link. John Vandenberg 04:00, 7 October 2007 (UTC)


Deletion subpage

I've created a subpage for listing articles within the project scope that are up for deletion: Wikipedia:WikiProject_Academic_Journals/Deletion. There's a new item under the PROD section. Espresso Addict 00:23, 20 September 2007 (UTC)

Good thinking. Perhaps it would be helpful if we attempted to expand Wikipedia:Notability (academics) to explain when journals should and should not be included. Perhaps there is already guidance on this issue somewhere in Wikipedia space, but it seems to me that we should strive to have some basic information about most any peer-reviewed academic journal that's used frequently -- whenever the journal is cited it can link to the article on the journal, and the serious researcher can determine the worthiness of the citation. The issue seems more about Reliable Sources than about notability really. We want to make sure that serious academic journals don't get deleted, but we also want to make sure that the criteria don't allow JayHenry's Journal of Hot 18-Year-Old Actresses to pass. --JayHenry 03:06, 20 September 2007 (UTC)
We should definitely try to come up with some basic criteria for academic journals (I think I suggested this earlier, but possibly in the wrong place). I'm not aware of existing guidance on this point; Wikipedia:Notability (books) explicitly excludes magazines and there's no mention of academic journals under Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Common_outcomes#Literature. Personally, I'd suggest developing them here, as a separate set of guidelines from WP:PROF, as the criteria for books would seem equally relevant. Espresso Addict 03:26, 20 September 2007 (UTC)
I'd suggest not tinkering at WP:PROF, because its contentious enough at this point. It would be better as a part of books,as an extension to the paragraph on academic books. (I'm not happy with the book guideline, by the way, because interpreted literally it would allow an article on any serious non fiction, as they all get reviews.) We don't have enough results yet to be fair about adding to common outcomes, and the closest part now reads "Books are notable if well-known," which is not much of a help to anyone.DGG (talk) 03:52, 20 September 2007 (UTC)
I'd forgotten the bit about academic books. "In that case, notability should rely on the reputation of the academic press publishing it,[8] how widely the book is cited by other academic publications or in the media,[9] how influential the book is considered to be in its specialty area and whether it is taught or required reading in a number of reputable educational institutions." sounds fairly easy to adapt to journals.
Publisher reputation, influence and citation aka impact factor all apply to journals. Also important might be length of establishment, indexing, number of libraries holding the journal, and possibly total number of subscribers, if an accurate source is available (I don't know how Ulrich's get their figures, but many published figures originate in people ringing up the journal to ask, and editorial secretaries are routinely asked to inflate the figures; the multiplier for the number of people who read each copy is also often based on a tiny, deliberately unrepresentative sample). It might also be worth taking into account prestige of the Editor in Chief -- often new journals succeed or fail by that one. Espresso Addict 04:18, 20 September 2007 (UTC)
Would it be reasonable to move it or put a redirect to it under Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion Sorting? That way the "deletions" link in the navbox at the top of the project page could be fixed. Additionally, if it used the same format as the other delsort pages, it seems likely that The wubbot (talk · contribs) could clean it up along with the other such pages. —David Eppstein 06:34, 21 September 2007 (UTC)
Adding a new delsort list needs to be discussed on WT:DS; typically requests for a new delsort lists are rejected unless they are be accompanied with justification that the list will see enough traffic (i.e actual xfds are often). John Vandenberg 08:06, 22 September 2007 (UTC)
One of the points of maintaining the current page is to see whether or not there's sufficient traffic to make it worthwhile applying for inclusion at delsort. Espresso Addict 22:13, 24 September 2007 (UTC)

Related to deletion debates and notability, does the magazine whose article is being discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Pensée (Immanuel Velikovsky Reconsidered), count as an 'academic' journal? Carcharoth 13:55, 22 September 2007 (UTC)

Without looking too closely, probably yes. Either it appeared before I started trawling through the AfD lists, or I must have missed it, sorry. Espresso Addict 22:13, 24 September 2007 (UTC)

About the notability of journals, I think that the length of time it has been around should be a consideration. Kind of like the 100-year test, but not quite as stringent. As for multiple names, have a look at Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, which started as a single journal, but is now split up under several names. Similarly for MNRAS. (Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society). Carcharoth 13:55, 22 September 2007 (UTC)

Hello good people. This is valuable discussion you are having, thanks for this contribution to the Wiki process, I look forward to seeing its fruit. Anyway, I'm not sure I'm contributing anything new by saying this, but I've got to start getting up to speed with the discussion sometime. Some issues that cross my mind, that I hope are on topic:
  • Original research is being peer-reviewed and published constantly.
  • The whole point of original research is expanding human knowledge.
  • The whole point of publishing it is making it available to illuminate issues considered important.
  • By definition, original research is not well known.
  • By definition, peer review means it is as reliable as feasibly possible.

Wiki is in the business of making reliable knowledge accessible. Isn't that what motivates us to contribute? We don't have the resources to provide the same level of peer review with respect to content that journals have. But it would seem to be wise to benefit from what they provide for us — qualified assesment of content.

A fundamental dilemma:

  • Peer-review in journals works for the communities that use them, because the reviewers are merely typical of members of that community. In other words, the reviewers provide a means of anticipating response to a thesis or set of results, that the readers would supply themselves were the paper read and discussed in a large real-time forum. Within an academic community, readers are able to evaluate the quality of articles, and of journals and their editors and reviewers by the articles they publish. Main point: journal articles are written for a specific audience. They assume common specialist knowledge, while presenting something new.
  • When Wiki presents the results published in a journal, the audience and issues are quite different. I do not think we should be saying that Wiki endorses this journal and/or the particular article or results. Rather, what Wiki should be saying is that the results have been made publically accountable within a community of experts on the subject, which is pretty much the best anyone can ever do on any topic. In other words, we are not claiming truth for the results, but reporting a responsibly, accountably published POV from our NPOV.

Another dilemma:

  • Many disciplines make progress by adopting a theory and testing it over a period of time. Quite often such theories eventually strike counter-examples or better explanations and are modified. Some disciplines are particularly "fluid", consider the different traditions of psychotherapy, for example. Should we exclude reporting of results that are not universal within a broader discipline? Where do we draw the lines? We don't want to be reproducing the rantings of cranks, even if they've set up their own legal entities, registered an ISSN, and review one-another. However, who are we to judge a crank outside our own area of expertise. Wouldn't it be more NPOV to allow editors to quote journals that represent experts that debunk the cranks. It would be nice to short-cut this step and have a "proscribed list of crank journals", or alternatively, a list of "gold standard" journals, but really, aren't we claiming a bit much for ourselves. There are professionals who debunk the cranks, why not quote them? Viewed one way, this is just good old fashioned literature review. Let the cranks be quoted, reading an explanation from a professional regarding why they are cranks is very educational. It's a bit lazy and dogmatic to short-cut such a step.
  • I think quoting from crank journals is an excellent thing. What it means we get is the genuine, "official" crank view. All the better if we have some crank editors who are motivated to report that view as fairly as possible. Just as they are permitted to write up their views though, they need to understand that counter-arguments to their positions have equal claim to publication at Wiki. It is the readers, not the editors who should be the judges. A good Wiki article is one that gives the readers as many of the facts as possible, as clearly as possible; not one that leads them to a conclusion that a consensus would find reasonable. Wiki articles are different to journal articles.

Yet another:

  • Newton was good enough for more than 100 years before being refined. Many disciplines (including Physics) move much faster than this now. What on Earth do we do when areas like genetics are producing significant results and overturning previous understanding almost monthly? Impose a quarantine on reporting immunology research, until they have all the facts! There are many topics that are uncontentious, however, until we know everything, there will be many that involve debate. In fact, many of these topics will be precisely the ones readers will want to consult. I'm sure it's much more challenging for Wiki to develop a culture of handling contentious topics well than it is the others, but that's what we're working on here I think.

Sorry this is not very systematically presented. I guess it's an attempt to put something of a case for, if it has an ISSN, it is objectively researchable, and can assist readers, so let's do it! Naturally, this is a huge task, but the nature of Wiki will mean that, by and large, the best-known and most important journals will be written up first. Frankly, if you ask me, I'd be begging for people to write up the other ones, 'cause I can't imagine many wanting to do it.

Conclusions:

  • 1. Wiki policy: include any journal with an ISSN
  • 2. This project: prioritize journal projects and motivate contributions without censorship

Now educate me about all the things I'm missing. Alastair Haines 01:48, 25 September 2007 (UTC)

One point that worries me is that your post above seems to be implying that this project is designed to summarise and quote the contents of journals. I don't see it that way at all. I see it more as a project to write article about the journals, rather than the contents of the journals (though the contents would still be mentioned in the article). ie. Research the history of a journal, its first publication date, famous editors, famous articles, and so on. The process where an editor of another article reads a journal and adds something to an article using the journal as a source, is a completely different process. Carcharoth 14:51, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

On the topic of deletion, User:Jayvdb/Ulam Quarterly is a good straw man to use for assessment purposes. I honestly dont think it is notable (see also Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Piotr Blass (third nomination)), even in spite of it being mentioned on Wikipedia and elsewhere. It has an ISSN. John Vandenberg 03:48, 25 September 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the example John. Ulam is probably an excellent example of a genuine journal that did not turn out to serve a long term need. Personally, I find it fascinating simply as an example of market forces in academic publishing.
There are journals in my area that existed for specific purposes over a period of time. Sometimes publication of ancient texts is done as a series, probably as a result of fund-raising issues. Eventually all the documents are deciphered and the series is ended. A classic example is Discoveries in the Judean Desert. This is a hard back book series, not a complete set of journal serials, however, its notability (in the sense of wide application and interest across many disciplines) allowed for that.
I guess my point is that the sort of journal we all imagine is one that started sometime and will stay in print indefinitely. However, I suspect there are several disciplines with notable serial titles that are widely cited, even foundational to the discipline, but are discontinued due to having covered what they intended to cover. Ulam is a different sort of example, it's just a common or garden maths journal that was not ultimately needed to "share the load" of publishing the findings of mathematicians.
Were it up to me, I'd accept Ulam as a Wiki article, but then you know I argue for accepting all. I'd be much more selective in what I'd defend against deletion though. I can't imagine anyone really missing the Ulam article, so I'd not fight for it, despite my own preference.
Enough said, I'll plug away at theological journals for the time being. I'll aim to put more substantial stubs in place, rather than reference more titles from now on though. I'll base the bare-minimum info for stubs on recommendations this project has provided above. Cheers. Alastair Haines 06:45, 26 September 2007 (UTC)
I'd tend to apply an arbitrary cut-off of 5 years of continuous publication for notability of any serial publication, unless there was some reason why this was inappropriate (eg as Alastair Haines mentions, an intentionally limited series, or a short-lived journal where more than one or two papers it published were highly cited, or a new journal that is showing all the signs of becoming established). I might be showing my age here, but there also seems reason to expect higher standards in general for purely e-published serials, if only because the overheads are far lower, and therefore there are a greater number of start ups, some of which are likely to be shortlived. Espresso Addict 21:50, 26 September 2007 (UTC)
I wouldn't want to say this as an absolute. Even ISI requires only 3 years for Journal Citation Reports. And sometimes a new journal like Nature Chemical Science will obviously be important from day 1 (& in this case there's even some controversy to report). In the past, journals in new fields, like Cell or J Mol Bio were obviously important immediately. I'm hard put to think of any titles with a short life span in molecular biology that actually were important, --it may be different in the humanities. DGG (talk) 08:59, 29 September 2007 (UTC)
Oh, sure -- a journal below 5 years could easily be notable. In my area, Nature Medicine was among the best journals in its field within 3 months. What I was trying to express was that I'd personally consider a peer-reviewed academic journal that has published for 5 years to be inherently notable, without needing further supporting information. Espresso Addict 16:23, 29 September 2007 (UTC)
OK, sorry I misunderstood--I see we agree on that part. But in the other direction I would certainly say that not even 5 years, or 50 , would make a very insignificant journal significant. In this as in any field there are some at the bottom end. Thousands of journals limp along, sometimes publishing an occasional issue, without ever publishing anything of substance. Among the considerations are whether the journal has ever published an article that was even reasonably cited; whether it is found in more than a handful of libraries; where it ranks among others in the field. I would certainly agree with you that a very specialized journals that is the only one in its subject might be significant even though very small and irregular and rarely held. But in a subject where its among the least significant with many dozens of important journals--no. I [perhaps have a bias here--I conscientiously spent some time each year figuring out which biology journals were of no possible use to even a major library. (There was in fact a time when we simply bought everything published, but eventually at even the best-financed library money proved more finite than publishers' dreams.) I'll get out my lists next week, and we can look at some examples. DGG (talk) 04:33, 30 September 2007 (UTC)
It's probably my ignorance of the truly insignificant journals. A journal that's never published articles cited in reviews, doesn't make it to Medline &c, and isn't held in decent specialist libraries would generally tend to pass the non-librarian by. Espresso Addict 04:58, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

WP:N

Most contributors to discussion of notability here seem to be disregarding the Notability guideline which specifies, in a nutshell, "has received significant coverage in reliable secondary sources that are independent of the subject". Do you really think academic journals should be an exception? If so, why? Nurg 01:00, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

Short answer: notability is a criterion for being encyclopedic, but so is reliability, Wiki articles on journals are justified at a "metaWiki" level because they are part of making "transparent" the verification process.
The others here seem to have thought this through better than me. But the case I'd put is this:
  1. Journal articles are considered primary sources of original research because they are peer-reviewed by experts in a subject area. If a new QUASAR is discovered, we can report that at Wiki on the basis of the journal article that records the observation, and the method used so it can be repeated. A Time magazine report, on the other hand, would not be the basis reliability, but would be a basis for notability. Such notability is required for the new QUASAR to actually deserve a namespace, however reliable the source.
  2. Wiki articles about academic journals themselves, however, should not be justified, imo, as encyclopedic on the basis of notability or independence (I think the others disagree with me). The justification for inclusion of articles on academic journals is a matter of improving the reliability and verifiability of Wiki, not its notability. Such articles can provide basic information regarding journals that allows readers and editors to evaluate just what kind of expertise or systematic bias might be associated with an organization that publishes a journal. Ideally they'd be in categories that also serve as a bibliography for various subjects. I for one would like to know if a theological journal is published by Catholics, Mormons, Evangelicals or Linguistic Academics -- I'd rather an article by Catholics about Catholicism in some cases, not in others. Freudian and Behavioural schools of Psychology are similar, some professionals are expert representatives of schools of thought within a broader disciipline.
  3. Finally, most academic journal are widely cited by people within those fields, who are sometimes the only ones who can reliabily assess the content. Sometimes those are very broad communities. Mathematics academics and theoretical linguists are very specialized and very numerous. The New York Times will not always publish results in such fields, because they are incomprehensible to the general public, while sometimes being revolutionary within academic communities.
The question Wiki needs to address, imo, is do we let topics like Goedel's Theorem remain in the domain of mathematical experts and not be recorded at Wiki until published in the NYT; or do we allow non-expert editors to have some trace of the peer review involved in publishing journal articles, by having articles on those journals? Alastair Haines 03:53, 6 October 2007 (UTC)
My watchlist has had International Journal of Educational Technology appear a few times today as Nurg tagged it with {{fact}} and then {{notability}} before raising the concern here. In case an Afd is imminent, I have left some notes on that articles talk page. From a quick investigation, an Afd on that article could end in delete, even if it were improved, due to different peoples opinions on the Wikipedia notability criteria.
My personal opinion on Wikipedia notability of journals is that they are implicitly notable if the journal is kept in hard copies at a number of independent research libraries. In 1000 years, any journal articles that are still assessible will be analysed in order to better understand the scientific and academic community of our era. They will not care whether the journal was discussed in depth by independent people.
Also, as a journal is merely a collection of papers, each time a journal article is used as a reference somewhere else, it has been noted. Sometimes these are not independent (e.g. self-references, editoral staff taking liberties, etc), but when a journal's articles are referred to in the academic output of another person, real world notability is implicitly given to the journal at the same time. Measuring these micropayments of notability is the fun job of calculating impact factor. As a result, it would take an extremely low impact factor (or decent hand-waving to that effect) for me to consider a journal as not notable.
The "meta" importance of academic journals is foremost in my opinion, and meta:Wikicat is evidence of the importance of building a knowledge base about the sources that are used on any of the Wikimedia projects. It is important to keep in mind that WP:N is only a guideline, and is not one of the pillars of Wikipedia. WP:NOR and WP:RS are the policies here, and citing verifiable, authoritative sources is possible, even if journals of minor notability have to be written using only library catalogs and other journals as the independent sources. John Vandenberg 05:39, 6 October 2007 (UTC)
The meta argument would be stronger for a journal that is cited internally within other Wikipedia articles; that doesn't seem to be the case for IJET. —David Eppstein 05:59, 6 October 2007 (UTC)
Agreed. The meta argument for journals not currently used on Wikimedia projects shifts from informing our readers to informing editors of Wikipedia. Having information about journals like IJET will give editors an idea of the editorial process used by a journal when considering the reliability and importance of a journal article that they may be considering adding to Wikipedia or other projects. Information that is primarily of value to editors is typically kept in the Wikipedia: namespace; perhaps we should be considering setting up a "directory" where articles about journals of lesser notability can be placed. As this could become quite large, perhaps Wikibooks would be the best place for it. John Vandenberg 06:37, 6 October 2007 (UTC)
Sounds smart to me, but there's a lot about all the meta-space I don't know. My only concern is Wiki retain content as much as possible. I am sympathetic to removing from the main space articles that would not appear in a print Encyclopedia, so long as they are retained somewhere. I'm sure you guys will make the best things happen. Alastair Haines 08:07, 6 October 2007 (UTC)
I am totally opposed to this--here and in all subjects. WP is not print. We can include articles on everything important to any significant subject field. That we should be a free online version of a print encyclopedia is not the general purpose of the entire project. Even Citizendium has a much broader goal. We're not emulated the EB, we're transcending it. DGG (talk) 14:18, 12 October 2007 (UTC)

Nurg asks above: "Do you really think academic journals should be an exception? If so, why?" - now that attempts have been made to answer this question, I wuld invite Nurg to propose what makes a journal non-notable. I agree that there are notable journals and non-notable journals, but the question is where the line is drawn. I think "independent coverage" is a poor criterion to use here, due to the specialised nature of such journals. Carcharoth 12:41, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

Coming to this discussion late, many of my points have already been discussed, but it seems for journals "has received significant coverage in reliable secondary sources that are independent of the subject" would seem to include indexing of its content in the various subject-specific indexing services. Espresso Addict 09:49, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

I agree with the importance of journals for verifiability. The inclusion of non-notable journals somewhere in meta-space is ok. John's idea of a directory in meta-space is fine. Alistair's "removing from the main space articles that would not appear in a print encyclopedia" is on the button.
As to where to draw the line between notable and non-notable journals, it should be similar to the existing notability guidelines. It may be useful to have a guideline such as Wikipedia:Notability (academic journals). However, such a guideline should be drawn as broad as possible to avoid a multiplicity of very similar guidelines. So perhaps Wikipedia:Notability (journals) or Wikipedia:Notability (periodicals) would be better. I have drafted this Notability (periodicals). I have based it largely on Wikipedia:Notability (books). Feel free to copy or move it to a permanent address and to discuss refinements. Nurg 08:41, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
Thanks for that, Nurg. Could I also ask that you give some examples? Take the last three collaborations: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, and Astronomische Nachrichten. Could you discuss why they are notable, and maybe provide three examples of non-notable ones that currently have articles, so the comparisons can be made? Thanks. Carcharoth 11:00, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
I have made a rather long comment on User talk:Nurg/Notability (periodicals), on the proposed standard, a standard that would rely upon primarily or exclusively awards and being discussed in other publications--the basic N criteria. I think they are important when they exist, but are orders of magnitude too restrictive for notability. They might well be relevant for A class, especially the references. I'll copy it here in modified form after I see comments there. In general, to be frank, I think Nurg's proposal would be a denial of coverage to most of the important journals, and the wrong approach entirely. It would be in strong contradiction to any attempt to improve the coverage of academic subjects generally. The general N standards are inadequate anywhere in this area, usually by being too restrictive, and what i want to do is make it clear that we use others as well. We can twist the conventional standards to apply, as suggested above, but we don;t have to. DGG (talk) 14:04, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
I can't see your comment on the page you link? Espresso Addict 14:55, 12 October 2007 (UTC)

In reply to Carcharoth, PNAS and Astronomische Nachrichten appear to have multiple, independent references. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society seems to have one so it's 50% of the way there on that basis alone. Look, I'm not an expert on journals or on WP's notability guidelines. Nor have I expressed an opinion on the notability guidelines per se or their restrictiveness. The guidelines have been decided by better minds (presumably) than me. My question is why academic journals should be an exception to the notability guidelines that apply to everything else. So far I see no reason they should be an exception.

