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Wikipedia:Bot requests#Tagging images for WP:JOURNALS

Some journal covers were recently deleted because they lacked fair use rationales. I've got them restored and provided the rationale. Tagging all images found in journal articles will help us monitor them. Give comments at the link above. Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 03:44, 29 January 2010 (UTC)

AfD - request for comments

Journal of Vaishnava Studies by Satyaraja Dasa was put up for deletion, your comments/votes are requested. Wikidas© 20:25, 30 January 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard#Food_and_Chemical_Toxicology

Opinions? PubMed listed, but its reliability has been questioned. Tim Vickers (talk) 19:48, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

Categorization

I've been thinking about categorization recently.

Let's take a fictitious publication now called Journal of Foo and Journal of the American Foo Society. The full history of these journals are

  • 1918 Proceedings of the Society of Foo created
  • 1929 Proceedings of the Society of Foo renamed Foo Journal
  • 1934 Journal of the American Foo Society created
  • 1948 Foo Journal renamed Journal of Foo
  • 1963 Journal of Foo splits into Journal of Foo A and Journal of Foo B
  • 1969 Journal of Foo C created
  • 1970 Journal of Foo B merges with Journal of the American Foo Society
  • 1975 Journal of the American Foo Society ceases publication
  • 1982 Journal of Foo C ceases publication

How would you categorize these journals in terms of years of establishment and years of disestablishement?

One possible scheme would be

Journal Est. in Disest. in
Proceedings of the Society of Foo 1918 1929
Foo Journal 1929 1947
Journal of Foo 1948 1962
Journal of Foo A 1963
Journal of Foo B 1963 1970
Journal of Foo C 1969 1982
Journal of the American Foo Society 1939 1975

But it seems that this would be better detailed in if we had publications renamed in, publications merged in, and publications split in categories.

Journal Est. in Disest. in Renamed in Merged in Split in
Proceedings of the Society of Foo 1918 1929
Foo Journal 1929 1947
Journal of Foo 1948 1963
Journal of Foo A 1963
Journal of Foo B 1963 1970
Journal of Foo C 1969 1982
Journal of the American Foo Society 1939 1975

Thoughts?

  • When a journal is simply renamed, I would not call that a "disestablishment". It's just the name that changes, the journal continues. It's different for journals that merge, of course. They both have an independent date of establishment. But neither of them can be considered to have become disestablished by the merger, I feel. Having said this, and even though I habitually add these kind of categories to journal articles, I don't feel that these categories are actually very helpful, each constituting a hodgepodge of publications that just happened to be established in the same year. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 17:43, 6 February 2010 (UTC)
  • PS: not to mention the absolute mess with the "competing" categories "magazines by year of establishment". Many people don't seem to know these also exist and as a result the two groups of categories are hopelessly intermingled. And don't forget that some people go by "1956 establishments", making the mess even larger... --Guillaume2303 (talk) 17:49, 6 February 2010 (UTC)

Journals by country categories

  • We have a number of categories classing journals "by country". I find these most of the time very hard to apply. Many, perhaps even most, journals nowadays have a publisher in one country, with offices in many other countries, editors in possibly yet other countries, editorial board members from all over the globe, etc. Take, for example, most Elsevier journals. Elsevier is based in the Netherlands, so should we categorize all their journals as Category:Dutch journals? Or should journals published under their Pergamon or Academic Press imprints be categorized as Category:American journals? I agree that for some cases it may be clearer, such as the Historisk Tidsskrift, which is published in Danish and covers Danish history, but I find that cases like this one are the exception, rather than the rule. Any opinions on how to handle this situation? Do away with all these categories? Or keep them and put 90% of all journals in a new Category:International journals? --Guillaume2303 (talk) 23:52, 7 February 2010 (UTC)
  • Since you are them main person sorting and editing categories, just apply your best judgement. As for the location, the publisher is not so important; it is where the authors have to send submissions that should be the determining factor (typically, the editor's home university). Abductive (reasoning) 00:16, 8 February 2010 (UTC)
  • Nowadays, most journals have online submission sites. The servers of thz site of my own journal are located in the US, I access it from France, to assign a manuscript from Taiwan to an associate editor in Canada. If the manuscript gets accepted, I send it to the typesetter in Singapore, who sends it to the printer in India. If there is any problem, I contact my publisher in Oxford, UK... Even if journals still use snail mail, when a journal changes editors, the next one may be in a different country, so would now that journal change categories, too? The more I think about it, the more I feel like depopulating all those cats and have them deleted when empty... --Guillaume2303 (talk) 00:34, 8 February 2010 (UTC)
  • I don't know, it would be very difficult to delineate what goes into what categories. The British Journal of Experimental Biology, for example, was renamed The Journal of Experimental Biology and despite being published by a UK society, is edited by a Swiss scientist. Even journals as the ones you mentioned (I haven't checked these particular examples, I'm just talking in general) will have people from other countries on their editorial boards. And things are getting more international all the time. The Society for Neuroscience used to be a purely North-American (USA + Canada) society, having full members and foreign members (the last ones not being eligible to be elected to the governing council), but abolished that distinction a few years ago. Their annual meetings are still always held in some US city, but their journal (The Journal of Neuroscience) has been very international for many years. The British Journal of Psychiatry has "British" in its title, is published by a British professional society, has a British editor in chief, but also has an International Editorial Board and many published articles come from authors from all over the world. I think it would be better to include journals such as the ones that you listed in a category like "Canadian fisheries" or something like that and not have any country-specific journal cats. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 11:13, 28 February 2010 (UTC)

Unreferenced living people articles bot

User:DASHBot/Wikiprojects provides a list, updated daily, of unreferenced living people articles (BLPs) related to your project. There has been a lot of discussion recently about deleting these unreferenced articles, so it is important that these articles are referenced.

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Thank you.

Update: Wikipedia:WikiProject Academic Journals/Archive 2/Unreferenced BLPs has been created. This list, which is updated by User:DASHBot/Wikiprojects daily, will allow your wikiproject to quickly identify unreferenced living person articles.
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If you have any questions or concerns, visit User talk:DASHBot/Wikiprojects. Okip 01:37, 28 March 2010 (UTC)

People

The above notice about "Unreferenced living people articles" caused me to wonder: do we currently have any articles about people, and if not, why not? I don't recall seeing any in our categories.

There will have been people who have had a major impact on the world of academic journals; should they be within scope of this project? What about people who are mainly known for being a journal editor, etc? John Vandenberg (chat) 06:00, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

neuroinformatics wiki Journals

I've found a little collection of journals at [1]. We are missing quite a few of these topics. John Vandenberg (chat) 08:12, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

Journal of Modern Applied Statistical Methods

Please view the article about Journal of Modern Applied Statistical Methods, particularly the edits of user Edstat regarding the rankings of this journal. Edstat has been a lead editor for the article about this journal's founder, Shlomo Sawilowsky. Thanks, Kiefer.Wolfowitz (talk) 18:51, 18 April 2010 (UTC)

On Scientific writing

There are two related articles, but one is certainly superior. The articles are Scientific literature, and Scientific writing. I am thinking that Scientific literature is unecessary, but there are some small portions that could be merged into the other more in-depth article. However, this is just an opinion. Any suggestions?. Merge? Do nothing? etc., etc. ----Steve Quinn (formerly Ti-30X) (talk) 02:24, 21 April 2010 (UTC)

Disambiguation conventions

user:Guillaume2303 raised an interesting discussion on my talk page about the naming of two journals, where they appear to have identical names. Rather than focus on one journal, I have a provided a small list of journals with similar names below, so we can thrash out some conventions on how to disambiguate them. Please add more, and scratch entries which we agree are not in need of disambiguation. John Vandenberg (chat) 04:41, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

  1. Agricultural Economics (journal) & Zemědělská ekonomika
    Discussion started at User_talk:John_Vandenberg#Agricultural_Economics
  2. Agora
    • Ágora - studies in psychoanalytic theory / Ágora (Rio J.)[2]
    • Agora (History Teachers' Association of Victoria)[3] ISSN 0044-6726
  3. Architecture and Urbanism
  4. Contemporary History
  5. Historical Journal
  6. Journal of Public Health
  7. Synergy
  8. Traffic
  9. Apeiron
I would suggest that we disambiguate by field, then by publisher. For instance Ágora (psychiatry journal) and Agora (education journal), but Traffic (Wiley–Blackwell) and Traffic (University of Melbourne Graduate Student Association). For cases like Agricultural Economics and Zemědělská ekonomika, there's little possibility of confusion between the two, so hatnotes would be sufficient. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 03:05, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