The other thing to avoid with any literary or published or screen media subject is original research. It is all too easy to take info from the subject itself, so the requirement for independent sources is far more important than it is for most subjects. It is easy for us to avoid writing original research on physics but when writing about a book or periodical or website, it is very tempting to use the subject as a source - and that is original research. I can't be sure, but I suspect that everything in the International Journal of Educational Technology article is original research. Nurg 05:08, 13 October 2007 (UTC)

Still a great question, imo, Nurg.
Journals are a medium for publishing reliable original research.
If original research is absolutely prohibited, a body of knowledge cannot expand.
What Wiki precludes is editors providing their own original research.
Also, original research that has not been peer-reviewed is insufficient citation to establish a claim in a Wiki article.
If The Journal of Talking-Dogs prints a mission statement "to raise awareness of the contribution of talking-dogs to society." Is quoting that at Wiki original research? In what sense? If so, why does the policy preclude it?
As far as I can tell, Wiki is in favour of OR! So long as it is peer reviewed and outside Wiki. Who does that kind of thing? ... Academic Journals! :D
Alastair Haines 05:28, 13 October 2007 (UTC)
Alastair, we need to clearly distinguish here between referencing an article in a journal to support a claim in a Wikipedia article (this is a standard process, no different to referencing a webpage or book), and writing an article about the journal itself. Writing the articles about the journals will help people assess the references used in Wikipedia articles (well, once people get into the habit of linking the journal names and abbreviations), but writing about the journals is still clearly distinct from using the journals to write other articles. Carcharoth 05:36, 13 October 2007 (UTC)
Nurg, You talk about references. These are important to verify notability claims, but it is perfectly possible to have unverified notability claims that mean an article passes notability criteria. Often, an expert or someone with moderate knowledge of the field, will look at an article with unreferenced notability claims, will agree with them, and move on without adding references. Lazy I know, but it is what happens. Then someone who doesn't know the area comes along and instead of tagging the notability claims for a citation, tags it as non-notable because they have never heard of it. I agree that notability guidelines probably are needed for journals, but they need to be tailored to fit journals by those who know the subject area. There probably are a few experts, or at least well-informed people, reading and editing this page, who know more about journals than we ever will, so I'm happy to leave it to them to establish guidelines. The original research questions are interesting, but maybe we should leave that discussion for another day. Primary sources are sometimes the best sources of information about a subject. It is opinion that needs to be cited to independent, secondary sources. Carcharoth 05:36, 13 October 2007 (UTC)

Re Nurg's supposition that everything in IJET is OR: I don't want to defend IJET as an example of a good journal article. It lacks any evaluation of the quality of the journal, or third-party sources from which such an evaluation could be drawn, and doesn't tell much of a story about the journal or why anyone would care about it. It includes only facts that could be found in most university library catalogs. I think we want to set the bar higher than that. But everything the IJET article seems likely to have been collated from sources on the internet; if even that much is OR, then everything in Wikipedia that has multiple sources is OR, and the term becomes meaningless. What is disallowed as OR is material that does not come from external sources, or that synthesizes new conclusions by putting together information from multiple external sources (a process qualitatively different from merely gathering information from multiple sources). As everything in the IJET article seems purely factual, it is hard to see what new synthesis it might contain that would qualify as OR in that sense. —David Eppstein 05:53, 13 October 2007 (UTC)

Basically agreed. What a source says about itself is important. Mission statements are most reliable from a primary source. Circulation figures may also be audited and accountable by being published. There's a third party involved that we don't have access to. Qualitative assessments, however, are clearly inadmissible, except with caveats when other information is lacking. "Our leading journal ..." needs to be Wikified to "XYZ claim to be a leading journal". Much better "The UN Committee on ABC cited XYZ as a leading journal." Anyway, I think we think alike. Alastair Haines 06:04, 13 October 2007 (UTC)

PS re IJET: it now seems to have merged with another journal, Australasian Journal of Educational Technology. I've proposed a merge on the International Journal of Educational Technology page; discussion at Talk:Australasian Journal of Educational Technology. —David Eppstein 06:11, 13 October 2007 (UTC)

My comment referred to above seems to have gotten misplaced--dont know why--I will rewrite it tomorrow. But a special point: mission statements are a example of a sort of content I have the gravest doubts about , whether in journal articles or elsewhere., They usually say the obvious, and in terms of pure PR-talk. The mission of X journal is to publish peer-reviewed research on X, including the complete list of subfields of X1 through X100, and maintain the greatest possible quality and the highest standards of publication. The mission of Y society is to promote research and education in Y, and provide a forum for publishing research and discussion the problems of the profession. and so one, usually at much greater length. sometimes it isnt obvious, and then it needs to be said--and here again I would make a distinction between its stated mission, and what it actually intends to accomplish. I'm somewhat cynical about professional societies, universities, and publishers, which tend to have the same faults as other organized bodies, and whose articles can show similar degrees of self-serving rhetoric and COI. Durova's splendid essay WP:BFAQ is applicable to more than businesses. DGG (talk) 08:01, 14 October 2007 (UTC)

Journal Info & FRIDA

I've casually run into an impact factor measurement that I havent seen before: FRIDA[2] described here. This site Journal Info has caught a few peoples attention[3][4][5]. Anyone know more about FRIDA? John Vandenberg 08:51, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

Wasn't she with ABBA?
But that was Sweden. :(
Nice find John, btw the ATLA Religion Database mentioned on the record your first link points to is my main tool of work. PubMed seems to be the medical analogy. Perhaps we need a list of these databases. Surely they would be notable enough for the main namespace, under any definition of notability. Alastair Haines 08:25, 6 October 2007 (UTC)
This is your red link; there are many like it but this one is yours! :-)
You may be interested in recently started Dumbarton Oaks Papers and Oriens Christianus. John Vandenberg 09:27, 6 October 2007 (UTC)
Ha, ha, good on you John, yes indeed, it is mine. :D Alastair Haines 09:48, 6 October 2007 (UTC)
LOLOL John, I got a speedy deletion nom within 1 second of creating the page!
It is very funny, but I do smell a rat here. Alastair Haines 10:06, 6 October 2007 (UTC)
And I was naughty <blush>, I just deleted the tag! Alastair Haines 10:32, 6 October 2007 (UTC)
All is well that ends well. I've added a few categories, but maybe we need a new category for these databases. John Vandenberg 11:17, 6 October 2007 (UTC)
[[Category:Bibliographic databases]]? Should this be a subcat of [[Category:Academic publishing]]?
Another question, do you have any relation to javdbg by any chance?
There seemed a family likeness of hard working editorship, but maybe only the family sock-puppet? ;) Alastair Haines 14:18, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

International Symposium on Graph Drawing

I would like to establish additional articles on conference series. this seems to have some real 3rd party documentation, so lets see how it goes. DGG (talk) 06:32, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

Sometimes society newsletters print reports from attendees of recent conferences; I just saw one on the latest ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing in the most recent issue of SIGACT News, for instance. I think we could use those as 3rd party sources. In this case, STOC and SIGACT News are both sponsored by the same organization, but the editorial structures of the two are independent from each other, and in many cases they wouldn't even be that closely related. —David Eppstein 07:00, 3 October 2007 (UTC)
Perhaps we should stick to the really big & long-established international conference series to start with, and see what the community thinks? I've been asked to remove red links to conferences from society/publisher articles in the past. I suspect independent, non-trivial sources might be hard to find for most conferences, and sources based in the sponsoring organisation would not usually be considered independent. Espresso Addict 07:11, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

On Graph Drawing? Is this, like, how to draw the graphs we were taught about in school? :-) I'm guessing some mathematical graph definition here... (later, I see that the article exists! I assumed you were proposing to create it, as you hadn't linked to it!)

If anyone is interested in the articles we already have on conferences (well, those that have been categorised), then see Category:Conferences and Category:Academic conferences. Lots of non-notable ones there, but it gives people an idea of what already exists. Some of the really, really notable ones are ones such as Solvay Conference, Volta Conference, and Shelter Island Conference. An existing stub that looks like it deserves to be expanded is Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. An interesting approach can be seen at Ranking of computer science conferences. I'm sure some of the really big conferences in the biological sciences are under-represented here. Carcharoth 15:37, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

I've not seen any of the well-known biomedical conferences and there must be hundreds. A list approach might be a good way to start. Espresso Addict 19:39, 3 October 2007 (UTC)
You guys are great! I hadn't thought of conferences. Hmmm, neutrality, I think that can end up throwing the baby out with the bathwater — responsible organizations can be so specialized as not to attract much 3rd party attention, but whatever. Anyway, listing bigger conferences sounds like an awesome idea, makes another part of the process more transparent. This is a massive project and ultimately so helpful. Alastair Haines 14:01, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

Note, Ranking of computer science conferences has recently been prodded. Espresso Addict 21:48, 16 October 2007 (UTC)


Scope of the project (awards)

Would awards from scientific and other academic societies be within the scope of this project? The awards pages are fairly easy to maintain, as they are usually just lists, and can also provide ideas for stubs of scientists and other academics that can be created. Have a look at Category:Awards, Category:Awards by subject, and Category:Science and engineering awards. The awards articles I've worked on include Royal Medal, Willard Gibbs Award and (most recently) Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine. The same sort of questions of notability seem to arise, with pretty much the same answer. Someone receiving awards, or publishing in a journal, seem to be ways of measuring notability. Gauging the notability of said journals or awards, and the societies that publish/award them seems to be a bit harder, but I think it would be good to include societies, awards, journals, and journal publishers all in one area. Not sure if there is an umbrella term to cover all this, but maybe "Academic publishing and administration"? Is it worth setting up a 'shell' parent wikiproject to make all this clearer, or would that confuse things? Carcharoth 12:18, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

The trick, as you note, is determining which awards to include and which not. My own resume in real life includes a number of awards. But I can't think of an easy way to determine which awards have merit, and which do not. I mean, obviously the Nobel Prize does; the "Best Freshman of the Year of Transylvania University" does not. But where's the line in between? Obviously the Rhodes Scholars should have a page, but should the individual Rhodes Scholars be listed? Should the Rhodes Scholarship be a factor in notability? Maybe we need a workshop page to hammer out all these issues of inclusion? For prizes, journals, conferences and societies. We start conversations here but they keep getting lost in the flow of new threads. --JayHenry 20:24, 20 October 2007 (UTC)

Academic-type stuff in ANI thread

Some weird stuff at an ANI thread concerning something called the Institute for Human Thermodynamics, with an associated journal. Have a look at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents#User:Sadi Carnot, and in particular at the http://www.humanthermodynamics.com/index.html website , http://www.humanthermodynamics.com/About-IOHT.html institute and http://www.humanthermodynamics.com/Journal.html journal . If those here who know how to tell a genuine journal from bogus one could add comments both here and over there, that would be great. Carcharoth 13:17, 20 October 2007 (UTC) the website above is on the spam blacklist, so the links have been converted to text) DGG (talk) 03:59, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

Jacob Jaygbay, Jr.

Jacob Jaygbay, Jr. is up for AfD. I'm not sure whether it belongs in this project's deletion page, Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting/Academics and educators, or what (so I have defaulted to adding it to neither) but he seems to have some involvement with African scholarly publishing, and has some scholarly papers of his own on that subject. —David Eppstein 23:55, 27 October 2007 (UTC)

this is a really tricky one. I commented there that he is one of the leading authors in a very very narrow subject. His few papers represents a good fraction of the literature on african scholarly journals. DGG (talk) 03:59, 28 October 2007 (UTC)
I've added it to the project deletion subpage. As long as the volume of items doesn't become unmanageable, monitoring those with only a minor connection to the project seems no problem. Espresso Addict 15:39, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

MDPI and its journals

Could someone here review the MDPI article and the articles on the MDPI journals? I have some concerns about some of these articles, but I don't want to say any more unless I prejudice the response. Carcharoth 15:14, 30 October 2007 (UTC)

Different journal, same area, Molecular Diversity. Carcharoth 15:24, 30 October 2007 (UTC)
My impression is that it's the same people as the ones behind the recent Sadi Carnot kerfuffle. I can't find any reliable sources on this group. —David Eppstein 16:14, 30 October 2007 (UTC)
It's frustrating, because it all seems to hang together, but things never quite click and it seems to hover in some limbo state. Is it a small, new, respectable organisation, or something altogther less reliable? I just can't tell. Lots of names and qualifications, but what do they really mean? Carcharoth 16:19, 30 October 2007 (UTC)

BTW, the "open access" status of these journals has been disputed. —David Eppstein 17:57, 30 October 2007 (UTC)

the comment is that only part of the content is Open access, which makes them what is called hybrid open access journals-- and that this applies only to some titles--and the posting is 2 years ago. I'll check current status. As liblicense-l is the main information source in its area, referred to very widely, and moderated responsibly (by Ann Okerson of Yale), it might well be considered a Reliable source (& the author of this comment is a well known & responsible European librarian)--which would, ironically, count towards the notability of the publisher. At present, 3 are in Web of Science, International Journal of Molecular Sciences IF 0.69 80 out of 124 in Chemistry (Multidisciplinary) , , Molecules IF 0.84 (37/56) in Organic chemistry, and Sensors IF 1.37 (37/68) in Analytical Chemistry, are indexed in Web of Science. This is not great, but not negligible. I'll check on the others. Sadi sometimes also did some edits for respectable science, or at least used it as a screen. So that is no reason to delete necessarily DGG (talk) 16:28, 31 October 2007 (UTC)
This stuff wasn't added by Sadi/Thims, it was Shu-Kun Lin, another member of the same circle. If nothing else, his work on these articles raises WP:COI concerns. —David Eppstein 16:50, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

American Review: A Whig Journal

Edgar Allan Poe never worked on the staff of the American Review. In 1844, he was hired byN. P. Willis for the New York Mirror. The comment in the article is in error. Outis —Preceding unsigned comment added by 65.111.90.36 (talk) 21:37, 30 October 2007 (UTC)

Judging from comments at Talk:American Review: A Whig Journal this problem has already been corrected. EdJohnston 16:48, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

articles by size

Betacommand has generated a list of articles tagged with {{WPJournals}} ordered by size: Wikipedia:WikiProject Academic Journals/Articles by size. Note that discussion about assessment of these should ideally follow up on the new Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Academic Journals/Assessment. John Vandenberg 08:54, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

List of scientific journals in Serbia

This article has been at AfD here and the closure was unusually userfy. It is now at User:Nikola Smolenski/List of scientific journals in Serbia. The closing admin surprisingly asked "is there a WikiProject?". Should we link to that user page somewhere, so it does not get lost? --Bduke 00:31, 11 November 2007 (UTC)

Publication series?

Not sure if this is the kind of thing your project may be interested in, but I saw two articles on User:AlexNewArtBot/SwedenSearchResult that deal with a series of publications in Law, and the institute that publishes the series:

Personally, I know nothing about Law and publications in that field. At the very least, these pages should probably be combined in a single article, but I don't want to put any work into articles in which I lack interest if they are just going to be removed from Wikipedia eventually. Olaus 07:33, 16 November 2007 (UTC)

these are in the nature of Monographs in series, and we probably should include them in the project, as quasi-journals. the odds of their being eliminated from WP will be greatly reduced if you put enough work into the articles to show they are widely referred to. DGG (talk) 03:56, 20 November 2007 (UTC)
I combined the series with the institute. The institute seems to be mainly set up for publishing the series and having two articles just looked silly. I know enough about Swedish society in general to recognize some of the names of people and institutions involved, but I don't know if that is enough to prove "notability" in a Wikipedia sense to foreigners. I would be completely incapable of proving the importance of the publications, as I have no idea where to look. I could go to the library and find some legal journals that review some of these volumes, but it is not really my idea of fun... Olaus (talk) 14:12, 20 November 2007 (UTC)
One can check on library holdings via Worldcat. Butt heres no problem merging, if there is a redirect for the series. DGG (talk) 01:51, 22 November 2007 (UTC)
Yeah, I made the merge and redirected the series title. User:Carcharoth later added a category ("Category:Monographs" - although I'm not sure all of these are monographs, many seem to be) to the redirect, which is a smart feature. (One could include multiple publications from the same institution or publisher in the same article and still locate them in a category).
Law is very much a "national" field, and I don't know how much international interest one can expect, but according to Worldcat "Scandinavian Studies in Law" is held by 146 libraries in the US[6] and six in the UK[7]. It is to be expected that every significant Swedish library would have this series, and the Swedish Royal Library LIBRIS catalogue locates it in 28 libraries in Sweden and some odd locations in the rest of Scandinavia[8]. (Only the major Swedish libraries and very few Scandinavian academic libraries outside Sweden are included in that search, the real number is likely to be higher). As a comparison, there are six Swedish universities (Gothenburg, Lund, Stockholm, Umeå, Uppsala and Örebro) with the right to offer first professional degrees (juris kandidat) in Law.[9] Do you think this is enough? Olaus (talk) 08:28, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

relevant general discussion of guidelines

Wikipedia talk:Notability (media) on the proposed guideline Wikipedia:Notability (media) -- was originally proposed to deal with problems involving the notability of radio stations, but has general applicability. DGG (talk) 03:58, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

A question

When I was at medical school my university's library came up with the most amazing tool: it installed a proxy server on its library systems, so people could access online journals from the comfort of their own home, even if they were only using institutional subscriptions.