Prod of Scientific writing

I have proposed the page Scientific writing, a page related to this WikiProject, for deletion. The page is a how-to guide and therefore runs afoul of WP:What Wikipedia is not. Some of the advice it gives is also disputed. Anyone objecting to the deletion of this page may removed the dated {{prod}} tag, but if you do so please explain your rationale for keeping the page in your edit summary or at Talk:Scientific writing. Cnilep (talk) 19:19, 30 April 2010 (UTC)

I'm sure it would be possible to write an encyclopedic and properly sourced article about scientific writing. This isn't it. —David Eppstein (talk) 00:59, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
The page has been de-prodded. See Colonel Warden's comments at Talk:Scientific writing recommending that the page be rewritten as a history. Cnilep (talk) 15:27, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
I have moved the content of the previous "how-to" version of the article to the talk page of the Wikiversity Scientific writing article. I'm sure they'd appreciate any help from us to merge the text. Clifflandis (talk) 19:36, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

WP:JCW updated!

Joy of joys! After 10 months. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 23:05, 18 May 2010 (UTC)

Template:Statistics journals

Is the Template:Statistics journals standard? (It is organized by open-access, delayed open-access, and then by-subscription subcategories). The existing template is of interest for people interested in open-access journals, but not primarily in statistical journals.

The List of scientific journals in statistics is organized by these categories: (bad, imho) "open access" versus "subscription (bad imho), "general statistical journals" and then "specialties"; I would prefer that the list drop the open-access dichotomy and that the template adopting this latter organization (general journals, then specialisties).

Thanks, Kiefer.Wolfowitz (talk) 18:11, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

RfD for redirects to publishing giants

I've made an RfD for journal redirects to publishing giants such as Elsevier or Springer. To participate in this discussion see link here.----Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 19:23, 3 June 2010 (UTC)

Notability of various medical journals

People from this project may have an interest in a discussion I've started at Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#Notability of various medical journals. - TexasAndroid (talk) 16:38, 10 June 2010 (UTC)

I was doing a Google search to obtain infomation for "Energy Data Base", because I was unable to find this on Wikipedia. I found the database at this url: ETDE's (energy) Database.

I followed up with a larger search on Wikipedia for "ETDE's Energy Database". On Wikipedia, I came across this article Energy Technology Data Exchange . In the article, I noticed a word for word copy and paste job in one of the sections compared to the web page I just accessed (above). As I did more Google searches it was easy to discover that other parts the article are also word for word copy and paste jobs, from different parts of this website. Looking at the references, it may be copied and pasted off of PDF documents with the same content as the web site. I didn't bother to look at the references, as that seems to be a non-issue at the moment

The organizations sponsoring the website are the International Atomic Agency and the International Energy Agency and the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA). The copyright page of one, and the disclaimer pages of both don't clearly state that content is in the Public Domain. . It is certainly worth having this as an article. So, I am thinking of removing all the content (except for references and flags). Then I will write a quick blurb, and write an explanation in the edit summary. Anybody have any other ideas? Anyway for now I will place a copy vio tag, because I don't know what else to do. Thanks. ----Steve Quinn (talk) 02:24, 20 June 2010 (UTC)

PASCAL

When editing for the PASCAL database (in the abstracting and indexing sections) be sure to link to PASCAL (database). Otherwise PASCAL links to a disambiguation page. ----Steve Quinn (talk) 04:00, 4 July 2010 (UTC)

Journals of Gerontology

I'd like to elicit the services/consultation of this WikiProject. Journals of Gerontology is currently a horribly incomplete article that doesn't give full coverage to the journals. The Journal of Gerontology was published from 1946-1994, after which it was split into The Journals of Gerontology: Series A (which encompasses the Journal of Gerontology: Biological Sciences and the Journal of Gerontology: Medical Sciences) and The Journals of Gerontology: Series B (which encompasses the Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences and the Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences). I'm entirely unsure as to how these journals should be represented on Wikipedia (i.e., 1, 2, or 3 articles?) and how best to go about it. Thanks in advance for any ideas you may have or work you may be able to do on this page. —Zach425 talk/contribs 23:41, 4 July 2010 (UTC)

Abstracting and indexing

In most journal articles we have a section on abstracting and indexing, but it is perhaps not clear what should and should not be included there. Personally, I think that it is rather trivial to list things like DOA, HINARI, JournalSeek, Google Scholar, and Ulrich's, to name a few, mainly because this kind of databases/listings are trying to be complete and are therefore not selective at all. It's like including the Yellow Pages in this list... I have been cleaning up a huge number of journal articles created by somebody from Medknow Publications (see "what links here" at that page) and they have included with each and every article a long list of indexing services, most of them trivial. For the moment I have let these stand (removing only WoS if JCR and SCI were already listed), but I'd like to have the opinion of other editors here on whether this is desirable or even appropriate. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 13:11, 16 July 2010 (UTC)

Personally, I don't really see the harm in listing that information, even in the case of "trivial listings" such as DOAJ, so I would tend to keep this information. If we only list selective database (A, B, C), some people might think they aren't present in the non-selective ones (D, E, F). And since some people might only have access to a few databases (E, F), which could be entirely non-selective, we would do them a disservice to not list the non-selective ones. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 14:14, 16 July 2010 (UTC)
  • I think that reasoning flies in the face of WP:NOTADIRECTORY. We have to tell people what is important about a journal. We even give a link to the journal's homepage. I don't think we should give a link to each and every database that lists these journals. Take JournalSeek, for example. It lists rather trivial information, that is of not much use to anybody. Same for DOAJ: if a journal is open-access, the homepage gives access to all articles published. What value is then added by listing DOAJ? --Guillaume2303 (talk) 15:24, 16 July 2010 (UTC)
I think it makes sense to include indexing services that are selective rather than indiscriminate, and that actually index the articles in the journal. So not JournalSeek (because it is indiscriminate and doesn't index articles), not Google scholar (because it is indiscriminate), not the Australian CS list (it is selective but doesn't index articles) but yes to WoS or MathSciNet. JournalSeek entries might be appropriate for an external link section, though, and the Australian CS list can be used to say something about the importance of the journal: not being a selective abstracting/indexing service doesn't mean it's not useful. —David Eppstein (talk) 16:52, 16 July 2010 (UTC)
I have to agree that indexing services which are selective should carry the most weight regarding notability. Indexing services which are not as selective probably don't merit a place in the same section as the others. By mixing these together in the same section, editors might be giving undue weight to these less stringent services. Personally, Google Scholar has been a valuable resource for finding scholarly content related to articles I have written over periods of time. It has been effective for me to find articles grouped under a topic, and often provides more than one citation from various sites (for one article). But, this is from a writing perspective. From an indexing perspective - I don't know. If I actually had to find fifty highly cited abstracts at one time using this method I think it would be cumbersome. From what I understand these indexing services are often used to compile references for a lot more than fifty articles at one time.----Steve Quinn (talk) 03:58, 18 July 2010 (UTC)
Let me add - for a small number of useful articles at one time, Google Scholar is excellent. ----Steve Quinn (talk) 04:05, 18 July 2010 (UTC)
  • Just to clarify, I was not commenting on the usefulness of these indexing services per se. I only was talking about whether or not to list them in a section "abstracting and indexing" in a journal article. Google Scholar, or JournalSeek for that matter, can be very useful when searching for highly-cited articles, an ISSN, or a standard abbreviation, for instance. That doesn't mean that the fact that a particular journal is indexed in these databases needs to be mentioned in the article on that journal. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 08:17, 18 July 2010 (UTC)

Notability of recently founded journals

I'm not really active in this area any more, but I've been discussing with Guillaume2303 the notability of various recent journals s/he prodded and I've deprodded -- Conservation and Society, Asian Journal of Pharmaceutics, Journal of Young Pharmacists & Journal of Surgical Technique and Case Report. (Also Contemporary Clinical Dentistry, which I deleted as it only has one issue so far.) This is probably a better forum for discussion. Espresso Addict (talk) 01:11, 22 July 2010 (UTC)