I have been dreaming for some time of Wikipedia running a similar facility, or at least acquiring access to a similar facility. I am aware that the logistics and cost are substantial, but I also feel that it would be a collossal boost to academically-oriented subjects (sciences and humanities). Personally, I have to be selective with my sources because I have limited access to journals at most hospitals; I therefore may select a lower-quality reference because I can get hold of it, or rarely pay the library to order it from the British Library.

I'm simply curious about community support for such an endeavour, and I will cross-post this item on the Village pump to see what people's views are here. JFW | T@lk 13:13, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Institutions establish proxy servers to permit access from home because access is otherwise restricted. Access to wikipedia is not restricted, so there is no need for a proxy server set up to access it. ... Oh wait, you're suggesting that wikipedia purchase database access for its editors, so they could better cite references? That would be ... a lot of money. It would be awesome but I think it highly unlikely. --Lquilter (talk) 16:12, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

Research studies

What should be done with articles on clinical trials and other research projects. The most notable one I can think of is Human Genome Project. But then at the other end of the scale you have stuff like GISSI. Do we want to cover this sort of thing or not? Are other WikiProjects better set-up to handle these? Carcharoth (talk) 12:05, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

I would strongly support the deletion of articles on research studies in progress unless they have been discussed in a substantial way in the general science media, such as Nature or New Scientist--or the public media. In the case of GISSI, there's an article in Lancet, but it just presents the results. I mean some more prominent discussion than that. I am quite concerned that any research paper at all or named project could otherwise generate a separate article. I can think of a number of others here, which i will nom for AfD once we get rid of this one. DGG (talk) 13:01, 21 November 2007 (UTC)
Few people would argue against having an article on the Framingham Heart Study, which is also a research study in progress, but I believe that it meets your standard of general notice in science media. I'd support an eventual AfD of GISSI if no independent third-party sources can be added to the article. There is no problem at all with Human Genome Project. EdJohnston (talk) 17:43, 21 November 2007 (UTC)
Yes there is no problem at all with it -- I neglected to say so because it seemed so very obviously notable--as are many others. The major muti-center studies with general public health implications are generally notable at least after the results are published--we should in fact look around to see which ones may be missing here. DGG (talk) 01:40, 22 November 2007 (UTC)
But this may be systematic bias. The Framingham study is in the US, 60 years and involved 5,209 people at the start, into the third generation and a longitudinal study. GISSI is in Italy, over 20 years, and more than 60,000 patients. They may well be comparable in notability, but US news sources are more likely to cover the US one. Medical literature should be a better guide here. What we really need is someone who knows enough about cardiology and heart studies over the past 50 years to tell us which ones are notable. As for being in progress, it seems GISSI is really four separate trials which are finished, and one happening at the moment. More like a series of trials than a single one. Having said that, there are a lot of heart studies out there. Would be nice to have an article on heart studies in general. See also this. Carcharoth (talk) 06:17, 22 November 2007 (UTC)
You may well be right that it was unfamiliarity, but the article did not clarify it for me. Maybe this does need a further review--and we will probably then need to deal with the probably variation in results between different nations. DGG (talk) 08:01, 23 November 2007 (UTC)
I was just coming across this issue too.
  1. We have Category:Research projects and I began (yesterday!) adding this to relevant articles with the note-to-self to go investigate this as a category tree.
  2. I think it would also be helpful to have them organized by time, as well, but I'm not sure how to do the multiple-years issues.
  3. As for determining notability of research projects, there does have to be some useful standards -- we certainly don't want every graduate proposal with a wikipedia article. Nor do we want published research to be redundantly categorized as research projects. Some criteria that occur to me are (a) productive of multiple papers/research; (b) long-term longitudinal; (c) large-scale - e.g., the Iceland genomic project, by encompassing an entire nation, might have been notable not just because of widespread media coverage but also because of its breadth and novelty; (d) significant publicity. Obvious significant publicity will demonstrate notability always, but could some productive, long-term, large-scale survey that did not demonstrate significant publicity still be notable? It seems to me it could but I can't think of one of the top of my head.
--Lquilter (talk) 16:09, 18 December 2007 (UTC)
Category:Research projects is interesting. Thanks for that. That should be brought in scope as well... (one day, this little WikiProject will rule the wiki!!) - ahem! :-) Carcharoth (talk) 17:38, 18 December 2007 (UTC)
The usual academic criterion will do: sufficient references from other research groups to it to show that it is used at a standard in further work. This is not the 2 RS criterion, which is absurdly weak for cases like this. DGG (talk) 04:37, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

journal database?

Hi, do you guys around maintain a kind of database of all journals covered in WP articles, containing the ISSN's (and possibly wikilinks) of the journals? I ask for the following reason: I wrote a database intended to simplify citing journal papers (and books) correctly by storing the information in a central place (http://zeteo.info, see also User:Jakob.scholbach/zeteo). Wikipedia editors can then just copy the information into an article. The database currently contains some 1000 journals (mainly mathematics journals). Most of them miss an ISSN, though. I'd be glad to be able to fill these gaps. Thanks, Jakob.scholbach 18:05, 30 November 2007 (UTC)

The other way round: If you are interested, I could provide a list of the most frequently cited journals (this is based on the WP math articles, more precisely only reference citations created with citation templates are covered). This could provide some impetus to write something about these journals here. Jakob.scholbach 18:08, 30 November 2007 (UTC)

Is this db in the public domain or GFDL. I see no copyright statement, so by default its your proprietary database. Besides the search box, it would be useful to have a way of displaying the complete list of journals. Sounds interesting. I was not aware there were 1000 math journals -- the Courant library at NYU only receives 220 [10] and I thought is as comprehensive as any; presumably you have a great many non current titles as well. Fine Library at Princeton has 720, current and non-current. DGG (talk) 05:09, 1 December 2007 (UTC)
I've now included the GFDL statement (see the Contact page). You can now also show the complete list of journals. (The number 1000 may have been slightly exaggerated. There are some 1100 entries, but there are duplicate items (for example "Acta Inf." and "Acta Informatica"). Jakob.scholbach 09:29, 1 December 2007 (UTC)
and that is where the work is in a centralized database--achieving standardization and resolving duplicates. As I am sure you know very well. Good luck with the project. Can you think of any good way for us to adopt such a database by stages? DGG (talk) 04:54, 2 December 2007 (UTC)
I don't know whether it is possible to feed WP with a database like this. If you want I can export the most frequently cited journal which don't have a wikilinik or similar things. Jakob.scholbach 11:05, 2 December 2007 (UTC)
Is that just current journals or historical ones as well? Carcharoth (talk) 13:10, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

A discussion about this tool, and other approaches to improve our bibliographic record keeping, has been raised on the Village pump (technical). I have recommended that we adopt the French solution of a "Reference" namespace, which could also be of particular interest to project members who are familiar with the notability discussions we have had in the past. John Vandenberg (talk) 06:33, 31 December 2007 (UTC)

Tagging new articles

Where the tag was missing, I tagged the new articles with {{WPJournals}}. I left the conferences mentioned in the "new articles list" alone (International Symposium on Graph Drawing, International Congress on Industrial and Applied Mathematics, European Congress of Radiology, European Society for Engineering Education). Do we want to tag those as well? Carcharoth (talk) 11:51, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

Deletion discussions

Is anyone still keeping Wikipedia:WikiProject Academic Journals/Deletion up-to-date? Carcharoth (talk) 12:04, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

User:Espresso Addict is apparently on a lengthy Wikibreak. She used to do a lot of it. --JayHenry (talk) 14:58, 8 January 2008 (UTC)
Her contributions started up again yesterday. I'll drop a note on her talk page. Carcharoth (talk) 15:10, 8 January 2008 (UTC)
I happened to browse through AfD and see one so I added it. I'd be quite interested in a Featured Article project if anybody else is up for it... --JayHenry (talk) 05:15, 9 January 2008 (UTC)
I would be. Not much time right now, but keep asking around and try and get some more people interested. Carcharoth (talk) 03:53, 20 January 2008 (UTC)
I will help, provided it was a journal that extends back into the 19th century. I would be even more keen on a featured list project (perhaps List of eighteenth century journals?). John Vandenberg (talk) 12:11, 22 January 2008 (UTC)
As featured articles I'd suggest Nature which is (relatively) low-hanging fruit. I think we could possibly interest other good editors in this project. User:WillowW and User:TimVickers, both excellent FA contributors, have some interest in such topics. I think another interesting one would be Impact Factor, also potentially useful for assessing notability. I looked into at one point and there's a decent body of literature on impact factor itself. I'd also be happy to work on an FLC project. How would we ever determine if we'd found all the eighteenth century journals though? --JayHenry (talk) 06:36, 28 January 2008 (UTC)
I'd support anything, really. I wonder what the final form of academic journal and scientific journal should be? And I wonder whether we have an article on the history of journals and publishing? The 18th century list would be a good start towards the history, though maybe the history article should come first? Oh, and it wouldn't be us who determines whether a list is complete - the structure and completeness of lists should be deived from the sources. ie. Look at what lists others have already done. Carcharoth (talk) 02:01, 29 January 2008 (UTC)

Does anyone think that popular science magazines could be covered here as well? I'm thinking that a primary motivation for inmproving articles on the journals was so that people could judge references by reading the article on the journal (or at least link to it). Maybe something similar can be said for magazines like New Scientist, Scientific American (the two main ones, I think) and American Scientist (found a nice article on the online version recently). Those three articles are not tagged in a WikiProject. Would anyone object to tagging those? Several issues of scope have come up over the months since the project started, but as Jay Henry noted above: "We start conversations here but they keep getting lost in the flow of new threads." I've started Wikipedia:WikiProject Academic Journals/Scope I also recently started Wikipedia:WikiProject Academic Journals/Images. I'll add both to the front page. Carcharoth (talk) 14:11, 27 January 2008 (UTC)

Project activity

The weekly collaborations (which were nice) seemed to have died out. Shall we restart them as fortnightly or monthly ones? Carcharoth (talk) 14:41, 27 January 2008 (UTC)

Ugh. I've been meaning to pick that ball up again, for a while now.
To get this back on track, I've created a table of proposed collaborations, taking us through to June, so that we don't loose traction again. Does it look workable? Feel free to re-arrange, or lock yourself into a collaboration by noting your name at the end. Ideally, different people should take the lead for each of those collabs, so there isn't any burn out. John Vandenberg (talk) 05:46, 14 February 2008 (UTC)
This looks good to me. I will do my best to help out. One tip is that I've found journals often do retrospectives on anniversaries. The 50th volume or 100th volume of a journal can be a good place to look for information about the history of the journal itself. --JayHenry (talk) 05:52, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

Archiving talk page

Anyone know how to cleanly archive this talk page but still keep unresolved issues here, or restart unresolved threads? Carcharoth (talk) 14:42, 27 January 2008 (UTC)

I created an archive atop the page. You can just manually copy old threads over to the archive. If you wish to revive a thread, I see no reason not to simply move it to the bottom of the page. --JayHenry (talk) 06:32, 28 January 2008 (UTC)

WSEAS

I see we have a recent article on WSEAS. I've seen online criticism of this organization as promoting spam and junk conferences; see e.g. [11] [12] [13]. In the interests of balanced coverage, I'd like to add something about this criticism to the article, but only if it can be reliably sourced. Or possibly even add coverage describing how they used to be spammers and junk conference promoters, but got better, as this post suggests. Google is difficult as most of the terms I try run into more webspam from the WSEAS people rather than anything from a secondary source. Anyone have any better ideas where to look for published articles about this group? —David Eppstein (talk) 02:06, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

Journal of Medical Sciences Research

This is an online-only journal founded in 2007 that appears to have only two online issues (Oct & Nov 2007). It is web-published by the editor-in-chief, although there is an ed board listed. The wiki article was created by the editor cum publisher. I can't find anything searching on the ISSN except the journal website and apparent Wikipedia mirrors. It claims to be indexed by "Index Cupernicus", which presumably is a typo for "Index Copernicus", but searching there [14] on ISSN doesn't find the journal.

User:Travellingcari has recently removed notability tags placed by User:Shalom, and I've tidied the article, but on reflection I'm not sure this one is actually notable. Would be grateful for second opinions. Espresso Addict (talk) 18:53, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the link, Espresso Addict. I removed the notability tags due to recent AfD discussions which seemed to establish a precedent that journals are inherently notable. I don't necessarily agree, but that's a horse of another color. I'm tackling them as they come up in the backlog, most often in notability issues. When I hit them I try to find any external references, but lately especially in the case of:
which I also ran across, there seems to be frustratingly little. In many cases I think an argument could be raised that the journals ought to be mentioned in the context of their organization, if applicable. I am neither inclusionist nor deletionist but I don't believe in having articles just because we can. I think a valid reason(s) need to be met to have the articles. Thoughts? Hot Chocolate Addict aka TRAVELLINGCARIMy storyTell me yours 20:05, 7 March 2008 (UTC) :)
Journals are not inherently notable, and that should not have been the take away message from the AfDs. All significant peer reviewed journals are notable, and the discussions here give the criteria. Insignificant peer reviewed journals have been deleted before at AfDs, and I've said delete on one or two of them, or at least not fought to hard to save them. As for these ones here, Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs is a very major journal indeed, as can be seen from its precursor journals and the records in Journal Citation Reports. In general the continuation of an notable journal would always be notable, but there may well be reason for merging the articles on them--usually I think to the newest title with redirects to the others.The Journal of Advanced Academics is new to me, as its its precursor, so it needs some checking. Journal of Generalized Lie theory ditto. The Journal of Medical Sciences Research is a new online journal and that's always a little iffy, but it has an impressive board of editors. I note there is no JCR listing possible for a journal until it's in its 3rd year of publication. It's like any other subject: the articles need to be looked at individually and carefully. DGG (talk) 01:40, 9 March 2008 (UTC)

The Lie theory one is listed by, and I assume also indexed by, the American Mathematical Society [15] [16]. Which doesn't mean much (just that it's a seemingly-legitimate math journal), but is at least something. —David Eppstein (talk) 01:51, 9 March 2008 (UTC)

This makes it a bit more clear. No question Alcohol and Drugs is notable, and I agree that the history can (and as I've seen usually is) accounted for in the current name with re-directs if there were other articles. When I cleaned it up, I tried to make the history a bit cleaner because the message was muddled. I think the ones that definitely need some digging are the ones that aren't necessarily wholly covered in English, for example Journal of Generalized Lie Theory and Applications, which is Estonia based. While the journal is in English, there may be some Russian language discussion that could help clarify it. This was also the case with Journal of Applied Ichthyology where someone found a German language source. It's easier with ones like Biometrics (Journal), where JSTOR is involved as somewhat of an arbiter, but I think there has to be some external discussion of the long standing journals. On another note, I noticed New England Journal of Medicine had an infobox, didn't see that when I cleaned up the four I mentioned above. Is that stil in use for new/cleaned articles? TRAVELLINGCARIMy storyTell me yours 03:39, 9 March 2008 (UTC)
{{Infobox Journal}} should be used for academic journals. You don't need to fill in all the fields; discipline, publisher, frequency and issn are perhaps the most important. Espresso Addict (talk) 09:03, 9 March 2008 (UTC)
Done for the three that didn't have it :) TRAVELLINGCARIMy storyTell me yours 15:58, 9 March 2008 (UTC)

Metropolis Project

I just saved Metropolis Project (an international research/policy collaboration on demography, and sponsor of an academic journal) from an expired prod. I've cleaned it up somewhat and added a couple of references, but more attention would be welcome. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:56, 9 March 2008 (UTC)

AfD: The International Journal of Intelligent Technologies and Applied Statistics

What happened to our deletion sorting page? It seems to have redirected to one on literature, in which I'm sure academic journals will be swamped and lost. In any case, The International Journal of Intelligent Technologies and Applied Statistics is now up for deletion: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/The International Journal of Intelligent Technologies and Applied Statistics. —David Eppstein (talk) 00:44, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

The only redirect to the lit. list is Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting/Publications, which was merged in 2006; is that the one you have found ? I didnt know about it until now. We still have Wikipedia:WikiProject Academic Journals/Deletion , and I dont see it listed as a new list on WP:DS#List changes, and it is still being discussed on the talk page. John Vandenberg (chat) 01:36, 14 April 2008 (UTC)
I was trying to get to Wikipedia:WikiProject Academic Journals/Deletion but forgot the name of the link. Trying to get there from the "Deletion" link at the top of Wikipedia:WikiProject Academic Journals led me to the literature page. I was confused into thinking that somehow our unofficial deletion page had been redirected to the literature one. But I see that's a template that can't easily be changed to point to an unofficial deletion sorting page. —David Eppstein (talk) 04:16, 14 April 2008 (UTC)
Easiest way is to create Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting/Academic Journals as a redirect to Wikipedia:WikiProject Academic Journals/Deletion, and change the parameter in the template to "Academic Journals". I've gone ahead and done this. Carcharoth (talk) 07:26, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

Disease Models & Mechanisms

Started by a new editor, the journal is published by Company of Biologists and appears on their website, but I can find no evidence via ISSN in PubMed or WorldCat that it exists yet. Could someone with better search access than mine check this one out? If it's merely been announced should we retain the article, given that a CoB journal will almost certainly be notable within a few issues of starting? Thanks, Espresso Addict (talk) 15:41, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

it has not yet been published. The subscription price however has been announced, [17]. The online is going to be open access the first year. The price is for 2008, so presumably they intend to publish this year, but they do not say specifically. Normally, as a librarian, I would order a journal such as this as soon as a definite price is available, but I might not if there is no actual publication date announced. I will find out the situation, and update the article accordingly. DGG (talk) 07:34, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

Hello all, sorry for any confusion and/or transgressing of the rules on conflicts of interest. As you've guessed, I am a CoB employee, but had tried to avoid any superfluous self-promotion. The journal will launch in late summer/ autumn this year, but we don't yet have a concrete date, so I wasn't sure how to address this. Any suggestions? Neduardo (talk) 12:33, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

I'd suggest moving the article to your userspace until there is at least a definite launch date, and preferably until the first issue comes out. At the moment, the only sources for the journal's existence that I could find are from CoB, and that does not meet the Wikipedia verifiability policy, which requires third-party sources. Espresso Addict (talk) 13:09, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

Discussion on journal abbreviations (Citing sources)

See Wikipedia talk:Citing sources#We shouldn't abbreviate journal names. Some here have already commented. Those that haven't may still be interested, though the discussion started a few weeks ago. Carcharoth (talk) 07:38, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

Discussion about DOI bot

Of likely interest to WP:WPAJ members: Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard#DOI bot blocked for policy reconsideration. --JayHenry (talk) 21:10, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

Userbox

I have created a usere box here: User:Mdebets/Templates/WikiProject Academic Journals. If no-one objects or has improvments for it, I'm going to move it to the template namespace in a few days. --Mdebets (talk) 19:47, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

Thanks! I think templates like these stay in the user space. John Vandenberg (chat) 21:44, 30 June 2008 (UTC)
The other ones I've seen have names in template space like {{User WikiProject Projectname}}. —David Eppstein (talk) 22:28, 30 June 2008 (UTC)

Category:Wikipedians by access to a digital library

Please consider publicizing on the project page Wikipedia:WikiProject Academic Journals the categories at Category:Wikipedians by access to a digital library. Thanks. Bebestbe (talk) 20:41, 30 June 2008 (UTC)

I have created a category Category:Wikipedians_who_have_access_to_Web_of_Science. For the moment, I am the only one in that category... :-) --Guillaume2303 (talk) 20:43, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

AfD notice

Stubs for eighteen (18) journals have been listed at AfD here. The views of members of this project are likely to be very helpful in making decisions. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:58, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

I'll copy them into our deletion sorting page. Thanks for the notice. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:09, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

Institute on Global Drug Policy and its journal

The Journal of Global Drug Policy and Practice is used as a source on critiq of the Insite-project of Vancouver. However, the journal seems to be controversial; described as a web page of a lobby organisation and not a legitimate sientific journal. [18] What to do about it? Could anyone with more experience (and english as native languege) dig in to it? Steinberger (talk) 05:39, 31 July 2008 (UTC)

I took a look. It certainly appears like a journal, but it lack the 2 basic attributes of any medical journal: an ISSN, and being indexed on PubMed. But the editors and contributors are definitely not the sort of borderline people usually seen on marginal journals. However, down in the corner of the home page, it says: "This project was supported by Grant No. 2005-JL-FX-0128 awarded by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice. " And then I checked the affiliations of the authors, and actually read the papers: this is essentially public relations for the current US government view of the subject. The principal theme is harm reduction: 3 entire issues out of the 6, every article in them with the POV that it doesn't work. The journal claims to be peer-reviewed, and it probably is, under the direction of an editorial board who all agree with each other. The quality varies--there is, for example, an excellent history of US narcotics control at [19] "The “Local” Matters: A Brief History of the Tension Between Federal Drug Laws and State and Local Policy" by Kevin A. Sabet, Ph.D. It's not a reliable scholarly journal in our sense, or in that of the National Library of Medicine, but it's more than a blog. Anyone want to start with this and write an article on them, go right ahead. DGG (talk) 03:13, 5 August 2008 (UTC)

Articles flagged for cleanup

Currently, 1439 articles are assigned to this project, of which 162, or 11.3%, are flagged for cleanup of some sort. (Data as of 14 July 2008.) Are you interested in finding out more? I am offering to generate cleanup to-do lists on a project or work group level. See User:B. Wolterding/Cleanup listings for details. More than 150 projects and work groups have already subscribed, and adding a subscription for yours is easy - just place a template on your project page.

If you want to respond to this canned message, please do so at my user talk page; I'm not watching this page. --B. Wolterding (talk) 18:21, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

Abbreviation help

Heya, I've been having trouble tracking down the full title of an abbreviation, and was wondering if anyone here could help?

I've been trying to link all the publications at Uropeltis pulneyensis, and one of the sources is "J soc bibliogr nat sci". I don't recognize it, and haven't been having any luck with Google. Search engines verify that it's a "real" abbreviation, but not what it expands to. Can anyone help? Thanks, Elonka 16:53, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

Probably Journal of the Society for the Bibliography of Natural Science. However, whether such a journal, or even such a society, exists, I don't know. I'm suspicious that it may be an error for the Journal of the Society for the Bibliography of Natural History. Nurg (talk) 00:07, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

What qualifies?

Does this project have guidelines for what qualifies as an academic journal? Recently [20] a journal was added to the List of scholarly journals in economics which looks iffy to me. (So far as I can see from the web site, there's one editor, no review policy, no organizational affiliations, and actually no issues published yet.) The same WP editor added a Journal [21] to List of law journals which looks similar, except the law journal has one issue.

Anyway, I don't want to over-guard the gates, but I would tend to keep these off of the lists. If this project has guidelines which back up that position, that would be helpful. CRETOG8(t/c) 04:02, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

There are two different questions here. (1) What falls into the scope of this project? I'd say, anything that calls itself an academic journal. That one included. Also some closely related subjects such as academic conferences. (2) What journals are sufficiently notable to have their own article, or to be listed on a list such as the one you point to? I don't think we've yet had enough experience to write out clear rules that would make it easy to decide this question, but to get a feel for how past cases of this type have been decided, you could look at the archives in Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting/Academic Journals. My own feeling is that the standards for inclusion in the list and the standards for having an actual article shouldn't be very different from each other: per WP:RED, we don't want to make redlinks for subjects that can't support an article. —David Eppstein (talk) 04:27, 31 August 2008 (UTC)
Thanks, not the nice clean rule I was hoping for, but still helpful. CRETOG8(t/c) 04:43, 31 August 2008 (UTC)
To get an idea of how to establish notability for an academic journal, it would perhaps be helpful to nominate a few articles of what might be borderline cases for AfD. The ensuing discussion could help us when the time comes to formulate a guideline on notability for AJ. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 10:21, 31 August 2008 (UTC)
AfD is for improving the encyclopedia by removing unsatisfactory articles, not for experimenting with policy. If you want to nominate for AfD, the obvious place to start is at the bottom of the existing articles, not the borderline. DGG (talk) 22:52, 2 September 2008 (UTC)
Question was about article scope, not project scope, but I thought I'd point out Wikipedia:WikiProject Academic Journals/Scope in any case. My feeling is that things like New Scientist and Scientific American and Popular Science, while borderline (and could have their own taskforce or project) are within the 'spirit' of the scope. Something like Physics Today is sort of (as far as I can tell) a cross between an academic journal and an industry news journal. Stuff like Science (magazine) Science (journal) is more clearly a straightforward academic journal. Anyway, as I said, project scope wasn't the question, but any excuse to waffle. :-) Carcharoth (talk) 15:35, 31 August 2008 (UTC)
As for project scope, anything that can best be discussed here is in scope. As for adding titles, I agree with David E: titles that are added without corresponding articles should either get an article to discuss or be removed from the list. As for whether this title is important enough for an article, it has not yet even had one issue published, which settles that question. Another ed. already removed it. DGG (talk) 22:52, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

Opinions requested on Zeitschrift für Geologische Wissenschaften (Journal for the Geological Sciences)

I stumbled upon this recently-created journal article and have been working a bit on it. I noticed that it has no impact factor. In the absence of specific guidelines for scientific journals, I am not sure whether this journal actually passes WP:NOTABILITY. I asked the advice of DGG here, who suggested to take it to AfD, but first ask for some opinions here. I waited a few days, because I had left a few messages on the creator's talk page in the hope that this person would be able to uncover a few more sources, but as I never got a response, I am going ahead now. Let me know what you think. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 15:22, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

I would wait a bit more before listing any academic journals for an AfD. Hopefully someone familiar with the field will chime in. As the discussion from last October shows, WP:N is a fairly poor guide in evaluating notability of academic journals. In this case I am not particularly sure, although I am somewhat inclined in favor of deletion. As you say, the journal is not indexed in the Journal Citation Reports, which actually does list 137 journals in Geoscience. On the other hand, it is indexed (according to the journal's website) by GeoRef, Chemical Abstracts, and Geoline. The editorial board does not appear to be particularly distinguished. Looking at the library holdings, in the U.S. it seems to be held by 77 libraries[22]. It is not great but not terrible either. Still, I'd like to hear from somebody familiar with the field first, before this is listed for an AfD. Nsk92 (talk) 16:27, 2 October 2008 (UTC)
I'd say the journal is a sufficiently notable one, with an interesting history. I believe it was originally an East German publication, and served as the official journal for the Gesellschaft für Geowissenschaften (GGW), the DDR's state institution for geological sciences, and was published by Akademie Verlag. When established in 1973 it superseded the journal Geologie (est. 1952), when that was merged with about 4 other periodicals also put out by the GGW. Geologie itself was the successor to Geologica, est. 1949 and apparently the first geological journal published in the DDR. As such, ZGW & its predecessors would've been the leading geosciences periodical of their time in the DDR, with some international reputation as well even considering the Cold War ethos. Post the German reunification ZGW apparently continued as the official/leading geo journal until 2004 when the GGW was merged with its former West German counterpart to form the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Geowissenschaften (DGG). Its association with the German geosciences institute(s) ceased, and I presume its rights and name were sold off to the present publishers, Verlag für Geowissenschaften Berlin. The format/rationale for the journal doesn't seem to have changed much under the new owners, at least to judge by the covers/contents listings of before-and-after editions. --cjllw ʘ TALK 03:05, 10 October 2008 (UTC)
  • Would there be any sources so that this story can be included in the article? Also, I still would feel happier if we had some more objective criteria for deciding when a journal is notable enough or not. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 05:09, 10 October 2008 (UTC)
Sure, have come across a couple, will look to add them in as references & expand the article a bit (they're in german, but that's probably to be expected). --cjllw ʘ TALK 07:26, 10 October 2008 (UTC)
  • Excellent, good job! Doesn't matter that they are in German, sources are sources. This journal is out of intensive-care now, I think. Still, my remark just before about criteria for notability for journals still stands in general, as WP:N hardly seems appropriate. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 08:54, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

I very much agree with Guillaume2303's last point. It'd be good to have some kind of a well-defined standard for inclusion of articles about academic journals. It is also true that this is one area where WP:N is really of very little help. One almost never writes about an academic journal, although lots of articles are published in them and academic journals are considered kind of a gold standard of a reliable source in WP:V. There are no industry awards or equivalents of something like Pulitzer prizes, and, more or less, no industy-type publications about academic journals as such. I think it is in fact quite useful to have WP articles about academic journals containing basic factual info such as who publishes them, what subject matter they cover, basic editorial board info (especially if it includes particularly prominent academics), if they are indexed by various citation indexes and databases, what their impact factor is, etc. Having basic info of this kind is valuable when evaluating and weighing the significance of sources cited in other WP articles, so there is additional benefit to the project from having WP articles about academic journals apart from the general encyclopedic value. Yet after looking at the situation in my own field, mathematics, I find that almost no journal (including the most elite ones) passes the basic reading of WP:N. For example, that is the case with Inventiones Mathematicae, which is generally regarded as the second most prestigious journal after Annals of Mathematics. I looked around quite a bit and could find very little in terms of the type of coverage that WP:N usually asks for. Most mathematicians would probably gladly give up half a year salary to have a paper published in Inventiones, but they don't actually write this in public. I checked the list of the 200 math journals that are indexed by ISI's Journal Citation Reports and are assigned impact factors there. Even the journals at the very bottom of that list are in fact quite decent and well regarded math journals, e.g. GLASGOW MATHEMATICAL JOURNAL (no. 185), and JOURNAL OF KNOT THEORY AND ITS RAMIFICATIONS (no 183). So I probably would be sympathetic to the (perhaps radical) view that any journal that is fully indexed and is assigned and impact factor by ISI's Journal Citation Reports is notable. So far we have been fairly lucky that articles about academic journals are rarely AfD-ed. But if it comes to that, I would not like to have to invoke IAR all the time, and it'd be nice to have some kind of a written standard. Maybe something could be added to WP:BK regarding this. Nsk92 (talk) 13:31, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

Towards a guide for notability

Nsk92 has presented in the above section some thoughts on what makes a journal notable. I agree that it is time to start thinking about these issues and develop perhaps a guideline along the lines of WP:PROF and WP:BK. I am quite willing to kick off this discussion by offering some, as yet rather random, thoughts.

  • Obviously, not every scientific journal can automatically be declared notable, like not every academic is automatically notable. When I was still a student, I was for several years co-editor of the "Communications of the Dutch Water Plant Society" (now defunct), which was held by only 1 or 2 major libraries and had no editorial board. Even though it claimed to be a "scientific journal", articles were not peer-reviewed. I surmise that this is an example of a non-notable journal.
  • If a journal is included in the Journal Citation Reports and has an impact factor, it is notable. There may be other databases (PubMed?) like that, for similar or other fields. Google Scholar is probably not selective enough. How about Scopus?
  • If a journal has published several very high impact articles, that would make the journal notable (I have no examples of this).
  • If a journal has been the subject of publications in reliable sources, that would make it notable. Probably a rare occasion, such a journal would most probably be included in major databases anyway. Also, this may be something unnecessary to stipulate, as this is already covered by WP:N.

OK, back to real-life work. Criticisms, other thoughts and bright ideas are welcome. :-) --Guillaume2303 (talk) 17:51, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

I think the JCR criterion is acceptable, within the fields that it covers and its other limitations. We'd also need criteria for other subjects, including the soft (soft=non-mathematical & non-experimental, in this context) social sciences--which it covers inadequately-- and the humanities. I know of no truly selective indexes in these subjects, unfortunately. another key limitation is that it cannot cover a journal until it has been in existence for three years, and many journals are notable before that. the third main one I can think of is historical publications no longer active. One within the period of the 60s + are in older editions of JCR, but not the current one; unfortunately they are very difficult to locate now. Pub Med is almost totally nonselective for English language medicine, and is not a suitable criterion. As for Scopus, one of its key selling points has been to include more journals than WoS, and I am reluctant to accept it as sufficient--possibly indicative. . As in other fields, my view about a fixed standard which even by itself permits inclusion is that though some WoS journals are not reallly notable, it's easier to include them all than carry out elaborate debates in esoteric subjects for the sake of removing perhaps 10% or so. DGG (talk) 00:18, 11 October 2008 (UTC)
I would say the JCR criterion is a good start as well, and outside of that, normal notability guidelines would probably apply. For historical, defunct, journals, for instance, the normal standard for anything historical should apply. If there is a history tracing forward to a current journal, then including the whole history and various names and changes in one article would probably be a good idea (i.e. merge stuff together). For the journals with the longest histories, some splitting up between differen period might be needed, but that will be rare. The problem of what to do about young journals that have already become notable, is, I think to turn back to the general notability guidelines again. If enough sources can be found showing notability, the lack of an impact factor should not matter too much. Carcharoth (talk) 19:03, 13 October 2008 (UTC)
The problem with young journals may be less severe than it seems. Genes, Brain and Behavior, for instance, appeared for the first time in 2002. It was included in the ISI databases by early 2003 and received an impact factor over 2003 in the 2004 JCR. So 2.5 years after the first issue, an impact factor was available (and the information that the journal would be included in the JCR was available much earlier from the journal lists published by ISI). --Guillaume2303 (talk) 19:55, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Chem Zbl

Does anyone know what journal Chem Zbl stands for? It appears to be an abbreviation for a rather old science journal. I've got some articles I'm looking for in it, and if it is an old journal, it would make a nice article. II | (t - c) 02:37, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Chemisches Zentralblatt. I imagine it's an index of chemistry papers from other journals — at least that's what the mathematical Zentralblatt is. —David Eppstein (talk) 02:46, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Notability discussion

I joined a discussion at WT:N, and the result was Wikipedia talk:Notability#Journal papers! If you have views on this, please come and discuss them. Carcharoth (talk) 18:34, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Akademie Verlag

Could someone who can check the German homepage please check Akademie Verlag (AV) and the bit about them in Astronomische Nachrichten (AN)? The Akademie Verlag article says "founded 1946 in the Soviet occupied Eastern part of divided Berlin", which tally with the date when they started publishing AN (1948). Both articles also correctly link to German Academy of Sciences Berlin. It's the later stuff that gets confusing. The AV article says "Since 1997 they are part of R. Oldenbourg Verlag which in turn is owned since 2004 by Cornelsen Verlag.". The AN article says "Akademie-Verlag was taken over by VCH in 1990." and "From 1996 to the present day [...] the journal has been published by Wiley-VCH. This company was formed in 1996 when the German publishing company Verlag Chemie (founded 1921) joined John Wiley and Sons." I think VCH is the same as Verlag Chemie, but not 100% on that. If someone could check this out, I'd be grateful. Also, Akademie Verlag needs quite a bit of cleaning up anyway (the German article is quite a bit longer than the English one). Carcharoth (talk) 13:17, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Also, should articles like this be tagged in scope for this project? Don't think anyone else will want it! Carcharoth (talk) 13:19, 14 October 2008 (UTC)
See here. In 1991, after reunification, Akademie Verlag was sold to Verlag Chemie (VCH). John Wiley then bought VCH (in 1996) and in turn sold the humanities section of Akademie to Oldenbourg. The physical sciences section continues to be published by Wiley-VCH. 128.226.130.90 (talk) 21:35, 14 October 2008 (UTC)
Thank-you very much! I will try and find time to correct the article later, but if someone else wants to do it first, please do so. Carcharoth (talk) 22:39, 14 October 2008 (UTC)
I've expanded the article on Akademie Verlag a little, digging out at least the title of works about the role in the GDR. One book about the censorship history in the 1960s was even published by Akademie Verlag, titled (translated) "Every book an adventure". It can be previewed at Google Books. -- Matthead  Discuß   11:36, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

Glaring omissions?