Espresso addict what is your question? Of course Guillaume2303 can PROD an article if he sees fit to do so. I do have to apologize because I am chuckling at the military parlance - "terminate with extreme prejudice". That was a good one. So, anyway Espresso addict, what information are you seeking here? ----Steve Quinn (talk) 03:15, 22 July 2010 (UTC)
Espresso addict Conservation and Society appears to be sufficiently notable to me according to WP:Notability (academic journals). First it is peer reviewed, second it is already at volume 8, third it is abstracted and indexed in a number of bibliographic databases. Also who ever created this article failed to mention this journal covers both science (natural science) and social science. Personally, I consider the mention that this is also a scientific journal is important.----Steve Quinn (talk) 03:31, 22 July 2010 (UTC)
I've heard of Conservation and Society, but I took Journal of Young Pharmacists to AfD. Abductive (reasoning) 04:15, 22 July 2010 (UTC)
OK, I will take a look at Journal of Young Pharmacists at Afd. One more thing about Conservation and Society; it has been in existence for seven years. Imho, this could also indicate notability. Does anyone have an impact factor for this journal?
Also, I am guessing that most of its articles would also be worthy of note over this time period. Just a guess on that one.----Steve Quinn (talk) 04:57, 22 July 2010 (UTC)
Conservation and Society isn't listed in either JCR, so no impact factor. Narayanese (talk) 07:47, 22 July 2010 (UTC)
  • According to Google Scholar, one article has 78 citations (but there is something weird here, it was published in 2010 and some of the citations are from earlier articles...). Searching in the more reliable WoS, I find that 13 (thirteen) articles have ever been cited by WoS-indexed journals (search for "Conserv Soc"), with a maximum of 10. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 08:30, 22 July 2010 (UTC)
  • Basically, what I just wrote in the JoYP AfD applies to C&A, too: " Most indexing services listed are trivial because they list everything (Google Scholar, DOAJ, and such) or are user-submitted (Index Copernicus, HINARI). The latter one is in a sense doubly trivial: HINARI is a service where publishers can choose to provide cheap (or even free) access to a particular journal to researchers in developing countries (so it's the publisher who decides about coverage). For an OA journal to be listed here is, if anything, even more trivial. Yet others are so obscure that I have trouble even finding them (SCOLOAR, for example)." The C&A article lists one database that is absent for the other journals (ASFA), but according to the homepage of that database, it is not selective (or at least not very selective) either. I don't agree with Steve Quinn's arguments that the age of a journal plays any role in determining its notability, nor the fact that it is peer-reviewed. To me, C&A is just as non-notable as JoYP (which is why I prodded it, of course). -- Guillaume2303 (talk) 08:23, 22 July 2010 (UTC)

I'm not seeking any info, Steve Quinn -- as automatic project notification appears to be gone for good, I'm merely notifying this project that these journals have been proposed for deletion by an editor who believes them non-notable. I'm no longer maintaining a watchlist or scanning AfD, so others here might wish to watchlist them so as to be involved in any future discussion of their notability at AfD. I'm neutral as to whether they are notable enough for inclusion, I merely feel that the issue deserves more than one editor's scrutiny. Espresso Addict (talk) 00:07, 23 July 2010 (UTC)

Guillaume2303, I didn't realize that all these were trivial index services. I thought a few were, but appearently was unaware of the status of the others. (My inexperience in this matter is showing).
For example, I thought EBESCOhost was very selective. At the recent Afd, one editor pointed out that EBESCO is not one of the more selective, and hence, not one of the more noteworthy. So, after your deeper investigation into Conversation and Society if you wish to bring this journal to Afd feel free to do so. Also, I feel it might be worth taking a look at the references some of the journal articles are using, just to get a feel for how notable these are. I might do this myself. However I have a couple other things I am working on, and several other writing and editing projects after that. I will try to fit this in. Anyway this is normal for editing on Wikipedia. There are always, at least, several things on the back burner. ----Steve Quinn (talk) 03:14, 23 July 2010 (UTC)
As an afterthought, would it be a good idea to just bring all these to Afd under the same discussion, since they appear to be related by common deficiencies? ----Steve Quinn (talk) 03:18, 23 July 2010 (UTC)
I think they should be kept separate to allow discussions to focus on the details of each, which include different disciplines and regions of the world. John Vandenberg (chat) 07:49, 23 July 2010 (UTC)

Applied Mechanics Reviews

I recently authored an article entitled Applied Mechanics Reviews. I also became aware that apparently there used to be an abstracts database connected with this journal. Guillaume2303 discovered a message board saying that it ceased publication in 2004 [10]. I discovered a PDF document that is probably out of date [11] which briefly discusses the database on page 3. I was wondering if anyone had anymore information regarding this database. Thanks in advance for your time. --------Steve Quinn (talk) 13:33, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

Studies in Intelligence

Does this journal belong in our project and should it be categorized as an academic journal? Or should I class it as a magazine? Any opinions welcome, I'm a bit at a loss here... --Guillaume2303 (talk) 08:56, 8 August 2010 (UTC)

Its aims look like those of an academic journal. There's an editorial board and it states that the board determines acceptance of papers, though I didn't find the phrase "peer review".[12] The contributors of unclassified articles to the latest edition seem to be predominantly academics (though there might well be a bias towards classified articles being written by intelligence personnel). I'd plump for academic journal. Espresso Addict (talk) 12:09, 9 August 2010 (UTC)
So far a quick google search has turned up this Studies in Intelligence. When combined with this blurb [13] , used as one of the references in the article, it does appear to be an academic journal (so far). From the aforementioned Studies in Intelligence page, I click on the first link and get this: Volume 54, Number 2, June 2010 (Unclassified extracts from Studies in Intelligence). However at the bottom of this page, and at the top of the former page is this (or similar) caveat: "All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed in this article are those of the author. Nothing in the article should be construed as asserting or implying US government endorsement of an article’s factual statements and interpretations". This implies to me that there is no peer review process. At the same time the blurb used as reference does state: "...intelligence 'has developed a recognized methodology; it has developed a vocabulary; it has developed a body of theory and doctrine; it has elaborate and refined techniques. It now has a large professional following'..." Still without peer review that would be a mark against saying this is an academic journal. I say let's call it a magazine, unless some set of notable indexing services turns up. ----Steve Quinn (talk) 21:34, 10 August 2010 (UTC)
"The final responsibility for accepting or rejecting an article rests with the Editorial Board. / The criterion for publication is whether, in the opinion of the Board, the article makes a contribution to the literature of intelligence." seems like a form of peer review to me. Espresso Addict (talk) 21:39, 10 August 2010 (UTC)
Espresso, where did you find this? Do you have a link? Yes, that statement indicates peer review. So far I haven't found any form of vetting articles by an editorial board. The articles themselves appear to be in the format of a magazine. For example: [14], [15], and [16]. ----Steve Quinn (talk) 21:45, 10 August 2010 (UTC)
It's in the link I provided above, which is "How to Submit Articles: Editorial Policy" -- [17]. Espresso Addict (talk) 22:59, 10 August 2010 (UTC)
I say it's an academic journal, given it has scholarly articles, an editorial board, and its readership is not a lay readership. Abductive (reasoning) 23:09, 10 August 2010 (UTC)
I agree it is an Academic Journal as per Abductive and Espresso. ----Steve Quinn (talk) 23:23, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

AfD

I declined a prod on Internet Journal of Criminology and it's currently at AfD: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Internet Journal of Criminology. Espresso Addict (talk) 13:55, 4 August 2010 (UTC)

Overload (magazine)

There is a discussion going on at this article's talk page concerning the question whetehr or not Overload is a peer-reviewed academic journal or a magazine. More input there would be welcome. Thanks. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 11:06, 11 August 2010 (UTC)

Peer review

This article and also anonymous peer review could use some attention (I'm too strapped in time). Another fork was created, which I redirected to peer review, but the stub creator is not happy with that. Comment at Talk:Independent review is welcome. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 09:48, 14 August 2010 (UTC)