Journal of Physics C, Journal of Physics F were merged to form Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter in 1988, but it seems to me that they still deserve their own articles. I don't have any of them at hand so I can't do them myself, but if someone could get around, that would be nice.Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 13:29, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

Biochimica et Biophysica Acta suggestion at DYK

I've just suggested Biochimica et Biophysica Acta at DYK, but the current article is a little short and dull. I've taken it as far as I can with the sources available free online, but if anyone has access to the online journal issues or the book listed in Further Reading, expansion in the next couple of days might increase its chances of being featured. A more reliable source for the hook fact (that it was the first Elsevier journal) would also be a bonus. Thanks. Espresso Addict (talk) 06:46, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

Scientific journal wants authors to add Wikipedia articles

An ongoing discussion is here. —David Eppstein (talk) 02:13, 19 December 2008 (UTC)

See HISTORY OF CHEMISTRY JOURNALS, by John Andraos, 2000-2003. HTML version from Google is here. Carcharoth (talk) 17:32, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

Article clean-up may be needed

Please see Johann Salomo Christoph Schweigger. I'm not sure the journals mentioned there are the right ones. If anyone has time to check into this, I'd be grateful. Carcharoth (talk) 17:35, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

Ack. It's a copyvio from here. Big rewrite is needed. I've stubbed it for now. Carcharoth (talk) 17:37, 31 December 2008 (UTC)
Hang on. Might be the other way round. Our article dates from 2006. That page I linked says "This text has been compiled from the biographies of Schweigger available in the Internet", but links to another page and doesn't say when it was written. Hmm. Carcharoth (talk) 17:40, 31 December 2008 (UTC)
This page seems to name an author for that biography, but I'm not sure what Intute is. Carcharoth (talk) 17:43, 31 December 2008 (UTC)
It was compiled from this, which is a snapshot of a webpage in 2000. The first two paragraphs of that page are clearly visible in our article. John Vandenberg (chat) 18:06, 31 December 2008 (UTC)
Thanks. I've stubbed, added that link as a source, and left a note on the talk page. Carcharoth (talk) 18:14, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

Knowledgeable assistance, please

I'm working with an editor, User:SJSJR2D2, who has been working on an article on the Seattle Journal for Social Justice, located here. I'm fairly sure it's not notable, but the editor's been working on it in good faith, and that's fine by me. However, today I was asked to point out some articles in the category of Law journals for him/her to use, with the comment that the ones s/he had looked at looked pretty similar. So, looking at a few, I noticed that there are a lot of articles on law journals that aren't really sourced; most of them have claims of notability, i.e. notable alumni, etc., however. Frankly, I know less than nothing about law journals, so I'd appreciate if someone could possibly jump in and advise the editor as to what should be done at this point. Better that someone who knows what they're doing take a stab at it rather than me flailing around in something I don't know. Thanks! Tony Fox (arf!) 02:50, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

Archiving

Since this project has a very long talk page with many conversations from 2007, I've taken the liberty of setting up an autoarchiving system for it. I set the timer to 90 days, and I hope that I did it correctly. (I have no confidence in these things.) If you don't like it, or if I screwed up, please feel free to either revert to or fix it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:40, 13 January 2009 (UTC)

Scoliosis (journal)

WikiProject Medicine is dealing with its list of notability problems at the moment. Could someone here please tell me whether Wikipedia should have an article on the journal Scoliosis? I don't know whether this is a junk journal or the best in its subfield; I'm not even sure how to start figuring it out. At this point, just getting "the right answer" is more important than cleaning up the one-sentence stub, so I'm perfectly willing to just have someone {{subst:prod}} it if not notable, or to remove the {{notability}} tag if it is.

By the way, there are 13 such articles with unclear notability on this project's list as of the last database dump (October 2008). They are:

Thanks for your help! WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:46, 13 January 2009 (UTC)

Scoliosis is a rather young journal, started 2007, and many such entities don't survive. However, it is produced by a reputable society and indexed by Medline, which speaks for notability. It appears to have been unanimously kept at AfD in 2008: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Scoliosis (journal). I'll try to flesh it out a little, as the present article isn't very useful.
In general, indexing, age (number of issues published), regularity, impact factor, number of libraries that hold it, publisher, quality of editorial board and whether there's a print issue are all factors to look at. In previous AfDs, as I recall, all journals with significant history of publication or produced by a prestigious publisher have been kept. Espresso Addict (talk) 13:59, 13 January 2009 (UTC)
I have removed notability tags from Journals of Gerontology (major in field) and Futures (journal) & Solar Energy Materials and Solar Cells (both published by Elsevier). The tag on Journal of Physics D had previously been removed. "Annals of scholarship" was a partial duplicate of Annals of Scholarship and has been redirected. Espresso Addict (talk) 14:44, 13 January 2009 (UTC)
Thank you! I appreciate both your efforts to improve Scoliosis and also your very accessible explanation of the general principles for notability. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:05, 13 January 2009 (UTC)

Video medical journal

Investigating the list of notability-tagged articles from WhatamIdoing above, I came across Video medical journal and would be grateful for input from this project as to what should be done with this. The current article is clearly promotional of a video website which appears to be run by the article's creator; however, the general topic of internet-published videos appears interesting and notable. Comments on the talk page would be useful. Thanks, Espresso Addict (talk) 18:39, 13 January 2009 (UTC)

A similar journal is Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE). Although it is not mentioned in that article, I know that it was recently included in Medline/PubMed. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 18:48, 13 January 2009 (UTC)

Guideline for "notability"?

Is there some IF level above which journals are wikinotable so the first deletionist doesn't have his way with them? I was thinking of adding some pharmacology journals, but there's a "fat tail" in this area with 30+ journals having an IF over 4. Thanks, Xasodfuih (talk) 19:11, 20 January 2009 (UTC)

E.g. JPET has over 600 mentions in Google News [23], but you'd be hard pressed to find a third party writing at length about the journal. Also, ghits are not really a good measure because journals that publish mostly reviews (thus make a good source for medical wiki articles) get few news hits. E.g. CNS Drugs has an impact factor comparable with JPET, but it's hardly ever mentioned in the mainstream news. Xasodfuih (talk) 19:38, 20 January 2009 (UTC)
We've tended to go mostly on indexing (including impact factor) being important for notability, as there are rarely, if ever, third-party sources which talk in detail about the journal itself. I wouldn't set an impact factor threshold -- all journals with an impact factor at all merit inclusion here, because their research is the underpinning of all that we do here. I've sometimes included an NLM catalog [24] reference to satisfy the letter of the third-party sources guidelines.
One thing to note is that publishers often come along and add in promotional material, which then makes the article very vulnerable to attack, so watchlisting any journals you create is important. Espresso Addict (talk) 21:02, 20 January 2009 (UTC)
Thanks for the guidance. I went ahead and created a stub for the Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics. Xasodfuih (talk) 21:16, 20 January 2009 (UTC)
Xasodfuih, for your example of JPET, I don't know about full-length third-party articles about it (usually such things are reserved for editorials within the same journal), but Journals of the Century in Pharmacy, Physical Therapy and Nutrition and Library journal use and citation half-life in medical science (insert off-topic grumbling about special characters in DOIs) each have about a paragraph on it (in the latter case because citations to it had an unusually large half-life in the study, probably less due to anything special about the journal and more to the limited holdings that were tested within the study). I found these by a Google scholar search with the journal name and "impact factor" as key phrases. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:31, 20 January 2009 (UTC)
I'm guessing the landmark articles on paracetamol in the late 1940s contribute to that long half-life. Paracetamol is one of the most studied and used drugs, so those papers get cited in many books and review articles. Xasodfuih (talk) 22:03, 20 January 2009 (UTC)
For the last year, we have been able to defend every journal in JCR as notable. Whether it should go beyond there is dubious in the fields it covers well--it would be hard to ague that there is any established journal in pharmacology or physics worth mentioning that isn't included, but there need to be the following caveats :
1. For fields in the humanities of soft social sciences, many other journals will be notable.
2. New journals can not be included into JCR because one cannot calculate an impact factor till the third year. New journals can be notable, certainly if published by major societies.
3. Ceased journals are not in the current JCR. They can be searched for year by year, but its a horrible job, unless there's some comprehensive list I have forgotten about. They can still be notable.
4. Personally, I do not consider inclusion in Scopus to be equivalent--their criteria have much broadened in the attempt to be competitive with the largest possible number of titles, which is of course good for some purposes, but not notability. I think the same about inclusion in Chem Abs and Medline--they are examples of directory type inclusion. DGG (talk) 06:25, 24 January 2009 (UTC)
Hi all... User:Drmies and I have been talking about this, and we were invited here via a note on Drmies' talk page. We've been collaborating on a draft essay about notability for journals that we felt we should bring to your attention.--S Marshall Talk/Cont 16:44, 4 February 2009 (UTC)

Nature vs Annual Reviews

DGG worries about journals with no IF. Well, the top pharma journal had no wiki article unitil I added it an hour ago. The two other top 3 pharma journals also don't have articles. Speaking of which, the Nature Review journals all have a separate page, but their Annual competitors are all lumped on one page. Is this by accident or by design? Xasodfuih (talk) 16:22, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

I think the Nature Review series may well be the oddity. I recall several of the Trends review journals used to have individual articles, but were deleted some while back. The Current Opinion series is also all covered in a single article. I've been meaning to re-create one or two of the Trends journals when I had sourced enough material to avoid them being obvious deletion candidates, but haven't got around to it yet -- in that case I think there's sufficient differences between the journals, as well as sufficient history for some of them, to make some individual articles plausible. I'm not sure, however, what value a series of stubs on near-identical review journals provides. Espresso Addict (talk) 17:45, 26 January 2009 (UTC)
I agree, the only technical problem is see is that of journal infoboxes, listing ISSN, editors, IF, etc, which is difficult to do if an article is about several journals simultaneously. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 17:53, 26 January 2009 (UTC)
You could conceivably give all the info from the infoboxes in a table if the articles are merged. Half of the the Nature review articles actually don't have an infobox. Xasodfuih (talk) 20:53, 26 January 2009 (UTC)
I used a table format with the modern journals under the Biochimica et Biophysica Acta umbrella. I recall it was a lot less cumbersome than the subheading formats I tried in draft versions. Espresso Addict (talk) 06:40, 27 January 2009 (UTC)
That table looks good. Xasodfuih (talk) 15:49, 27 January 2009 (UTC)
The Expert Opinion series has individual articles as well, but I'm not sure they're warranted. Xasodfuih (talk) 20:18, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

Cover images

I see that some of these get deleted and some don't. What's the policy behind this? Xasodfuih (talk) 15:49, 27 January 2009 (UTC)

You need to upload them to en-Wiki (not Commons), use a reasonably small thumbnail & provide a bit of boiler plate as a "fair use rationale", see eg [25]. Though many people write far more detailed rationales, I've never had any trouble with just using that. Espresso Addict (talk) 17:16, 27 January 2009 (UTC)
WP:FurMe is a nice tool to help write a Fair use rationale. John Vandenberg (chat) 09:55, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

News that won't get covered by automatic alerts

  • The Category:Journals by publication frequency hierarchy of is now available with a set of basic subcategories.
  • Category for deletion: Category:Three times annually journals, considered for rename then for deletion here
    Update: not deleted but renamed to Category:Triannual journals
  • The {{WikiProject Journals}} banner alias {{WPJournals}} can now be used to tag other common classes: "Redirect Disambig File Template Category Project NA" (in addition to "Stub Start C B GA A FA / List FL"). See its new documentation with self-documented sample code ready for pasting.
  • The Category:Academic Journal articles by quality page now display an automatic counter of classified articles. All its subcategories now have the standard navigational headers and have been tagged with the banner/class=category
  • The main stub templates have been tagged with the banner/class=Template
  • This project's main page has been updated (fixes to the header, assessment counter, documentation for tagging stubs or categorizing articles, cf. history).

That's some stuff I would have liked to find, please review/amend. — The Little Blue Frog (ribbit) 23:01, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

The CfD should get covered by the alerts. If it's not, please file a bug report at WP:AAlerts/Bugs.Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 01:59, 28 March 2009 (UTC)
The category didn't have a WPJ banner when it was nominated. As I understand it, the alerts are more or less only about articles tagges with the banner. — The Little Blue Frog (ribbit) 05:04, 28 March 2009 (UTC)
Yes, but it does now, so it'll get picked up. As a general remark, it would be a good idea for this project to run a bot to tag articles from relevant categories. You are very lucky in that these categories will be very clean (ie not a lot of false positive). The alerts system will be that much more powerful.Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 05:20, 28 March 2009 (UTC)
It hasn't been picked up, but it doesn't surprise me: the category was tagged after the fact. When a category is tagged, I don't think the bot is going to scan all old "category for deletion" and "category for rename" to see if it's already under discussion somewhere. Anyway, I had to populate the category in emergency and the deletion motion was withdrawn, it was just renamed to Category:Triannual journals. — The Little Blue Frog (ribbit) 18:58, 8 April 2009 (UTC)
Thanks TLBF. The automatic counters are a great motivator. We have work to do! ;-) John Vandenberg (chat) 09:53, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

Excellence in Research for Australia journal lists

As a bit of background, the Australian Research Council has been developing the framework for the government initiative called Excellence in Research for Australia. They have released two excel spreadsheets with the list of journals.[26]

I have created two lists with all of the journals:

And I have reused the structure of WP:LOMJQ for the two lists of A* journals:

I am still inquiring about the copyright status of this data, which is why I have avoided including all of the spreadsheet data into those pages. There are two tasks I think we should do:

  1. Ensure we have articles for all of the A* journals, and hopefully keep working through the lists
  2. Incorporate this rating system into Wikipedia, either as categories, or in {{Infobox Journal}}

In the interests of full disclosure, this is related to my day job as a staff member of an Australian university. This would take a lifetime of Sundays to do myself, however if can reach a critical mass, Australian researchers will be able to use Wikipedia articles and categories to help them determine which journals they should be targeting, and the researchers themselves will likely hop in and help us create articles for the missing journals on the lists. John Vandenberg (chat) 10:50, 24 April 2009 (UTC)

I am marking journals on the list as {{done}} when the article has been confirmed as the correct journal, and the ISSNs are listed. John Vandenberg (chat) 11:33, 24 April 2009 (UTC)
I have finished cleaning up the PCE A* list. There are now 28 missing journals on the list. I have only created two of these, so there were 30 missing. The list supplied by the Australian Research Council contains 96 journals, so we already had articles for roughly 69% of these A* journal (i.e. the top 5%).
There are also another seven entries which are redirects to Annual Reviews (publisher); given that the Australian govt thinks these are in the top 5% of journals, those seven are probably notable enough to have their own article.
John Vandenberg (chat) 12:13, 26 April 2009 (UTC)
I have finished searching for existing articles for the HCA A* list. I count 121 existing articles, of a total of 378 journals on the list. That means Wikipedia has articles for only 31.5% of the top 5% of journals, and there are 257 missing articles on the HCA list.
There are 26 HCA articles which need an infobox before they can be marked as {{done}}. John Vandenberg (chat) 14:55, 26 April 2009 (UTC)

Australasian Journal of Bone & Joint Medicine

Australasian Journal of Bone & Joint Medicine is a non-journal disguised as a journal. Guillaume2303 (talk · contribs) added the WP:WikiProject Academic Journals's template to the article's talk page.

Does this WikiProject concern itself with publications masquerading as journals? davidwr/(talk)/(contribs)/(e-mail) 19:38, 11 May 2009 (UTC)

  • I am fully aware of the status of this journal (in fact, it was all the brouhaha that led me to check whether we had an article on it). As this was masquerading as a scientific journal, I think it belongs to the Journals Wikiproject. Placing that banner there does not signify any endorsement or such, just that this article falls within the interests of this particular Wikiproject. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 19:48, 11 May 2009 (UTC)

Physics publications.

WP:PHYSPUB has been created recently. If you find a physics-related journal, could you please tag the article with {{physics|class=|importance=|pub=yes}} ? Thanks. Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 01:00, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

Does your WikiProject care about talk pages of redirects?

Does your project care about what happens to the talk pages of articles that have been replaced with redirects? If so, please provide your input at User:Mikaey/Request for Input/ListasBot 3. Thanks, Matt (talk) 01:29, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

GA Sweeps invitation

This message is being sent to WikiProjects with GAs under its scope. Since August 2007, WikiProject Good Articles has been participating in GA sweeps. The process helps to ensure that articles that have passed a nomination before that date meet the GA criteria. After nearly two years, the running total has just passed the 50% mark. In order to expediate the reviewing, several changes have been made to the process. A new worklist has been created, detailing which articles are left to review. Instead of reviewing by topic, editors can consider picking and choosing whichever articles they are interested in.

We are always looking for new members to assist with reviewing the remaining articles, and since this project has GAs under its scope, it would be beneficial if any of its members could review a few articles (perhaps your project's articles). Your project's members are likely to be more knowledgeable about your topic GAs then an outside reviewer. As a result, reviewing your project's articles would improve the quality of the review in ensuring that the article meets your project's concerns on sourcing, content, and guidelines. However, members can also review any other article in the worklist to ensure it meets the GA criteria.

If any members are interested, please visit the GA sweeps page for further details and instructions in initiating a review. If you'd like to join the process, please add your name to the running total page. In addition, for every member that reviews 100 articles from the worklist or has a significant impact on the process, s/he will get an award when they reach that threshold. With ~1,300 articles left to review, we would appreciate any editors that could contribute in helping to uphold the quality of GAs. If you have any questions about the process, reviewing, or need help with a particular article, please contact me or OhanaUnited and we'll be happy to help. --Happy editing! Nehrams2020 (talk • contrib) 21:47, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

Two business journal lists

I have set up two lists of journals:

Wikipedia:WikiProject Academic Journals/BW Top 20 - Business Week
Wikipedia:WikiProject Academic Journals/FT Top 40 - Financial Times

Both have copyright issues, which is why I have put them in project space initially. Depending on how respected these lists are, we may want to ask the companies whether they would release these lists into the public domain. John Vandenberg (chat) 07:52, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

  • Not sure separate articles on these lists would be warranted. But I don't see any problem (copyright or other) with mentioning these rankings in the articles on the different journals (e.g., "BusinessWeek ranked this journal 15th in its 2008 annual top 20 MBA rankings" or something like that). --Guillaume2303 (talk) 08:30, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

Two South African journal lists

Using the spreadsheets available here, I have created two more tables of journals:

I believe these lists are annually updated by the Department of Education (South Africa), but I am not familiar with the publication collection/reporting that occurs in South Africa. Maybe we need to write an article about it. :-) John Vandenberg (chat) 07:58, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

WP:BOTREQ#Journal compilation

I've made a request for a bot compilation of what is found in the |journal= parameters of {{cite journal}} and {{citation}}. This should be useful for your project. Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 03:12, 30 May 2009 (UTC)

Category farms at Informa journals

I've just cleaned out a bunch of cat farms in Informa publications (I'm sure there are many more to go). Given the similarities of the articles, I suspect that the articles were created by an employee -- which is fine with me, although it leads to some odd quirks, like wikilinking Ph.D after the editors' names and putting the journal title in bold italicized text throughout the article -- but they have a tendency to list a dozen or so categories for each journal, which is nonsense, and to miss the most relevant categories, which is unfortunate.

I just wanted to suggest to you all that you keep an eye out for this problem so that Category:Academic journals isn't any more bloated than actually necessary. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:10, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for that. I think I removed some categories from these articles a few days before you while I was cleaning up a few of the categories. I noticed there were other unnecessary categories, and groaned, but didnt get back to cleaning those issues up. John Vandenberg (chat) 13:22, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

BOT generated list of journals is complete

Rest of thread moved to Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Academic Journals/Journals cited by Wikipedia

After several false starts and bug fixes, a comprehensive list of journals cited by Wikipedia is finally complete. You can read more about the project and see the results at Wikipedia:WikiProject Academic Journals/Journals cited by Wikipedia/. It is hoped that this list will help members find missing pages that need created. Comments and suggestions for improving the results on the next run are certainly welcome. --ThaddeusB (talk) 01:05, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

List of Journals by publisher

These are useful lists, but should they be separate, or be part of the article for the publish. The list for JHU Press was just merged by another editor into the main article [[Johns Hopkins University Press]. My view is that it should be separate, to facilitate linking--but possibly it depends of publisher size, and JHU P is right in the middle. I';'ver asker for comment on the talk p. there. DGG (talk) 02:11, 5 July 2009 (UTC)

Hi I have raised a question about listing more scientists related to a specific journal, see here, then just the Editor-in-Chief. My question is, if it is forbitten (or should be forbitten) to list scientists related to the journal as Associate Editors and/or members in the editorial board...??

Personally I think it is a shame, that scientists associated with a journal are being removed. This listing gives an overview which people are interested in the same specific field, and have gathered around that specific journal. I think these listings give an overview of a specific group of scientists that all support the paradigm the journal is spreading. Which I consider one of the corner stones of scientic development.

I would like to hear your opinion about this? Thank you.

-- Marcel Douwe Dekker (talk) 21:20, 21 June 2009 (UTC)

Personally, I don't see why not. Then the biographies of these scientist can be updated to list this membership/editorial board position and so on.Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 21:26, 21 June 2009 (UTC)
Ok thank you. -- Marcel Douwe Dekker (talk) 21:29, 21 June 2009 (UTC)
  • Personally, I agree with DGG who removed those editorial board members. There are several reasons for this. First, editorial boards have some turnover, with some journals terms are just a few years. Who are you then going to list, current members? Everybody who ever was a member? Who's going to maintain all these ever-changing articles? Second, and more importantly, depending on the journal, it is more or less an honor on being on its board and, hence, more or less prestigious scientists will agree to be on the board. Being on the board of a journal like Science certainly is a big honor. But the Int J Gen Syst has an impact factor of just 0.826 (just released 2008 IF, the 2007 IF mentioned on the journal's website is an even lower 0.551), ranking it 49 out of 85 journals in its ISI category "COMPUTER SCIENCE, THEORY & METHODS". Most of us agree that having an IF makes a journal notable, but I think most will also agree that this journal definitely is second or even third tier. (And, yes, I know all about the limitations of IFs, but remember that they were created to compare journals...) Anyway, I would expect that many scientists on the board of this journal might not even make WP:ACADEMIC, so what's the use in listing them in the article on the journal? Remember that being on an editorial board does not make a scientist notable, more is needed than that. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 22:19, 21 June 2009 (UTC)
I have never liked this practice, which I think is promotional--not just in journals, but with organizations too. The person who is important with respect to an academic journal is the editor in chief, or sometimes the coeditors in chief, or for very large journals the people in charge of the specific sections. . They are the ones who actually affect the reputation of a journal, by a/soliciting good papers, b/ deciding to whom to send incoming articles, and c/ making the decision about what to accept. Sometimes other people also solicit, but the e-i-c uniquely does b & c. (There are unusual journals that do this by group decision--but usually 1 or 2 people will be dominant in this also). As I have learned from publishers, the only significant thing the publisher of a journal can really do to improve the quality of a journal is select the e-i-c. The members of the editorial board have 3 roles only: a/ To lend their prestige to the title page b/to serve as a source of peer-reviewers--sometimes the only peer-reviewers, and c/to be solicited for articles. The e-i-c receives the usually very high office expenses paid, and as major item of professional power: he directly affects individual careers, and even for a major journal affect the course of the profession itself. For some major journals, where it is a full-time job while it lasts, either he gets paid part of a professorial salary, or his university gets reimbursed for the cost of his teaching which he then gets excused from. Many universities require faculty to get the provost's permission before accepting such a job & expect some arrangements to be made. As for the board, they get usually a free subscription. Sometimes there is an implicit understanding that their own papers & those of their students will get special consideration. (Sometimes it is explicit, in which case most of us would consider it an unethically operated journal). They've been known to join for that as much as for the honor.
I have never myself been e-i-c of a journal, though I known people who were. My advisor was associate e-i-c for the major journal in his field, Journal of Molecular Biology, in its first spectacular decade. The role of associate editors of the sort varies, as does their importance. In this case, he got to see early much of the work done in the extremely competitive subject, got to select many of the referees, and supervised the rewriting of many of the articles (and as a speciality, rewrote some of the ones from non-English speakers). But he never knew what would be actually published till it came out, and it was John Kendrew's journal, & the major think K. did, and made him a very central figure in the subject. He was the 1st e-i-c, and started the journal about the same time he won the Novel Prize in Chemistry. That's the general level of e-i-c s for such journals. Most of the then very few important molecular biologists in the world was members of the editorial board. I've been on the e.b. of several journals. As such, I was occasionally sent a ms to review as a referee. When the journal needed more papers, I was asked to find someone who could--with a strong hint that I should help the journal by contributing one myself. I listed the e.b. on my cv, but it didn't count for much there. There are journals where I would turn it down, but in general I (and the 100s of people of the ebs of some journals) like the free subscriptions.
I see the above request as a repeated attempt to use the names of the e.b. for publicity. That's of course what they are for partially, but not at WP. The reasons given amount to saying as much outright. We are not Linkedin. '
As for Wikipedia: We certanly do not accept eb membership as a factor in notability--We do often include eb's in bios, including many of the people above. I'm not sure we should always do that. My view, normally, is that if the need it to make a substantial article, they may not be notable. DGG' (talk) 23:41, 21 June 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, but I think you misjudging my intention. I am not at all interested in listing names just for publicity. It seems you have a rather extreme opinion here:

  1. Only the editor in chief is worth mentioning in a scientific journal article, other names should be removed
  2. Biographical article shouldn't mentioned that a the person is (just) an editor for any journal
  3. Listing any more people from the editorial board makes Wikipedia into a publicity vehicle, like LinkedIn

My main focus is uncovering and explaining about the connections/relationships between scientists in some specific fields. I think

  1. Journals are an important vehicle in distribution of science, which is established by a lot of people working together. Wikipedia should explain about those people involved in the journals operations, and not automatically assume the editor in chief is the only one that counts.
  2. Being an editor for a journal is an important and notable part of a scientists career.
  3. In the specific journal there are over 50 people on the editorial board. I had mentioned 9 scientists of which 6 have a Wikipedia article.

My main concern is that listing the notable people in the editorial board is a possibility to show some of the connections/relationships between scientists. It is just an other piece of the puzzle. If you reduce all links in a journal article the article turns in a dead-end street.

-- Marcel Douwe Dekker (talk) 22:10, 22 June 2009 (UTC)

Ah, I also thought you were asking whether we should list everyone of the editorial board, which would usually include a lot of not-notable people.
However if you are listing only people already deemed "notable" and have articles, I dont see a problem with that. The lists will probably be harder to maintain as people come and go from the board, but that is a different problem - we would prioritise who is listed based on what impact that they had to the credibility and reception of the journal.
John Vandenberg (chat) 22:23, 22 June 2009 (UTC)

Sorry I haven't been more clear. I started this discussion because of the removal of this one sentence:

Other scientists currently or previous on the editorial board are Lofti Zadeh, Okan Ersoy, Mario Bunge, Peter Checkland[1], Mihajlo Mesarovic, Richard Sternberg, Yasuhiko Takahara, Bernard P. Zeigler and, Hans J. Zimmermann.[2]

As you can see I dealt with the problem (that people leave the board) by using the phrase "currently or previous on the editorial board". I guess the specific question here is: Can I expand the one sentence in the International Journal of General Systems article:

The Editor-in-Chief of the journal is George Klir.

to (leaving the three "black names" out)

The Editor-in-Chief of the journal is George Klir, and other scientists currently or previous on the editorial board are Lofti Zadeh, Okan Ersoy, Mario Bunge, Peter Checkland, Mihajlo Mesarovic, and Richard Sternberg.

-- Marcel Douwe Dekker (talk) 22:48, 22 June 2009 (UTC)

I've had a quick look at the article in question.
If a scientist has been mentioned in a third-party source as being part of the editorial board, I think they should definitely be mentioned.
I don't have a problem listing others that already have a Wikipedia article also, preferably with at least a citation to the front matter which has their name on the printed edition of the journal, for verification purposes. John Vandenberg (chat) 00:55, 23 June 2009 (UTC)
  • I'm not sure yet what the intention is here. Only very rarely will there be third-party sources mentioning that someone is on an editorial board, but I agree with John that if they exist, they can be used to source the article (it's difficult enough to find third-party sources for most academic journals...) On the other hand, just listing people that happen to have a WP article does not really seem useful to me, as DGG already argued. However, Marcel mentions above: "My main focus is uncovering and explaining about the connections/relationships between scientists in some specific fields." That sounds very much like original research to me and WP then is not the place for this. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 06:14, 23 June 2009 (UTC)
This "uncovering and explaining about the connections/relationships" simply relates to every listing of related scientists, for example in the "see also" section of a thematic article (example), or in a separate list of scientists in any specific field (example). These listings show which scientists are involved in the particular subject. I am just saying this common Wikipedia practice, shouldn't be forbidden in scientific journal articles. -- Marcel Douwe Dekker (talk) 12:08, 23 June 2009 (UTC)
We do this, for the successive editor-in-chief. It can sometimes also be done for authors of seminal articles which can be shown by published reliable sources to be especially notable. We do not try to form a web of all possible connections. There are some information science people doing interesting work with similar projects of a large scale; a key author you might want to follow is Loet Leydesdorff and a key place for such studies the SIGMETRICS mailing list, SIGMETRICS@LISTSERV.UTK.EDU. I follow that list, and I do not recall any work done with editorial boards specifically. So OR it is, and it should be interesting. Remember to publish it in a peer-reviewed journal so we can cite it. DGG (talk) 05:36, 28 June 2009 (UTC)

Sorry, I simply fail to understand, how this sentence can be classified as OR:

The Editor-in-Chief of the journal is George Klir, and other scientists currently or previous on the editorial board are Lofti Zadeh, Okan Ersoy, Mario Bunge, Peter Checkland, Mihajlo Mesarovic, and Richard Sternberg

The journals website confirms, and previous journals confirm this information. I am not making anything up. It is not that I have started interviewing scientists about there scientific network. I am just combining the existing information from primary sources. -- Marcel Douwe Dekker (talk) 14:46, 28 June 2009 (UTC)

P.S. Since we can't seem to come up with some kind of agreement, I already made up my mind, that the proposal to list (all) notable (allready in Wikipedia mentioned) editors is something what should be allowed, but what shouldn't be stimulated either because of the given arguments.

  • Comment I think that the "rule" could be quite simple: The EIC should be listed. Associate editors or board members should only be listed if there are additional reasons beyond their mere membership of the board. These additional reasons should be supported by independent secondary sources (so just a listing on the journal cover or website would not be enough). I think this summarizes the viewpoints of most people above, except Marcel Douwe Dekker. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 22:14, 28 June 2009 (UTC)

Indeed I fail to understand, why you can add in a biographical article that a person is a member of the editorial board of a journal, and you can't mention in the journals article which scientists (allready mentioned in Wikipedia) are members of the editorial board? -- Marcel Douwe Dekker (talk) 01:01, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

  • It's the nature of these things. Being a member of an editorial board means that someone thinks you are a notable expert, hence it is interesting to mention in a bio of that person. However, editorial board members generally don't do much for a journal. So for a journal it is much less important or interesting who is on the board. Editors choose board members for different reasons. It may be because these people are good reviewers, but more often it is only because they are a "name" in the field and convey some prestige to the journal. That's why DGG (and I agree with that) considers such listings promotional in nature. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 06:50, 29 June 2009 (UTC)
The nature of these things...?! That sounds like the one and only truth. It seems to me however this is (just) one way of looking at these things. It is an argumentation I respect. That is why I agree not to stimulate the listing of all notable editors in the journals article. But actively removing reference to notable editors, in other words censoring this articles, is a far to dramatic action for me.
It seems to me this is not about the nature of things, but about how we represent things in Wikipedia: about Wikipedia philosophy. It seems like Inclusionism (generally less concerned with the question of notability, and instead focus on whether or not an article is factual, with merit, or useful) versus Exclusionism (removing irrelevant or superfluous information). It seems to me I am in favor of the Inclusionism and you (Guillaume2303) and DGG in favor of Exclusionism or even Deletionism. I am not sure where to put Headbomb's (laissey fair) or John Vandenberg's (formalistic). That is all right with me. Wikipedia for me is about having respect for others point of view.
Back to this particular subject. I think there are different points of view and different philosophies at stack here. There is no agreement about any thing here... and in this situation better to leave the things as they are. With the Wikipedia Project Systems I have been engaged in improving 1000+ articles, and I have gotten serious doubt about my attempts to forcing my own standard on every article. If we leave it, this will mean we respect there are going to be differences between the articles in the field here. That is fine with me. -- Marcel Douwe Dekker (talk) 14:40, 29 June 2009 (UTC)
I guess with the latest move of DGG, here removing the scientists related to the article, he makes it quit clear he doesn't accept scientists beeing mentioned in a journal's article. -- Marcel Douwe Dekker (talk) 11:52, 30 June 2009 (UTC)
P.S. I guess this is a typical example of Deletionism and inclusionism in Wikipedia, not regarding accepting whole article but specific content in an article.
Ok, since you raised the question, I will try to answer it. DGG has stated, that the EIC is the most important person in the journals operation, and other editors are involved for various reasons. Now I agree. For DGG it is the reason to list ony the EIC in the journal's article and exclude other editors, and for me it is the reason to include the other editors. So it seems to me, we only disagree here about how to deal with the representation in Wikipedia. DGG wants to exclude/delete and I want to include certain facts. And here I make a link with "Deletionism" versus "inclusionism". -- Marcel Douwe Dekker (talk) 13:37, 7 July 2009 (UTC)
  • As someone who is actively involved with editing several scientific journals (as EIC, AE, or board member), let me assure you that DGG is completely right: the EIC calls all the shots (publishing is definitely not a democratic process) and although some associate editors may have some influence on a journal's policy, editorial board members have none or almost none. I support completely DGG's position that only the EIC should be listed (except for rare cases where there is a good, independent source showing that an associate editor or board member was involved with a journal in a notable way). --Guillaume2303 (talk) 13:53, 7 July 2009 (UTC)
It is already hard to find third-party commentary on individual journals and (as Guillaume2303 mentioned) any external comment about who is on their editorial boards is uncommon. Since it is Wikipedia's mission to neutrally reflect what reliable third-party sources say about each article subject, listing the editorial board seems like overkill and a violation of WP:NOT. The only place where I can imagine this being significant if there was a feud or controversy involving people on the journal's board, which was reliably reported. Then it would be worthy of some specific text in the article. EdJohnston (talk) 14:04, 7 July 2009 (UTC)

I think it is fair to state that it is a common positions of the three of you, DGG, John Vandenberg and Guillaume2303n, that:

only the EIC should be listed (except for rare cases where there is a good, independent source showing that an associate editor or board member was involved with a journal in a notable way

I call this a Exclusionism/Deletionism position. It is common to use both primairy and secondairy sources to build any article. Take the Albert Einstein article, and their are at least ten references to his own published work. There is no rule in Wikipedia, that every single fact mentioned in the article should be confirmed by reliable third-party sources. For me removing information confirmed by first party sources, based on arguments like "overkill", a violation of WP:NOT, and "WP:POV", is a typical Exclusionism (removing irrelevant or superfluous information) way of thinking.

I guess I have an Inclusionism way of thinking here. Maybe this has something to do, with me not being a scientist, and hardly ever look in a journal. For example with the International Journal of General Systems, for me it is important:

  • what the journal looks like
  • what the journals scope is, and
  • which people are involved in the journals operation/which notable people participate in the journal's organization.
  • and maybe what similar journals operate in the same field

I don't care much if this is mentioned in reliable third-party sources or not. For me the journal is part of a forum in a particular field, and I am interested in what that forum looks like and who participate.

Now it seems to me the Exclusionism/Deletionism position rules here, and there Wiki Checklinks is no place for my point of view. So be it. I hope the weather changes one day here. -- Marcel Douwe Dekker (talk) 14:51, 7 July 2009 (UTC)

  • I doesn't look like it is possible to convince you of our position, but I'll still give it a last try. "Which people are involved in the journal's operation": as I tried to explain above, editorial board members are not, or only very rarely, involved in a journal's operation. Associate editors are involved only in a limited way (by handling the reviewing of submissions), but have generally only a secondary role in setting policy, which is the exclusive domain of the EIC. "What similar journals operate in the same field": we have categories for this kind of question, or articles like list of scientific journals in biology, etc. If you want to call it "Exclusionism/Deletionism" that people don't want to include irrelevant facts into articles, then so be it. Portals (which you for some reason just removed from the International Journal of General Systems article, can be handy for this, too). --Guillaume2303 (talk) 15:24, 7 July 2009 (UTC)
Thanks. I have refraised: "which people are involved in the journals operation/which (notable) people participate in the journal's organization". That is what interests me? If I read about a subject, I want to know, who is involved? I guess next time I will just push the button "Pages that link to...", which is absurd... but that is all that is left. -- Marcel Douwe Dekker (talk) 20:39, 7 July 2009 (UTC)
The re-phrasing does not really change anything. People that are notable should have a separate article anyway. Notable or not, any person important for a journal should be mentioned in the journal article. The problem here is that you don't seem to be willing to accept the notion that being on an editorial board really, really, does not mean that you are "involved in the journal's operation" nor does it mean that you're involved "in the journal's organization". If you're interested in which researchers collaborate/interact with which other researchers and are involved in a certain field, you need to look at patterns of co-authorships, citation networks, and such. I am on multiple editorial boards myself. I would be hard pressed to say who else is on those boards. Half of the other board members I have never met and I won't even know their names. Of the remainder, most I wouldn't even recognize if I passed them on the street. As for the journals that I edit myself, obviously I know the names of all people on those boards, but several of those I have never met. An editorial board is NOT the place where people network, collaborate, discuss, or anything like that. If you still think this is important, then I am afraid you indeed will have to click "pages that link here". Even that will not help you, because as DGG stated somewhere above, many bios of researchers don't even list their board memberships. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 21:34, 7 July 2009 (UTC)

Thanks Guillaume2303n, I value to hear your experience from the field as I valued reading DGG's experience, but this doesn't change the way I feel... and maybe I should try to explain.