Guillaume2303, I shall mosey on over that-a-way a little later. ----Steve Quinn (talk) 19:37, 14 August 2010 (UTC)

Python papers

I think a consensus needs to be reached to determine the notability of these two "journals", which have been added to the List of scientific journals (Computer science section):

Not looking notable to me, but then I am still green in some areas. ----Steve Quinn (talk) 19:33, 14 August 2010 (UTC)

Pflügers Archiv: European Journal of Physiology suggested at DYK

I've submitted this to DYK with the hook "that the earliest accurate description of an action potential appears in the first issue of the physiology journal Pflügers Archiv?", but have got a bit stuck in developing the article, as I can't read German and can't access the recent papers. If anyone can add to the article, that might be useful. It's particularly in need of an independent reference for being the oldest physiological journal, which I haven't yet uncovered -- it would make a nice addition to the hook if it could be independently sourced. Thanks, Espresso Addict (talk) 18:58, 18 August 2010 (UTC)

Proposal

Hi, I made this suggestion in Meta to open a new project about classifying books, journals and articles, in which you might be interested. Best wishes.--Xtv - (my talk) - (que dius que què?) 08:44, 20 August 2010 (UTC)

"Country" field in journal infobox

There was a discussion a while ago on thist talk page to discard categories classing journals by country. The rationale of that decision was that nowadays journals are almost invariably international, with publishers in one country, editors, board members, and authors all over the world, and printers yet somewhere else. Similarly, most publishers (like Elsevier, Springer Science+Business Media) either have offices all over the globe or (like Wiley-Blackwell) are the result of mergers of publishers in different countries, with the original country barely recognizable any more. I therefore propose to remove the "country" field from the infobox. I will also post this note at the infobox journals talk page, but propose to centralize the discussion here. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 15:17, 5 August 2010 (UTC)

A lot of journals are still published by a learned society and do have an obvious primary country -- to pick just some I'm familiar with Biochemical Journal, Journal of Virology, Journal of General Virology, Biochemistry, Annals of Internal Medicine, Development, Proc Natl Acad Sci USA, NEJM, JAMA &c&c. Some journals are deliberately limited in scope eg British Journal of..., European Journal of..., Indian Journal of... &c. Usually the main editorial office will be in a single location, even if the journal has offices on other continents -- these are often essentially just a forwarding address or a single ed board member who's agreed to front for the journal. Also some are historically associated with a place/country, even when the publisher is now genuinely international; there's still a geographical bias in submissions eg Nature vs Science, or JAMA/NEJM vs Lancet. Espresso Addict (talk) 16:18, 5 August 2010 (UTC)
  • Yes, editorial offices will be located in one country. However, when editors change, the office may suddenly go to a different country. Concerning the first example that you listed, the Biochemical Journal: It is published by Portland Press, which has offices in the UK and US. The editorial board is from all over the globe. The "Chair of the editorial board" (which I guess is more or less their editor in chief) is from New Zealand. The only address for an editorial office that I could find is in the US. The infobox gives as country "United Kingdom". The Journal of Virology indeed seems to be mostly US-based, although even there authors come from all over the place. As the publisher in the infobox is listed as "American Society of Microbiology", the addition "(United States", does not seem to add much useful info. The Journal of General Virology is published by an international society (based in the UK, but with members in 60 countries and not presenting itself as an international, certainly not a British society). Its editors, again, are from all over the world, as are the members of the editorial board. The current editor is from the UK, but there is no reason to expect that the next one will be, too. Biochemistry is published by the "American Chemical Society (United States)". Their editor in chief and most associate editors are from the US, but one is from France and one from Taiwan. The editorial board is world-wide. Authorship also is world-wide. I'll stop here. My point is that even in the less-frequent cases that a journal is more strongly connected to one particular country than another, the info in the "country" field does not convey much information, whereas in most other cases, choosing a particular country to list is more or less arbitrary. Even journals that have "British" or "European" in their title (and last I heard, "Europe" is not a single country yet) will often have US-based editors (European Journal of Neuroscience, for example). And although there may be a geographical bias in submissions to Nature and Science, that is nowadays only slight and the Nature group has journals (with "Nature" in their titles) where the editorial offices are in NY (where even Nature itself has branch offices). I maintain that listing a country is superfluous in the best case and misleading in the worst case. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 17:16, 5 August 2010 (UTC)
The publisher of the Biochemical Journal is the Biochemical Society, whose publishing arm is called Portland Press; it's a UK learned society and a UK-registered company with editorial offices in London & a distributing centre in Colchester.[18] The "US office" you link to is simply c/o the academic address of the Vice Chair of the Ed Board. The Society for General Microbiology is also a UK learned society, based in Reading; its membership is predominantly British and secondarily European; it has very little presence outside Europe. Learned societies globalise far slower than publishing companies. I agree it looks odd to state US after American Society for..., but I thought it was for consistency and to improve machine readability. Espresso Addict (talk) 18:15, 5 August 2010 (UTC)
  • From the website of the Biochemical Society: "The Society exists to promote excellence in research and education in the fields of molecular bioscience. The Society's international membership is a network that facilitates the promotion of molecular bioscience." Their membership fees are displayed in £, $ and € (with a discount if you pay direct debit from a UK bank account). I think you have illustrated my point about how difficult it is to assign a "country" very well. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 19:33, 5 August 2010 (UTC)
  • Er, you shouldn't believe everything you read on the net... I don't know the current membership breakdown but the soc has always been very strongly UK based because the major advantage of membership relates to conferences held in the UK. Espresso Addict (talk) 20:05, 5 August 2010 (UTC)
  • But don't you see that this is the whole point? Here we have a UK-leaning society. They put on their website that they are international. Their publisher has offices in the UK and US. The editor in chief is in New Zealand. Unless one knows this society as intimately as you do, it is very difficult to figure out what country to put into the country field. With commercial publishers it is even more difficult. BioMedCentral is UK-based, so I put that in the box for their journals. But recently they were bought by Springer. Should I now put "Germany" in all those boxes? Does it matter? Blackwell is UK based. It was bought by Wiley and is now called Wiley-Blackwell. Their main offices are still in Oxford, so I put UK for WB journals, but US for Wiley journals (even though WB has US offices, too, and some of their journals are published from there). WB specializes in society journals. Some of these societies are national. So do I put the society country in the box instead of the publisher's country in those cases? And what if Wiley decides at some point to merge WB completely with its own operations? Do we then change all boxes of WB journals from UK to US? Note that nothing would change in the journals themselves, they would still be published for the same societies, have the same editors and editorial boards, and cater to the same public. I edit a journal myself. When I started it, the original contact was signed with Munksgaard, which was fully-owned by Blackwell. Some databases still list the journal as published in Denmark. Blackwell decided to merge Munksgaard completely in their normal operations, so then the journal became UK. Originally the editorial office was in the US, but it moved with me to France 5 years ago. I send accepted manuscripts to a typesetter in Singapore. They send it to a printer in Malaysia. I can go on and on. To me, the country field just doesn't make any sense at all and in the rare occasions where it does, the info is superfluous (and in the even rarer cases where perhaps it isn't, you can mention it in the main body of the article). My whole point is that often it is way too difficult to make a sensible choice, so it is better to do away with it. One publisher (I think it was World Scientific, don't remember exactly) created a bunch of articles on their journals and put "International" in the country fields. I changed all that to "Singapore", because that is where they are headquartered, but frankly feel that that was pretty silly. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 20:34, 5 August 2010 (UTC)
  • I don't object to leaving it out where it is ambiguous, merely to removing it from articles where it isn't, such as the ones I list (and all the many other journals published by the same societies). Babies & bathwater, anyone? Espresso Addict (talk) 20:36, 5 August 2010 (UTC)
  • I think that even with most of the journals that you list, one can debate what country to put in the country field. Is it the editor in chief (because that is where the really important decisions on a journal are made)? Then the Biochemical Journal hails from New Zealand. Is it who prints and produces the PDFs? Then it's the UK, because that is where the publisher is registered. Is it the society behind it? Then we can debate whether it should be the UK (they have a UK-geographical bias) or whether it should be "international" (because that is apparently how the society sees itself). --Guillaume2303 (talk) 21:14, 5 August 2010 (UTC)
  • "Then the Biochemical Journal hails from New Zealand" !! -- I think that pretty much says that it isn't where the (transient) ed in chief hails from! Maybe it's just my background, but it seems 100% clear the most important thing is where the (main) editorial office is located. Espresso Addict (talk) 22:29, 5 August 2010 (UTC)
I don't what we gain by removing it, so I oppose its removal. I wasn't a much a fan of removing the categories by country either. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 16:24, 5 August 2010 (UTC)
What is gained is the removal of misleading and useless information. The country a journal is "in" is about as relevant as the religious sect that founded a university; most of the time it is a historical curiosity that is best dealt with in the text. I support Guillaume2303 in this, since it is he who is doing all the work. Abductive (reasoning) 19:48, 5 August 2010 (UTC)
That is a load of crap, Guillaume2303 does a lot of work yes, but he certainly isn't the only one making sizable contributions to the project. LeadDogSong, Steven Quinn, myself, John Vandenberg, and many others all make sizable contributions, and to belittle them is frankly insulting. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 04:09, 6 August 2010 (UTC)

Headbomb, I think Abductive was just talking about the issue at hand. Anyway, I think it makes sense to remove these when they are clearly ambiguous but not when they are not ambiguous. Hopefully journals will be upfront so it's not ambiguous. The example above of the Biochemical Society appears ambiguous (and I looked around at the website a bit). If you can't cite it, I don't see why it should be in an infobox. II | (t - c) 04:18, 6 August 2010 (UTC)

I respect Headbomb's desire to keep the "country" field in the infobox. However, I agree with -Guillaume2303 that this field has become essentially irrelevant. Even recently I was working on some journal articles where it seemed to be a toss up whether the relevant country was the UK or the USA. If I remember correctly it was the set of "Nature" journal articles I was working on. The Library of Congress had (something like) two journals based in the UK, while two others were based in the U.S. I could double check to get specific, but this gives a general idea. In addition, there was another set of articles by another publisher, yet again it was a toss up between the Netherlands and the USA. I have conferred with Guillaume2303 on this, and it mostly a matter of only remaining consistent - and nothing more. For example when its publisher "A", use country "A". With publisher "B" use country "B". But then a "what if" occurs here. If it is not Guillaume2303n or me implementing this system, then what are other editors placing in the country field? Depending on the specific journal it is just as appropriate to fill in USA or some other country, for the same publisher. And I am not aware of any agreement or guideline that states which country to use for which publisher. Wrapping up - also a good point was made that the country a journal is "in" is about as relevant as the religious sect that founded a university.---- Steve Quinn (talk) 05:05, 6 August 2010 (UTC)
Take journals such as the International Journal of Hematology. It's a journal published on behalf of the Japanese Society of Hematology, edited by Japanese board, published by Springer Japan. It's a Japanese journal, and there's no ambiguity.
Even in "ambiguous" case (it's not), it's only on Wikipedia that we're treating the publisher's country as being "ambiguous". Everywhere else, they list the place where the journal's publisher's HQ is based. Nature is published by the Nature Publishing Group, based in the UK. Nature is thus a UK journal, and there's no ambiguity about it. If I were to publish in Journal of Physics G, I would be publishing in a UK journal, since it published by IOP Publishing, based in the UK. The journal doesn't stop being UKian because a Canadian published in it, and that a Russian reviewed the paper. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 05:51, 6 August 2010 (UTC)
The Nature stable journals (eg Nature Medicine but not Nature itself) would be among those where I'd agree with taking out the country info, as they're published by a UK company but their editorial office is in the US. Elsevier-published journals are also problematic, as the company is (I think still) headquartered in The Netherlands, but most of its journals have editorial offices in other countries because they were acquired by company takeover. Espresso Addict (talk) 11:42, 6 August 2010 (UTC)
  • OK, so how about this compromise (I think EA already mentioned this above): only fill out the "country" field if the journal can be assigned to any one country unambiguously. Under "unambiguous", I would take journals where the publisher's main office is based in that country, as well as the editor-in-chief and the editorial office (as indicated on the journal's website - but increasingly, offices are electronic only and no specific address is given). That would take care of most cases, I think. Most (or even all) Elsevier journals would not have a country listed, same with other major publishers. I do think, though, that the case for the International Journal of Hematology is less clearcut than Headbomb seems to think. It is published by Springer Japan. Click this link and you'll see that it redirects to the article on Springer. That's quite proper, SJ is a full subsidiary of Springer and doesn't merit its own article. So we have here a journal that calls itself "International" and is published by a German-owned company on behalf of a Japanese society. The Editor in chief is Japanese, but the associate editors and the editorial board are very international. Anyway, the issue at hand here is my compromise proposal. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 11:55, 6 August 2010 (UTC)
  • Sure. But the original article creator ought to be consulted (where they're a regular editor and not just a publisher representative), because there are some that truly are unambiguous but perhaps don't look so clear on e-paper -- simply because posing as "international" gets papers & thus sells journals. Espresso Addict (talk) 12:07, 6 August 2010 (UTC)
I'd say unambiguous meant that (1) the publisher's company registration, including any parent company; (2) the journal's main editorial office; and (3) the headquarters of any learned society on behalf of which the journal is published (not just "an official publication of", which isn't the same thing at all) are all in the same country. I don't think the ed in chief should be taken into account, though the info box could perhaps give the country for them as well. Espresso Addict (talk) 12:31, 6 August 2010 (UTC)
I appreciate the effort in trying to determine ambiguous and unambiguous, however, the original proposal was to either keep, or remove the "country" field. As I read this --- ambiguous - or not ambiguous --- kind of vetting I am beginning to think it is too complicated. In any case, it means that we keep the "country" field. That is fine with me. So as Headbomb stated, and which I intended to state, I too have been editing this field based on the location of the Headquarters of the publisher (as far as I know). So I think let's just keep it simple. Let's realize a consensus that stipulates the "country" field is for the country of the puhlisher's headquarters. Also, (maybe trivial) that is a common thread among the variety of publishers, which we encounter. Also, it is apparent that Headbomb feels strongly that the information contained in this field is worthy of note, and that should be taken into consideration. This may speak for a silent segment who also feel this information is worthy of note. Thanks for your time. -----Steve Quinn (talk) 23:22, 7 August 2010 (UTC)
  • That leaves the question what is to be considered the publisher's headquarters. Should I put UK for Wiley-Blackwell (as their head offices are in Oxford) or US (because they are a full subsidiary of John Wiley & Sons)? If a publishers creates a "subcompany" in some country (probably to facilitate the administrative part of business operations), then what is the headquarters? The country of the subsidiary or the country of the parent company (for example, Springer Netherlands, Springer India)?
  • These are interesting dilemas, and points which I shall ponder, and attempt to come up with a response. ----Steve Quinn (talk) 17:04, 8 August 2010 (UTC)
The subsidiary. Springer India is in India, not the netherlands, so you would list India's as the publisher's country. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 19:39, 8 August 2010 (UTC)
Personally, I think it would be best to simply list the headquarter's location of the parent company, whatever that may be.----Steve Quinn (talk) 21:51, 10 August 2010 (UTC)
That would lead to nonsensical things like Springer Japan (Germany), since the parent is Springer Science+Business Media Gmbh, based in Germany. If a journal is published by the subsidiary, the subsidiary is the thing that is relevant since it the one responsible for all things directly related to the journal. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 08:11, 16 August 2010 (UTC)
  • I agree that "Springer Japan (Germany)" would look rather weird, but it might be close to what really is going on. Let me give an example that I experienced myself. When I started Genes, Brain and Behavior ("G2B") back in 2000/2001, I negotiated with "Blackwell Munksgaard" in Copenhagen. The people there made the decision to go ahead with the journal and for the first few years, Blackwell-Munksgaard was displayed on the journal's cover. (And last time I checked, PubMed's journal database still says the journal is published in Copenhagen). However, that was the last time I dealt with Munksgaard, as the publisher handling the journal was located in Blackwell's Paris office (now closed). I myself (and the editorial office) were in the United States at that time. When my publisher (the person, I mean) left Blackwell, the journal was handled by another publisher in the Oxford headquarters of Blackwell, but one of our annual meetings took place in their Massachusetts office. Nowadays, Blackwell is a full subsidiary of John Wiley & Sons and operates as Wiley-Blackwell. The subsidiary headquarters are still in Oxford, but they also have large offices in the US. The editorial office of G2B is here in Bordeaux (France). Accepted manuscripts are send to my production editor in Singapore, who sends it on to India for typesetting and then to Malaysia for printing. Putting a country name in the country field is therefore kind of playing roulette and this was already the case already when the journal was still published by Munksgaard. It was not and never has been a Danish journal... --Guillaume2303 (talk) 08:32, 16 August 2010 (UTC)
And we would not be saying it's a danish journal, but that the journal is published by a danish publisher. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 15:25, 16 August 2010 (UTC)
Not saying that's not true, but that's besides the point, on top of being WP:SYNTH/WP:OR and can't be verified in sources... Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 16:23, 16 August 2010 (UTC)
  • Yep, that's my point, without SYNTH and/or OR, in nowadays publishing environment there is no way of knowing whether the info that we are putting in the country field is correct and pertinent or not. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 16:31, 16 August 2010 (UTC)
  • In reply to Headbomb above, regarding the example of Springer: For me since the "parent" organization is in Germany, then Germany would go in the country field. There would be no (Japan) Germany. In this case Japan is not even considered. However, with Springer, it appears to be just as easy to enter the country location of the subsidiary. For example, [19] is Springer Netherlands, [20] Allerton Press, Inc., [21] Springer Berlin Heidelberg, and [22] Springer, U.S.A. I agree with listing the subsidiary publisher for Springer journals, since this is an established convention by Springer itself. This would be consistent with having a reliable source. And I think that helps emphasize that this is the proper thing to do.
With Elsevier a different strategy needs to be employed. It appears that only the imprint is listed on the journal's home page. Hence, an extra step is needed to find out the location of the imprint, which I think is reasonable. [23] Elsevier, [24] Urban and Fischer, [25], Science Press and [26], Saunders.
For a publisher like Wiley (and others) it may not be as clear right away, but perhaps WorldCat, or Library of Congress lists an appropriate location. The Wiley site lists both "Wiley" journals [27], and "Wiley-Blackwell" [28]. In fact it may be the specific function of Wiley-Blackwell to publish journals that are available "online" from John Wiley & Sons, Inc. I notice that some journals by Wiley are not availabel "online". ---- Steve Quinn (talk) 18:06, 16 August 2010 (UTC)
  • Here is a kink in my "wonderful" strategy. "Peptides" is an Elsevier academic journal, here. The publisher (or imprint?) in the top left is Elsevier. So of course, Elsevier = Netherlands, right? At the Thomson Reuters Master Journal List search the location is NEW YORK, USA, NY, here, and the Library of Congress also lists the location as New York, N.Y.. here. Also, the Library of Congress lists the publisher as Pergamon. That is probably out of date but it is an imprint of Elsevier, and scrolling to the bottom of the page are the "Latest Receipts" up to June 2010. ---- Steve Quinn (talk) 04:54, 17 August 2010 (UTC)
  • The location for Genes, Brain and Behavior is Oxford : Blackwell Munksgaard according to the Library of Congress here. On the "Full Records" page here the 'Latest Receipts" are up to July 2010. ---- Steve Quinn (talk) 05:11, 17 August 2010 (UTC)
  • I found G2B at Thomson Reuters here. it lists publisher and location as WILEY-BLACKWELL PUBLISHING, INC, MALDEN, MA. USA. I originally found it in Biological Abstracts. It is interesting that this particular journal is only one of 10 listed with the word "gene" in the title, and one of 29 listed with "brain" in the title (Master Journal List search). That probably means it is a highly rated journal. (Kudos) ---- Steve Quinn (talk) 05:35, 17 August 2010 (UTC)
  • Steve, even though these sources are perhaps reliable sources in the WP sense (not really sure about that, but I guess they are), your sleuthing shows that they don't always contain correct information. If you have a look at G2B's page on the WB site (http://www.wiley.com/bw/journal.asp?ref=1601-1848), which for non-controversial information is acceptable as a source, you can see two errors in the LCCN info: there is no comma after "Brain" in the journal's title and, the publisher is currently clearly indicated as being Wiley-Blackwell. Where Thompson gets the idea that G2B has anything to do with WB's Malden office, I don't know, the journal never had anything to do with that office. All I can imagine is that the applications to be included in the Science Citation Index went through that office. In any case, you have shown that even reliable sources can provide incorrect (or conflicting) info on which country a journal is from, reinforcing the point that I have been making. As for Headbomb's remark above: "Correct is simple. Check the sources. If it's pertinent or not is opinion." I strongly disagree with that. First of all, as shown by Steve, it is difficult if not impossible to find "correct" information. But the question of whether this is pertinent or not is a real one. Suppose we had a reliable source giving us the name of the editor's spouse and his/her children. We still would not list that info in the article because it is not pertinent... --Guillaume2303 (talk) 11:59, 17 August 2010 (UTC)
  • Whatever is decided (and let me reiterate that I think the field should be eliminated), it seems clear that the location of the publisher and the location of the editoral staff are two different things. It is simply not interesting where the publisher is located, especially given that there is an oligopoly of Wiley-Blackwell, Springer and Elsevier. Abductive (reasoning) 19:56, 18 August 2010 (UTC)
  • In addition, that info belongs arguably in the article on the publisher, not in the article on the journal. Even if known, we don't list the country of birth of the editor in chief either... --Guillaume2303 (talk) 13:48, 23 August 2010 (UTC)