Take for example the Complex Systems (journal). If you look at the article itself it seems a minor journal, even though the founding editor Stephen Wolfram is well known. Now I just started checking the persons on the editorial board and I found 15 out of 21 happen to have a Wikipedia article, see here. Now, never in my life I am going to think that is a minor journal. Many great scientists seems to support that journal with being part of that editorial board.

Now it is not just about that journal beeing a minor or mayor journal. That list of scientists all seems to support (in a way) the field of complex systems. This is a think I am most interested in. The field of systems science is a developing field with a lot of concurrent paradigms. Complex systems is one of the most recent paradigms in the field. And there is hardly any listing of the scientists involved here. Now there is the Category:Complex systems scientists and also the most important institute, the Santa Fe Institute lists some of the people involved. My experience, my belief is, that if you want to learn something new, the best thing is to read about it from different angles. Now the Complex Systems (journal) article could give you one of these angles, if it should list those scientists involved.

Just as important, or even more important, if you want to learn more about systems sciences, and look deeper, there is a real need to differentiate between the different fields here. And listing those scientists here and there helps build such a framework. I guess I have an Inclusionism way of thinking here. -- Marcel Douwe Dekker (talk) 23:47, 7 July 2009 (UTC)

  • What you need is an article list of scientists in systems science (or different lists according to the different paradigms that you refer to), not a listing of editorial board members for some journals. Even relatively obscure journals will have mostly notable persons on their editorial board. When I started my own journal (so even before it appeared once, so it was definitely "minor" at that time), I had a Nobel Prize winner and several members of national academies of sciences on my inaugural board. A distinguished board therefore does not equate notability. Having a WP article or not is an unreliable indicator of notability, too. There are many bios out there of decidedly non-notable persons (nobody has just tried to delete them yet) and many notable people don't have an article yet. But I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree on the meaning of editorial board memberships and consensus here clearly is that such lists should not be included in articles on scientific journals (you being the lone dissenter). --Guillaume2303 (talk) 07:07, 8 July 2009 (UTC)
There seem to be several controversies in your last comment. There is a list of list of systems scientists, but I might need a list of paradigms in systems sciences. It seems to me the Noble Prize winner joint the editorial board of your journal because the expectation where he, and not because it didn't matter any way. And if you find non-notable persons listed, just delete those articles. If you find notable persons without an article, create one.
There is an easy solution, which is being still rejected: Link to the journal, and link back. This is the normal procedure in Wikipedia. Look at article about universities, about companies, about other organizations. This is the whole purpose of Wikipedia to create free information, not to withhold it. -- Marcel Douwe Dekker (talk) 22:45, 8 July 2009 (UTC)

Rejuvenation Research

RFC

  • I recently created an article about an academic journal: PSCF. An expert User:DGG has already commented positively on the article, but further commentary appears needed. If another editor could lend a set of eyes that would be greatly appreciated. --Firefly322 (talk) 12:52, 4 July 2009 (UTC)
  • In the light of the discussion above I think you should remove the info on board members. If you have access to the Web of Science, you could add some info on citations to and from the journal. See for example Genes, Brain and Behavior. I worked very hard on that one (with the advice of DGG) and I think it came out rather nicely in the end. Adding a cover image would help, too (for licensing, look at the covers of other journals and just follow that example). Hope this helps. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 13:32, 4 July 2009 (UTC)
Thank you very much. I agree with your editoral decisions in this matter. In fact, I thought the aritcle was in great shape and nobody would have any more problems. But despite your efforts and those of at least four other (e.g., User:Northfox, User:DGG, User:Colonel Warden, and User:Firefly322) in fixing up the article as well as in satisfying and removing various tags, the tags have been put back into place and there is suggestion to merge it with the American Scientific Affiliation. Comments are now requested at Talk:Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith. --Firefly322 (talk) 06:52, 5 July 2009 (UTC)
  • The discussion over there is not really civil, but the attention of so,e other editors might be valuable. In particular, it would be good if we could establish the notability of this journal without any doubt and merge some info on its history that some (rather strong-minded) editors are insisting on including in another article. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 16:44, 4 August 2009 (UTC)
  • Establishing notability is truly a feat of inductive reasoning wherein there can never be anything final (just weaker or stronger establishments) unlike that of deductive reasoning, which can really only occur within in the bounds of certain types of math problems. Since this journal article has received more discussion regarding its notability than most and since ultimately notability is merely something editors agree to, I think there need only be a re-iteration of the earlier discussion. --Firefly322 (talk) 02:45, 5 August 2009 (UTC)
Also I noticed what would be fair to say is some WP:overtagging [27] in order to make a point.--Firefly322 (talk) 03:24, 5 August 2009 (UTC)
There also appears to be following others around and taking opposite stand just to make another point (or the same, can't be sure): [28] --Firefly322 (talk) 18:44, 5 August 2009 (UTC)
I share Guillaume2303 sentiment here: [29]. These actions often violate civility and good behavior all together in order to make a WP:POINT. This shouldn't be happening. --Firefly322 (talk) 18:44, 5 August 2009 (UTC)

Peer review request

Bot tagging request

Since we're getting a bunch of new articles from the missing journal list, I thought of having a bot tag some of them systematically to help reduce the load. See request for details. I think everything in there is reasonable. If you have comments, please leave them on the botreq page.Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 02:06, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

I have added another related task: Wikipedia:Bot_requests#WP:LOMJ_maintanance. --John Vandenberg (chat) 02:33, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

I recently created the Typo Cleanup and Redlink Watch for the journal parameter dump. Any help is appreciated, either in participation, or in feedback. Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 10:45, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

{{Infobox journal}} overhaul

I've expanded the template to be able to handle up to 10 different ISSNlabel/ISSN/eISSN. It's fully backwards compatible, so there shouldn't be anything different from your normal use of it, and nothing should be broken, but now you can handle things like this without breaking a sweat, and there's some enhanced logic (details are boring, but now eISSN can be used independantly of ISSN without screwing things up). Feedback/comments are welcomed. Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 16:07, 14 August 2009 (UTC)

Thank you! Awickert (talk) 04:04, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

Writing guide

I just created a writing guide which covers the basics of writing a "perfect stub" for academic journals. Feel free to add to it, make corrections, give feedback, etc... Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 20:11, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

  • Great job!!! I made a few small corrections/additions. I would leave out the external links, though: the journal homepage will already be in the infobox and very often will also be used as a reference (if the advice on citing is being followed), so it is a bit superfluous, I think. Thanks for the tip on the automated peer review tool, I love it! --Guillaume2303 (talk) 09:03, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

Stubtemplate subpage deletion debate

Would anyone here have time to comment at this deletion debate? I'm not quite sure of the best way to handle this. I think moving the page and updating old links is best. Any advice would be appreciated. Carcharoth (talk) 14:06, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

Giving the project a new look

I find the current project to be rather dull-looking and hard-ish to browse (compared to say projects like WP:PHYS and WP:ELEMENTS). If you want, I can turn this into a tab-based project. What I have in mind is something like

  • Home: Goals, Scope, Stats, Members, Alerts, DYK /New articles/, related projects, etc...
  • Writing guide: Which would give the steps to create the "perfect stub" and tips on how to go beyond that
  • Resources: Templates, Infoboxes, Categories, ...
  • Journal dump: Journal Dump, Highly Cited journals, Missing Journals, Typos, Redlink Watch

Feedback/Comments? Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 18:18, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Please do! :-) Carcharoth (talk) 14:04, 23 August 2009 (UTC)
Alright, how's this? Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 18:05, 25 August 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Bot_requests#Journal_disambiguation_bot

Feedback/comments are welcome. I doubt this is controversial. Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 21:07, 25 August 2009 (UTC)

Assessment

Comment: There is a psychology journal with the title Assessment. (I thought knowing that might be help for diambiguity purposes.)— James Cantor (talk) 16:37, 30 August 2009 (UTC)
  • Thanks James, but as this would be a subpage in project space, not article space, I don't think this will cause a problem (many other projects have a subpage called "Assessment"). Does that journal have an article yet? :-) --Guillaume2303 (talk) 16:53, 30 August 2009 (UTC)
Ah, I get it; thanks. I haven't created an article for that one yet, no. It's edited by a colleague of mine, but I have been concentrating on the sexology journals. If you'd like to look it up, it's published by Sage and is ISSN 1073-1911.— James Cantor (talk) 18:21, 30 August 2009 (UTC)

List of sexology journals.

Speaking of notability, I have created a list of sexology journals on the sexology page (although I can also imagine it as a list page unto itself), and have started creating pages for the (mostly) missing journals. I cannot vouch for the notability for all of these additions; I was aiming for completeness in writing the list I was working from. Any feedback would be appreciated.

Just in the interests of disclosure: I serve on the editoral boards of three journals in sexology, Journal of Sex Research, Archives of Sexual Behavior, and Sexual Abuse: A Journal of Research and Treatment.
— James Cantor (talk) 03:04, 28 August 2009 (UTC)

Traffic report

I already requested one a while ago. I marked your resquest as a duplicate. Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 14:18, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

Danish journal list

I have created /Danish journal list from the list of journals in the Danish journal ranking/metrics "Den bibliometriske forskningsindikator". John Vandenberg (chat) 01:37, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

J. Lit. Th.

Journal of Literary Theory has been prodded. As it's a newish journal with no citations elsewhere in Wikipedia and no third-party references, I'm not sure I want to deprod it but someone else may. This could be an interesting test case for the proposed notability guidelines linked above. —David Eppstein (talk) 04:37, 29 August 2009 (UTC)

  • Thanks for the suggestion. It has been deleted now. I had a look at it earlier and it did seem like it was going to fail under any guideline we could have come up with. I'd rather have a test case where a suitable journal would get deleted absent the proposed draft guideline. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 15:58, 30 August 2009 (UTC)
Interesting. Special:WhatLinksHere/Journal_of_Literary_Theory shows that this journal is included in both the Australian and Danish list of approved journals. I've checked the ISSNs in both lists and they match the deleted article. John Vandenberg (chat) 01:41, 26 September 2009 (UTC)
  • Now that would be an interesting test for the proposed guidelines. I'm currently swamped, but if someone would care to undelete it and add the list info that John found, we could then take it to AfD and see whether it would survive. As it was only deleted because of a PROD, I think this should be no problem. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 10:25, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

I've undeleted (as can be done for a prod with nothing more than a reasonable request) and added the Danish information. I don't have time right now to continue with the Australian information but someone else is welcome. —David Eppstein (talk) 11:51, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

  • Thanks David! I've been looking at the Danish website, and as far as I understand, the numbers in that list are not rankings but numbers of scientific fields. The site does mention that they are rating journals in 2 categories, in a proportion of 80/20% (the best 20% being in "class 2"), but I cannot find that ranking. Perhaps this has not been done yet. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 14:35, 26 September 2009 (UTC)
Re what the Danish numbers mean: it's sufficiently unclear from the source that your choice of avoiding any mention or interpretation is probably best. —David Eppstein (talk) 00:01, 27 September 2009 (UTC)
I commented on these lists at the AfD: I do not consider the mere presence or absence on the Australian list reliable for anything, plus or minus. The Australian rankings, however, probably are to some degree. I have read the discussions on the relevant list (SIGMETRICS) about the reliability of the ratings, and it seems to be regarded as not yet accepted generally, though the people who prepared it think it reliable (and I know and think highly of some of the people). Basically, the list is simply a list of all active peer-reviewed journals that might be of some relevance in the academic world, to which ratings have been added. They ratings are essentially prepared on the basis of reputation. (with Scopus citations as an additional factor for the ones in science). They show a strong bias towards Australian journals, and a bias against non-English, some of which is intrinsic to Scopus, and some of which represents Anglo-centrism. (For this journal, the rating there is B, 3rd out of 4 classes A*, A, B, C. It does show that the academics preparing the list have at least heard of it., and don't consider it at the lowest level.) In terms of Wikipedia notability , based on a preliminary check of such fields as I have some familiarity with, I would consider a B as positive evidence. I would not consider a C level as evidence of non-notablity. The Danish one is similar, though they will be using only two groups--there is a clear statement that they have not yet done the rankings. One misconception: the "Excellence for Research in Australia" is not a reference to the excellence of the journals themselves. It's a reference to the use of the project for measuring the quality of Australian academic departments for use in funding decisions. One of the factors, will be the quality of the journals the faculty publish in. The name in the link to it is therefore somewhat misleading.
The Danish list is harder to evaluate. It is based on titles present in the Danish academic libraries, and consequently indicates a different bias--very useful as a complement to the English language listings. Absence or presence by itself is again not all that meaningful. They will be using only two groups for rankings--there is a clear statement that they have not yet done the rankings. Again, the higher rank is meaningful for notability-- it will be probably about the same as the Australian A -- the higher one shows notability, the lower one is no evidence at all against notability. As Guillaume2303 says, the numbers there at present are arbitrary numbers for the subject classes.I'd go further than David E--these numbers are absolutely not meaningful at all in terms of importance. I have not yet seen any comment on this list--I suspect there will be more when they do their quality classification.
In either case, absence from the list can mean that the journal, however excellent, is of no great interest in the country that prepared it--this will be the case for most applied journals in fields that are geographically specific; one does not expect to see most American education or business journals on either list, just as one would not see many Australian or Danish ones on an American list. Fields like physics are of course a very different matter. DGG ( talk ) 03:11, 27 September 2009 (UTC)

Naming convention

I am right in assuming that pages like The American Journal of the Medical Sciences should be moved to American Journal of the Medical Sciences? Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 21:09, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

  • Depends on whether "The" is an official part of the name or not. If it is, leave it, if not, move it. If it is, you should add a listas parameter to the WPJournals banner (American Journal of the Medical Sciences, The). Hope this helps. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 21:15, 9 September 2009 (UTC)
Its reasons like these I'd like to be an admin. To determine that for each individual page would be so damn tedious. It be far simpler to create a bot and assume that they should be moved there the majority of the time, and direct people to me if the bot moved a page that shouldn't be moved. Oh well, maybe in a couple of months. Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 22:20, 9 September 2009 (UTC)
I would never do this with a bot. The question of determining whether an initial "The" is part of the title is exceptionally difficult, as often the case for utterly trivial matters--many publishers regard such things to an extent as a matter of style in designing the cover or title page, and are not necessary explicit about what is the official title of a journal. Libraries have been struggling this forever, with variable results. As the rules change from time to time, I would even be reluctant to always follow what is found in WorldCat or Library of Congress- it may represent older practice & will not be looked at until the publisher changes the title for some reason. I advise that the practical rule here should generally be that a publisher's title should be followed in such details only if a publisher uses it consistently-- they may well write "The Journal of X" when they mean the journal whose name is Journal of X. (Incidentally, the same problem occurs with society names of all sorts of clubs or societies, in all sorts of contexts).
In this particular case, the publisher, the Library of Congress,& Medline list this one consistently as The American Journal of Medical Sciences, (ISI and Scopus don't count, for they are notorious for using somewhat abbreviated titles, and drop the "the" in essentially all cases regardless) so it needs to remain at that title. DGG ( talk ) 15:49, 13 September 2009 (UTC)
Yeah, that might be a bad idea after all. Oh well. BTW, I've implemented some of your suggestions from your talk page archive in the writing guide. Feedback? Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 16:08, 14 September 2009 (UTC)
just saw this, I made a suggestion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Academic Journals/Writing guide about possible text to add, they current advice I give to people writing about journals. DGG ( talk ) 04:17, 27 September 2009 (UTC)

For those who care

I made a blog entry about the journal dump. See G. Landry (28 August 2009). "And the most cited journal on Wikipedia is..." The Head Bomb. Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 04:23, 29 August 2009 (UTC)

The pageview stats 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 are rather depressing for our "most cited" journals.
Thanks Headbomb; we care! ;-) John Vandenberg (chat) 01:54, 26 September 2009 (UTC)
Dunno, these don't look all that bad to me. J Biol Chem with 2500 views a month, PNAS with 4000, Nature with 13500, Genome Research with 550 and Science with 13200. Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 14:45, 7 October 2009 (UTC)
See also (http://toolserver.org/~alexz/pop/view.php?proj=acjrn&month=Oct09&limit=250&offset=0). Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 15:01, 7 October 2009 (UTC)

Fate of Wikipedia:List of missing journals

Wikipedia:List of missing journals may be useful here, but it may also be time to mark it as historical, move it to a sub-space of this project, or delete it.

Questions:

  • Is keeping and maintaining this list helpful?
  • Is keeping this list at all helpful?
  • Should this list be moved/renamed?

Note: The current list is split into 4 parts due to length. Some web browser versions circa 2007 choke when editing very large files. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs)/(e-mail) 15:24, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

Moving into subspace seems to be the logical thing to do IMO. Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 20:59, 9 September 2009 (UTC)
Moving into what subspace? You probably mean moving ias a subpage of something? I think the list remains important and is fine as it is. — Preceding unsigned comment added by DGG (talk • contribs) 15:49, 13 September 2009
Moved to Wikipedia:WikiProject Academic Journals/List of missing journals. All 3 pages, the header, and related redirects were moved or adjusted. Non-discussion, non-historical pages linking to the old names were fixed up to point to the current pages, see Special:WhatLinksHere/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Academic_Journals/List_of_missing_journals/A-C. If I missed anything please feel free to fix it up. Note that the "/A-C" is a result of a split from several years ago needed to accommodate certain web browsers. The combined list is over 275KB long. When it gets below 100MB it can be recombined. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs)/(e-mail) 20:40, 7 October 2009 (UTC)
OK with me. I thought the move unnecessary, but it isn't harmful. DGG ( talk ) 21:16, 7 October 2009 (UTC)

I have created /Lists to keep track of all our lists of journals. John Vandenberg (chat) 22:03, 7 October 2009 (UTC)

Categories mess

The discussion here might interest other participants in this project. I feel rather overwhelmed, so advice/help is more than welcome... --Guillaume2303 (talk) 20:54, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

Foundation year

The start year for MUSICultures is 2009. It is the successor to two other journals with different names, the earliest established in 1973. I realize that this is confusing, but certainly not unheard of in academic journals. It seems that each journal title should have a separate article, with the "year founded" being the first year that the journal is published under that name. The preceeding journal(s) can be listed in the Infobox. I don't know if there is an official policy for this, however. It there an official policy? There seems to be a need for one. Pustelnik (talk) 00:14, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

  • The usual way to handle this (and the most logical one, I would say) is that if a journal changes names, the article goes at the newest name and the older name redirects to the newer name. There are not three different journals. There is one journal founded in 1973 that has changed names twice. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 00:28, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

Notability guideline

Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History

Created a new article at Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History. Anyone have more information or want to help tidy it up? Carcharoth (talk) 11:15, 31 October 2009 (UTC)

Pageview stats

After a recent request, I added WikiProject Academic Journals to the list of projects to compile monthly pageview stats for. The data is the same used by http://stats.grok.se/en/ but the program is different, and includes the aggregate views from all redirects to each page. The stats are at Wikipedia:WikiProject Academic Journals/Popular pages.