If you'd end up keeping a country field (which I hope you wont, for the reasons given by Guillaume2303 et al), the country field ought to be placed in sme way so that it's meaning is clearer imo, and have a different parameter name so that all country info up to this point get hidden. I say the latter because in the past the field has been required, yet without directions so it has necessarily been filled with a country pretty arbitrarily (or that's the experence for me). Narayanese (talk) 19:23, 19 August 2010 (UTC)

  • This discussion is getting overly long and we don't seem to be getting anywhere. Perhaps being Dutch I fail too easily to see the importance of nationality/nationalism (I often cite Van Kooten en De Bie, who in the 80s stated that "We Dutch are proud that there are no Dutch left that are proud to be Dutch"). So perhaps headbomb and Espresso Addict (the two main opponents of removing the country field) could tell us what useful information they think is conveyed by the contents of this field. I would like to suggest that even in the obvious case of the "Japanese Journal of Foo" published by "Tokyo Publishing House" on behalf of the "Japanese Society for Foo", including "(Japan)" after "Tokyo Publishing House" in the infobox is perhaps not all that informative either. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 13:54, 23 August 2010 (UTC)

Categorization

As many of you know, I have been overhauling the categorization of journal articles. I am almost done now. I have re-organized the categories into a logical tree (I think), according to fields (Category:Academic journals by subject area). I also renamed most of the m from "journal" to "academic journal" (an exception being the journals by publication frequency and by language cats, doesn't seem worth the bother there). The last remaining task is also almost done, but I need some help there. It concerns removing articles from the "top categories" (which should be empty) to appropriate subordinate categories. For instance, a journal covering everything should go to "multidisciplinary academic journals", not "academic journals". I have emptied almost all of these top categories now, but am not yet completely done with Category:Academic journals and Category:Medical journals, a I am not always certain how to categorize these journals. I have created some new categories for some of them, but I don't really want to create categories that will just contain one single article... Help and/or suggestions will be appreciated. If you create a new cat, I'd also appreciate if you could let me know, so that I can check where it fits in the categorization tree. Thanks! --Guillaume2303 (talk) 08:44, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

Bot cleanup of |journal= and |work=

See the bot request. Basically, this is to make the replacement [[Foobar]] → [[Foobar (journal/magazine)|Foobar]] when appropriate. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 10:02, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

Undergraduate journal

I am wondering what should be done about Elements Undergraduate Research Journal. It may not be suitable for inclusion per notability. It has been tagged with (notability) since January 2010. A brief description of the journal [29] states that the scope is only university-wide. Also, articles are vetted by "staff members" and not faculty members. Frankly, I don't want to put in the time on anymore graduate or undergraduate journals, because so much extra time is involved to determine notability. There is a lot to do here with this and other projects, where my time is better utilized. I have one last graduate journal that I need to finish. After that, (personally) I am done with these, except to PROD or participate in an AfD discussion. Anyway, unless notabilty is apparent I reccomend AfD for this one. In fact, I am going to go ahead and do an AfD for this one, unless other editors reccomend against doing this. ---- Steve Quinn (talk) 04:28, 17 September 2010 (UTC)

This article has been nominated for deletion. The discussion is here ---- Steve Quinn (talk) 05:33, 17 September 2010 (UTC)

The Medieval Review

The Medieval Review, an online journal, is currently at AfD. See WP:Articles for deletion/The Medieval Review. Maybe someone has an opinion. Hans Adler 17:30, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

Iranshenasi

The journal Iranshenasi is currently at AfD. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 06:11, 22 October 2010 (UTC)

The mysterious database

Time and again, I have tried to find this database entitled, "Current Abstracts", and usually end up with current abstracts as a subjective term, such as listing a selected list of current abstracts [30], [31]. Or journal articles that are current abstracts of some other database [32]. So, apparently it used be part of EBSCO [33], but no longer exists [34]. So this is just an FYI for Wikiproject Academic Journals members. So it is probably not necessary to list this database when working on journal articles. And it feels good to be back :>) ---- Steve Quinn (talk) 05:30, 24 October 2010 (UTC)

  • It's not in their list of title lists either. Indeed better then not to list it anymore, just like trivial databases like DOAJ or Google Scholar, which include everything ("trivial" here used in the context of being important to mention in an article, I'm not saying these databases don't have their uses, of course!). --Guillaume2303 (talk) 09:28, 24 October 2010 (UTC)

Child Life

The journal Child Life is currently at AfD. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 09:44, 24 October 2010 (UTC)

Archives Journals

This article wa created last night and I am uncertain about what to do with it. There are, of course, other journals called "Archives" than just these 9. Also, although the publisher's page that is referenced to indeed talks about "JAMA & Archives" (and the header displayed by my browser does say "JAMA & Archives Journals", I'm not sure that this justifies creating a separate article. For the moment I have categorized this as a disambiguation page, but for a real dab this would need all journals that are named "Archives", not just those from this one publisher. Any opinions will be welcome. Thanks! --Guillaume2303 (talk) 09:19, 6 November 2010 (UTC)

Academic Journal articles have been selected for the Wikipedia 0.8 release

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WikiProject cleanup listing

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Wikipedia:Notability (periodicals)

Lists of taxa in journal articles

There's an editor who insists to include long lists of taxa described in some semi-professional journals, maintaining that they are informative. Although perhaps not against the letter, I think this violates the spirit of WP:NOTADIRECTORY and should be limited, at most, to a few examples or just a statement that the journal is the vehicle for new species descriptions. I would appreciate the opinions of some other editors here. See Carnivorous Plant Newsletter and Journal of Insectivorous Plant Society. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 22:53, 21 November 2010 (UTC)