The page will be updated monthly with new data. The edits aren't marked as bot edits, so they will show up in watchlists. You can view more results, request a new project be added to the list, or request a configuration change for this project using the toolserver tool. If you have any comments or suggestions, please let me know. Thanks! Mr.Z-man 04:12, 1 November 2009 (UTC)

I have assessed the unassessed articles in the top 100. John Vandenberg (chat) 07:12, 1 November 2009 (UTC)

Scope statement

The current scope statement reads:

  • "Specifically, we cover academic journals and their publishers, academic societies and their bulletins [internal publications], academic conferences and their proceedings, academic awards prizes and medals, and series of monographs. We also cover (to a lesser extent) student newspapers, student clubs, amateur societies, literary publications, textbooks, popular science magazines, educational publishing companies, academic libraries, archives and databases, websites, and research studies."

I propose to reduce this somewhat. Student newspapers and student clubs are best covered by the Wikiprojects concerned with their respective universities or states/country. Amateur societies should only be included if they publish an academic journal, otherwise they are better covered by the Wikiproject covering their discipline. Literary academic journals should be included, but literary magazines are better covered by the WikiProject Magazines. Textbooks better belong in the Wikiproject covering their discipline. Popular science magazines again go to the Magazines project, unless the magazine in question is covered by an academic journal bibliographic database (Scientific American, for example, which is covered in the Science Citation Index). Publishers should only be included if they publish academic journals. Same goes for websites, only if they are really journal related (so I don't think this needs to be listed separately in the scope statement). It is a bit unclear to me what is meant with "research studies" and I suggest that this, too, better belongs in the Wikiprojects covering their disciplines. This would leave the following reduced statement:

  • "Specifically, we cover academic journals and their publishers, academic societies and their bulletins [internal publications], academic conferences and their proceedings, academic awards prizes and medals, and series of monographs. We also cover (to a lesser extent) academic libraries, archives, and databases."

Comments anybody? --Guillaume2303 (talk) 10:56, 1 November 2009 (UTC)

I agree. That is good. The earlier scope was too broad. --Bduke (Discussion) 11:05, 1 November 2009 (UTC)

Narrowing it down is fine by me. The Magazines project was created after our scope was created. John Vandenberg (chat) 12:10, 1 November 2009 (UTC)

Narrowing is fine by me too. Do we cover research museums like American Museum of Natural History that publish research journals, and do conferences, or do we overlap with other projects there? I think where we overlap, we should overlap, rather than presume other projects will cover the academic publishing aspects. I think I included "academic awards prizes and medals" because there isn't anything that really covers those, and sometimes there are series of lectures and awards, that don't really seem to fit anywhere properly, but are sometimes managed by a journal or academic society, where the "admin" aspects and "history" aspects are poorly covered by discipline-specific WikiProjects. Carcharoth (talk) 16:06, 1 November 2009 (UTC)

  • I think the AMNH falls within our project for two reasons: first as a publisher of academic journals and second because of its extensive library. As for the awards and prizes, they are indeed a bit extraneous to our project but I left them in the proposed narrower scope exactly because of the reason that Carcharoth cites, namely that they are not reasonably covered elsewhere. The only other likely place that I can think of would be the Science workgroup in the biographies project. However, that project (and that workgroup in particula) doesn't seem to be very active right now. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 16:24, 1 November 2009 (UTC)
    • I should note that I have two definitions of scope. One is what we tag. And one is what we should be available to help with. Some of the things mentioned (such as the awards articles) are not tagged (I tend to tag them for the History of Science WikiProject), but it is useful for people to ask here about them, and to be notified of deletion discussions, and so forth. Carcharoth (talk) 16:34, 1 November 2009 (UTC)
  • Well, I'd better mention in the article that they publish journals, then! :-) Does DELSORT go by tags. Actually, that's a silly question. Many AfD'd articles don't have wikiproject tags. What I meant there was that we should still be notified of a wider range of "academia" and "academic publishing" deletion discussions, because we might me aware of something that others are not. But then I can't remember how delsort works and if we get any notifications at all. Carcharoth (talk) 18:39, 1 November 2009 (UTC)

International Journal of Computer Science Issues - IJCSI

If someone is interested in beta-testing our proposed notability guideline, here might be a good candidate: International Journal of Computer Science Issues - IJCSI. (I proposed it for deletion as I got the feeling that the journal is too new to be notable. The prod was contested, and there are now some comments in Talk:International Journal of Computer Science Issues - IJCSI with some claims of notability.) — Miym (talk) 11:24, 1 November 2009 (UTC)

If the journal would be accepted by ISI, then it would be notable. But at this point they have only applied for it. Given the rather amateurish looking website, acceptance by ISI is not certain at all. I think it would indeed be a good candidate for AfD. BTW, the proposed guidelines have already been used in AfDs resulting in both "delete" and "keep" decisions. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 11:55, 1 November 2009 (UTC)
Thanks for the feedback, I nominated the article for deletion: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/International Journal of Computer Science Issues. — Miym (talk) 20:18, 1 November 2009 (UTC)

Collaboration (AMNH)

Anyone interested in a cross-wikiproject collaboration on American Museum of Natural History? The bits that would interest us are the sections here onwards (I stuck in a "main article" redlink, as I think the Library should have its own article). But there are other bits as well, and if we could get other WikiProjects interested, it might work out really well. WP NYC, WP Museums at a minimum. WP National Register of Historic Places might be interested as well. Carcharoth (talk) 19:23, 1 November 2009 (UTC)

Category:Journals needs to be emptied

I noticed Category:Journals is populated by 177 articles, but the proper category name is Category:Academic journals, and the "Journals" page should be empty except for the blue box. If you are interested in fixing this type of problem, please do, especially if you can automate the task. Chutznik (talk) 03:04, 1 November 2009 (UTC)

  • No need to do this manually. The template placed on this category will make a bot do this automatically, but there is a "cool down" period of 1 week. So this should happen within a few days from now. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 09:50, 1 November 2009 (UTC)
It's now empty. What's the next step? Category deletion? Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 00:48, 17 November 2009 (UTC)
  • I think it should best be left as a redirect, as we do with articles that get redirected to a new title. Editors using HotCat will get redirected to the new Category automatically and any article added to "journals" by hand will be moved eventually by the bot. If we delete the redirect, somebody might at some point re-create the category and we'd get a mess again. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 07:19, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Infobox Bibliographic Database -- please review/test!

Hi folks! I've created {{Infobox Bibliographic Database}} as a way to quickly review important information about databases that index scholarly literature. Please look it over carefully, scrutinize it, and let me know if you see any additional fields that need to be added, corrections that need to be made, or documentation that needs to be clarified. I would much rather get it right from the start, rather than having to correct it a bunch after it's already in production. Leave any comments on the infobox's talk page. THANKS! -- Clifflandis (talk) 19:43, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Also, a test example can be seen on the Inspec page. -- Clifflandis (talk) 19:45, 18 November 2009 (UTC)
It is a good start. John Vandenberg (chat) 10:15, 7 December 2009 (UTC)

Citation and publication data

It would be interesting to include external links to publication and citation data provided at Scimago Journal Rank in every suitable journal. The site provides journal profiles including a lot of publication and citation data for every journal covered by Elsevier's database Scopus. If agreed I can get in charge of it. I am a wikipedia newbie, I hope this is the right place to ask this. --Fdbgonzalez (talk) 13:13, 25 November 2009 (UTC)

SCImago Journal Rank has an article. You are in the right place to discuss this. In order to add this to every article, we would add a parameter to {{Infobox Journal}}, and fill it in as we go.
I think that the article SCImago Journal Rank needs to be expanded and sourced before we start using this ranking everywhere. John Vandenberg (chat) 10:09, 7 December 2009 (UTC)

Chemical Abstracts

Chemical Abstracts will cease being a print publication as of January 1, 2010. Currently, its title redirects to Chemical Abstracts Service, the publisher that produces it. It has a long and interesting history (1907 - present), but I'm not sure whether I should put it on its own article, or leave that information on the CAS article. I currently am working from the CAS article (I put the journal infobox in a few minutes ago), but I can easily move it over to its own page. What do y'all think? --Clifflandis (talk) 19:16, 4 December 2009 (UTC)

It's definitely worth it's own article. Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 21:14, 4 December 2009 (UTC)
I agree. John Vandenberg (chat) 10:10, 7 December 2009 (UTC)

Conference categories

It seems that there are many academic conferences in Category:International conferences instead of Category:Academic conferences. In practice, academic conferences with Wikipedia articles are also international conferences. Where should we list them? Only in Category:Academic conferences? Both in Category:Academic conferences and Category:International conferences? Or should we perhaps add Category:Academic conferences to Category:International conferences in order to avoid the burden of listing everything in two categories?

The category tree is also a bit strange; for example, Category:Mathematics conferences is both in Category:Academic conferences and Category:International conferences, while Category:Neuroscience conferences is in Category:International conferences but not in Category:Academic conferences. — Miym (talk) 00:15, 11 December 2009 (UTC)

  • Most of these categories are "wild growth"... People create them as they go and then often don't look back. I have recently pruned a lot of journal categories, although there is still a lot of work to be done there. As far as I am concerned, as a concerned (and apparently informed) editor, I think you could devise a more rational category tree and then implement it (after perhaps having it checked for a second opinion by another knowledgeable editor). One note about academic conferences, in my field (neuroscience) there are several that are national, not international. On the other hand, they generally don't have (or merit) their own article as they are almost invariably organised by some society, so they are included in the articles on those groups. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 07:36, 11 December 2009 (UTC)
I think I'll change the category tree as follows: Category:Academic conferences becomes a subcategory of both Category:Conferences and Category:International conferences. I know this isn't 100% ideal. However, this change could help a lot with the current confusion: first, Category:Academic conferences becomes easier to find, and second, we do not have to repeat the combination Category:Academic conferences + Category:International conferences everywhere. — Miym (talk) 22:54, 11 December 2009 (UTC)

200 most cited journals1 now all have articles

See WP:JCW/Popular1 and WP:JCW/Popular2. I created the last three Brain Research, Molecular Brain Research, and Cellular Signaling so we could start working on WP:JCW/Popular3.

1 With the usual caveats. This is also based on the 28 August 2009 dump, so the rankings may have changed since then.

Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 00:12, 23 December 2009 (UTC)

Only 4 more and we'll have the 250 most cited. Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 21:13, 27 December 2009 (UTC)
I've completed /Popular3. a quarter of /Popular4 are redlinks. John Vandenberg (chat) 03:24, 28 December 2009 (UTC)
And 17 on /Popular5 are redlinks. So, we have about 40 articles left to write. Then the report logic needs to be expanded to give us a new worksheet. John Vandenberg (chat) 04:28, 28 December 2009 (UTC)
Yes, in the meantime I'm going through the most popular ones and giving them a spitshine (especially with the infobox and indexing). I've done the 200 top cited. I'll keep going through the list in order, so if someone feels like doing spitshines, maybe work on the 201-300 list (and so on) so we don't overlap. (Also declare it, so you don't overlap with someone else). Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 05:47, 28 December 2009 (UTC)

Article Incubator Invitation for Bocconi School of Law Student-Edited Papers

Hi everyone. I have put an article on Bocconi School of Law Student-Edited Papers in the article incubator, here: Wikipedia:Article Incubator/Bocconi School of Law Student-Edited Papers, in order to address the criticism that was made re its notability during AfD. Feel free to cooperate if you have any practical ideas to help establish notability. Incidentally, let me anticipate that the journal is the first student-edited legal working paper series, which has been created in Europe better to adapt to the editorial panorama of the Old Continent, where student-edited law reviews are not nearly as popular as they are in the US. I have already provided references (e.g. an article appeared on the German Law Journal) for these claims. Thanks for any help you may provide me with, --Grasshopper6 (talk) 11:40, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

Google weirdness

While creating the article on the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, I discovered something quite interesting. Google Books doesn't reveal all the sources. Take a look at the results from a Google Books search for "American Journal of Physical Anthropology", here. Note that it says there are 2,210 of them. But if you scroll to the next page, it cuts off at 14! So how does one find the kind of sources I used to demonstrate notability of the AJPA without resorting to the claim that because some indexing service or another lists it, it must be notable? Be seaching with an additional word, for example "American Journal of Physical Anthropology" founded or "American Journal of Physical Anthropology" influential, or with the founder's name. This opens up the Google results somehow. I hope this offers some hope that journals can conform to ordinary WP:PSTS policy in future. If anybody has a journal which they think should have secondary sources but couldn't find any, let me know here so I can look into it. Abductive (reasoning) 06:29, 8 January 2010 (UTC)

All Google services do that all the time. Try to search for, say, "foobar foo bar baz" in Google. It claims that there are "about 46,600" hits. Actually if you go to the 2nd page, you'll see that there are only 17 hits. With "omitted results included", you'll get 20. The figure 46,600 is just a wild guess, with little connection to the reality; just ignore it. — Miym (talk) 09:59, 8 January 2010 (UTC)
No, that is not true. There really are hundreds of hits, you just have to bring them to the surface with the additional terms. For example, in the second search I give above, with the addition of "founded" I can click through 862 results. You really should have clicked on my links before saying anything, do you think I am stupid? Abductive (reasoning) 17:52, 8 January 2010 (UTC)

Notability guidelines

Does this project have any standard guidelines on what constitutes a notable journal? I reported University of Toronto Faculty of Law Review as a copyvio and am wondering whether it's worth starting an original article, or just to let it be deleted. --Padraic 19:33, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

If you don't re-create it then add it to Wikipedia:List of missing journals/N-Z. Note that University of Toronto Law Journal is already in the list and may be a duplicate if the journal changed names. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs)/(e-mail) 20:28, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
The UTLJ is the faculty journal; the UTFLR is the student journal. It looks like it's notable so I'll start a stub. --Padraic 20:41, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
  • One option would be to check the citation impact of the journal based on databases of scientific articles, or Google Scholar. An average no. of citations per article < 1 would suggest lack of notability, in my opinion.--IJeCstaff (talk) 21:45, 14 January 2010 (UTC)

journals published in multiple languages

Business & Information Systems Engineering (journal) is an English edition of de:Wirtschaftsinformatik (Zeitschrift).

From only a quick look, it seems that there is only one journal here. Manuscripts can be submitted in either language, and the intention is that they will undergo the same peer-review before publishing.

Guillaume2303 (talk · contribs) prod-ed the article because the English edition hasn't become notable in its own right. I can agree with that, but we need an article about one of them. Which page name do we use? "Wirtschaftsinformatik" vs "Business & Information Systems Engineering (journal)".

We should have a "list of journals published simultaneously in multiple languages". What a ghastly pagename; any suggestions on a better name? John Vandenberg (chat) 02:10, 31 December 2009 (UTC)

I don't really care which is the main, but I agree that should only be one article. Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 04:17, 31 December 2009 (UTC)

Category:Management journals

Should the newly-created Category:Management journals be merged to Category:Business and management journals?

Comments welcome at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2010 January 13#Category:Management_journals. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 05:45, 13 January 2010 (UTC)

Merge proposal

WP 1.0 bot announcement

This message is being sent to each WikiProject that participates in the WP 1.0 assessment system. On Saturday, January 23, 2010, the WP 1.0 bot will be upgraded. Your project does not need to take any action, but the appearance of your project's summary table will change. The upgrade will make many new, optional features available to all WikiProjects. Additional information is available at the WP 1.0 project homepage. — Carl (CBM · talk) 02:24, 22 January 2010 (UTC)

List of African studies journals

I would appreciate if some other editors could have a look at this article. I did a rather drastic cleanup (there were originally three lists, A-E, F-L, and M-Z), and merged the reduced in African studies journals, which I then moved to the current location. The main thing I did was removing all external links (per WP:EL) and all redlinked journals (some of them had been removed recently after AfD or PROD). The editor who originally created these lists has complained bitterly on my talk page ([30] and [31]) so it might be good if someone else would have a look to see whether I have perhaps been too Draconian. Thanks. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 18:56, 25 January 2010 (UTC)

Request for comment on Biographies of living people

Hello Wikiproject! Currently there is a discussion which will decide whether wikipedia will delete 49,000 articles about a living person without references, here:

Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Biographies of living people

Since biographies of living people covers so many topics, nearly all wikiproject topics will be effected.

The two opposing positions which have the most support is:

  1. supports the deletion of unreferenced articles about a living person, User:Jehochman
  2. opposes the deletion of unreferenced articles about a living person, except in limited circumstances, User:Collect

Comments are welcome. Keep in mind that by default, editor's comments are hidden. Simply press edit next to the section to add your comment.

Please keep in mind that at this point, it seems that editors support deleting unreferenced BLP articles if they are not sourced, so your project may want to source these articles as soon as possible. See the next, message, which may help.

Tools to help your project with unreferenced Biographies of living people

List of cleanup articles for your project

If you don't already have this and are interested in creating a list of articles which need cleanup for your wikiproject see: Cleanup listings A list of examples is here

Moving unreferenced blp articles to a special "incubation pages"

If you are interested in moving unreferenced blp articles to a special "incubation page", contact me, User talk:Ikip

Watchlisting all unreferenced articles

If you are interested in watchlisting all of the unreferenced articles once you install Cleanup_listings, contact me, User talk:Ikip

Ikip 02:24, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

journals named after the discipline

There are a lot of journals which are named after a discipline. When it is a single word, we always use "Discipline (journal)". When the discipline is more than one word, there is the possibility of "Discipline Name" being the article about the journal as it is a proper name, and "Discipline name" being the article about the discipline. "Discipline Name" is usually a redirect to the "Discipline name" article.

Here are a few where the "(journal)" has been added:

And some examples where it has not:

And there are cases where the "Discipline name" redirects to a slightly broader topic:

Past & Present and Past & present which goes disambiguation page Past and Present

Tobacco Control needs to be split.

And as Wikipedia grows, comparative articles could easily be written about some of the following topics:

We need to decide whether "Discipline Name" as is acceptable as the title for an article about a journal. John Vandenberg (chat) 12:39, 7 December 2009 (UTC)

I think "Discipline Name" and "Discipline name" should always go to the same place. That probably means using "Discipline Name (journal)" for the journals, more consistently, and adding hatnotes to the "Discipline name" articles. —David Eppstein (talk) 16:02, 7 December 2009 (UTC)
I agree with David Eppstein. Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 00:27, 29 January 2010 (UTC)
  1. ^ Peter Checkland. Homepage. Retrieved 17 June 2008.
  2. ^ Cite error: The named reference EB08 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
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