  • I have to agree with Guillaume2303. Lists of taxa in journal articles does not seem to be appropriate for journal articles. The article is about the journal, and the lists of taxa do not seem relevant to the description of a journal. This is similar to avoiding listing every aspect of topical coverage of a discipline in a science journal article. ---- Steve Quinn (talk) 09:14, 23 November 2010 (UTC)
  • The lists of taxa appear to contradict certain policies.
    1. First, notadirectory has already been mentioned above - specifically - See no.7 Wikipedia is not a complete exposition of all possible details. Rather, an article is a summary of accepted knowledge regarding its subject.
    2. Second, academic language should be eschewed. See: academic language # 7. Texts should be written for everyday readers, not for academics.
    3. Content Information cannot be included solely for being true or useful. Merely being true, or even verifiable, does not automatically make something suitable for inclusion in the encyclopedia. See WP:INDISCRIMINATE
    4. Wikipedia is not a mere collection of internal links. Something like this may be appropriate for a stand alone list article. See WP:NOTLINK.
    5. Wikipedia, or the article, is not a scientific journal, or academic journal and should not be treated like it is. See Wikipedia is not a scientific journal
    6. These are articles about the journals. A statement that the journal is the vehicle for new species descriptions, would be sufficient.---- Steve Quinn (talk) 06:16, 27 November 2010 (UTC)
  • There was a similar case with the Bulletin de la Société Sciences Nat. I proposed to the editor who created that article to split that list of to a separate article, which seems like an acceptable solution for these carnivorous plant articles, too, as it addresses all of the concerns that Steve Quinn has listed above. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 09:34, 27 November 2010 (UTC)
  • Tthe edits by Steve Quinn to these two journal articles have been reverted, the revert argument basically being WP:IDONTLIKEIT (none of the above arguments were addressed; yes, I know, that wikilink talks about deletion discussions, but it applies quite well here, too). Therefore I think it would be good to solicit the opinion of the wider community on this issue. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 11:11, 27 November 2010 (UTC)
  • The information is useful to one who wants to know what species have been published in the newsletter, a publication which is in fact " a registration authority for cultivars of carnivorous plants since 1979". The arguments presented about the WP:NOT policy are simply refuted by noting that this case does not apply to any of them. Sasata (talk) 20:53, 27 November 2010 (UTC)
  • To clarify: this is a simple summary list of about three dozen taxa reported over a 38 year period in a newsletter, one of the aims of which is to report new carnivorous plant taxa. How does that apply to "WP:NOT #7. A complete exposition of all possible details" It seems to me to apply to the sentence that follows "Rather, an article is a summary of accepted knowledge regarding its subject." Sasata (talk) 21:05, 27 November 2010 (UTC)
  • Let's then also add a list of the articles on cultivating Nepenthes, because that is useful information to one who wants to know what articles on this subject have been published in the newsletter. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 21:17, 27 November 2010 (UTC)
  • See WP:Sarcasm. A clear distinction can be made: a list of the articles on cultivating Nepenthes will not have been published in other reliable sources, and each do not have notability themselves, whereas the taxa (notable by definition) will have been published in other sources and databases. Sasata (talk) 21:33, 27 November 2010 (UTC)
  • In all cases? No. I certainly don't think a list of taxa described in Taxon would be desirable. These two journals listed above are small, highly specialized, and in this case it seems encyclopedic and instructive to include the embedded list (WP:EMBED). A unique part of what journals do is legitimize the applied scientific name to a taxon. There are specific rules (ICBN) that dictate where and how a taxon can be validly published. Anyone can write about the cultivation of Nepenthes in any forum, making that subject non-notable with respect to the content of this journal's Wikipedia article (unless it was the first such report of a particular cultivation technique, etc. that would otherwise make it a notable publication in the journal). The taxa that are described in the journal, however, are deeply connected to the identity of these two publications. If you'd like to create a general guideline or proposal that generally a list of taxa described in an academic journal is not the best idea for the given reasons, but in some situations where the scope of the journal is small and the list of taxa is miniscule, it may be a good idea. (Just thinking out loud here, another example where it would be beneficial is perhaps a geographically-restricted journal that doesn't publish many taxa, e.g. a Journal of an academy of science in a state, province, small country). Rkitko (talk) 23:26, 27 November 2010 (UTC)
  • I reccomend a solution mentioned above, using the example of "Bulletin de la Société Sciences Nat". In this article it appears that the detailed lists taxa list was split into an article entitled "List of taxa published in Bulletin de la Société Sciences Nat". A link is provided in the "See also" section of the journal article. This also satifies the issues noted above. ---- Steve Quinn (talk) 03:23, 28 November 2010 (UTC)
    I don't see how this journal is "a registration authority for cultivars of carnivorous plants since 1979". It appears that the journal is not an International Cultivar Registration Authority (ICRA), unless I am missing something. Also, there is more than one. The society may be one, but not the journal. To wit -- "Those appointed as ICRAs represent a wide range of societies and institutions and will often be a specialist society interested in that particular group of plants. ...currently are located in many European countries, North America, China, India, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Puerto Rico." [35]
Perhaps the list of taxa would fit better in an article on the Society article (if there is one) or a regional International Cultivar Registration Authority (just an idea). ---- Steve Quinn (talk) 03:23, 28 November 2010 (UTC)
I've taken a look at List of taxa published in Bulletin de la Société Sciences Nat and see very little difference with the embedded list at Carnivorous Plant Newsletter. In fact, I see several problems with the former (very poor formatting, for one) and think that such small lists found at both journals mentioned in this discussion (Carnivorous Plant Newsletter and Journal of Insectivorous Plant Society) have no business being split into list articles. They're simply too small! Why arbitrarily remove them from the context of the journal?
Technically, the Society is the registration authority, but it uses its publication as its vehicle for performing the ICRA duties of cultivar description. The line is understandably blurred as the journal is the public record for the Society. And as far as I know, the International Carnivorous Plant Society (ICPS) is the only ICRA specifically for carnivorous plants. But that's not the issue here at all. You took issue with the list of taxa, not cultivars. Cultivars are not taxa. And there is no list of cultivars in the Carnivorous Plant Newsletter article. (As an aside, ICRA status is not strictly regional, and carnivorous plants certainly are not restricted to one country, continent, or even hemisphere. ICRA status is typically given for groups of plants, e.g. a certain orchid society is the registration authorities for orchids, an African violet society is the registration authority for African violets... But again, this is irrelevant to the issue of lists of taxa in articles about journals.)
The list of taxa would not be better suited for the article on the ICPS. The taxa are published in the Carnivorous Plant Newsletter, which is published by the Society. You seem to be confusing things. The journal is the Society's vehicle for publication of taxa, cultivars, and academic articles on cultivation and other observations. Your comments here seem to suggest to me, at least, that you may not understand the issues involved. I hope my comments clarify a few things, but is there anything I can clarify further? Rkitko (talk) 04:21, 28 November 2010 (UTC)
Sorry, for the misunderstanding. Another editor above stated that the newsletter is "a publication which is in fact a registration authority for cultivars of carnivorous plants since 1979". I was just trying to get some clarity on this, which you provided. You are correct this is irrelevant to the issue, and it looks like I shouldn't have brought it up in this discussion. Also, I am aware that carniverous plants are not restricted to a regoinal location, etc., etc. - so apparently I have caused some confusion. So I am OK with just dropping this part of the conversation.
As far as removing the lists "embedded" in both these articles - the main thing is these are scientific journal articles. These are not articles specifically about plants. These are supposed to describe the sceintific journal, not the plants. Perhaps a brief description of each general category: Drosera, Heliamphora, Nepenthes, Pinguicula, and Sarracenia would be best. I agree the lists seem small, but in such detail these lists appear to be off-topic. It appears to apply to the issues above WP:NOT. Why not have a summary style description of each category, rather than the list? This is a journal article, not a directory. ---- Steve Quinn (talk) 04:56, 28 November 2010 (UTC)
Ok. Back to the issue of whether the list has a place in the article on the journal. From my perspective, a major function of these two journals is to describe new carnivorous plant taxa. Including the embedded lists seems right on-topic to me. I cannot fathom how such an embedded list could be considered a violation of WP:NOTDIRECTORY. I would agree that in general it is a terrible idea to attempt to make a list of such taxa described in large journals, but because these two journals are 1) small and 2) highly specialized, the lists do no harm and actually improve the article. The two articles about journals chosen to discuss here are terrible representatives for such a discussion that would generate a guideline on taxon lists in these articles. I don't agree that the lists violate any rules, but if they did I would go so far as to suggest WP:IAR applies in these two cases since the lists put one aspect of the journals' missions in context with sufficient detail. I could imagine going into further detail, e.g. the table I constructed at List of Drosera species, but that's not necessary here. Are you making the more broad argument that should apply to all journals, or did you mean to persuade everyone in these two specific examples? If the former, your example of List of taxa published in Bulletin de la Société Sciences Nat is a much better one since the list is large, even though it desperately needs formatting work. As for stand-alone lists, these taxon lists in Carnivorous Plant Newsletter and Journal of Insectivorous Plant Society are just too small to make any sense as a separate list. Rkitko (talk) 05:21, 28 November 2010 (UTC)
I see that you have a "heavy" background in this area (from your User page). Also you are a member of the WikiProject Carnivorous plants. Therefore, obviously, your statements have merit. I agree that List of Drosera species, and List of taxa published in Bulletin de la Société Sciences Nat are both formidable lists, and much more than what either of these two journal articles contain. So, I understand your point of view. I think the suggestion that these lists actually improve the article is interesting, and did not realize it. I guess you are right - my concern is that the lists cloud the focus of the journal article. I really have to take your word for it that the listed taxa are signifigant regarding these journals - because you seem to be heavily involved in this field. In addition, there are other points, such as the journal, and these taxa are intimately related. Again I have to rely on the experience of those in the field. Hence, I agree that in general the lists would not work. But maybe these lists work for these two journal articles. I really don't have any good arguments to counter your recent arguments, these last few entries. ---- Steve Quinn (talk) 08:06, 28 November 2010 (UTC)
  • Support reasonable inclusion per mgiganteus suggestion above. Taxa official description is a cornerstone of biology, and if a journal described taxas it is desirable to know which descriptions it published -it is relevant both for the journal and the taxa. Lists that are too long can be easily split apart in a separate article, but short lists like the ones herein brought to attention do really belong to the article. WP:NOTDIR does not apply in my opinion; a relevant quote is: For example, an article on a radio station should not list upcoming events, current promotions, current schedules, et cetera, although mention of major events, promotions or historically significant programme lists and schedules may be acceptable. - Well, a list of all articles published by the journals would fall in WP:NOTDIR, but a list of taxa is just like the "list of historically significant programmes" described above: such descriptions are of utmost historical and scientifical significance, much more than common papers. --Cyclopiatalk 12:53, 28 November 2010 (UTC)
  • (unindent) Let me resume. There are 2 problems with the lists in Journal of Insectivorous Plant Society, one in common with Carnivorous Plant Newsletter. The first (and least important one) is that the list in JoIPS is unsourced. The database that is referenced may certainly reliable and useful, but to get this particular list, you have to enter a query into the search fields. (And I should note that much more reputable databases than the one linked to here can provide these results, too) There is, obviously, not an item/page/whatever in this database that says "list of taxa described in JoIPS". Hence you are engaging in OR here. However, this is all secondary to the main problem, whether or not these lists are encyclopedic or even useful. As a taxonomist by training, I argue that they are not only not encyclopedic, they are not even very useful in general. A taxonomist will be interested in knowing which taxa have been described in a certain genus or family, by whom, and where and when. As for lists of taxa described in a certain journal, that will only be of interest to the journal itself ("look what we have published!") or perhaps to some members of the society involved ("look how important our journal is"), but they have hardly any scientific value. A clear indication of this is that lists of taxa published in a certain journal are almost always published by the journal itself, with perhaps a few exceptions (I remember seeing some in Taxon) when somebody interested in the history of biology writes an article about a certain historical journal and then lists (not necessarily exhaustively) the taxa that have been described therein. Nothing like that is the case here. There is another aspect to this all: whereas species are undoubtedly notable (in the WP sense), describing a new species is a very ordinary, everyday event. Each year thousands of new species are described. Only rarely will such a new description be very notable (like the rare cases that a new primate or other large mammal is described). So the fact that a journal publishes (occasionally or regularly) descriptions of new taxa certainly adds to their notability (again in the WP sense). As for Besoiro, the proper way to handle this is mention this in the article and then provide a reliable source (as was done for Besoiro; even if that is a reference to the journal itself, we're not talking controversial stuff here, so self-reference is permitted here) or provide a recent example with a reference to that particular article. If somebody really feels strongly about such lists of taxa (as was the case for BdlSSN), I'm fine with them being split off as separate lists (even though they will almost by definition be only barely notable), but included with the journal article they give undue weight to the descriptions of new taxa and distract from all the other content that these journals may be offering. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 12:59, 28 November 2010 (UTC)
The list in JoIPS is sourced with a database that is reliable and reputable (I trust it more than IPNI). I hope my comments at Wikipedia:External links/Noticeboard#ELNO #9 clarifies a few things about that. And I certainly don't think there's anyway one can conclude that referencing such a database is OR. The information is present in the database; we did not synthesize information or gather it anew, but simply used a reputable resource much like any database returns data on species. Am I doing OR when I enter a taxon into the IPNI search and then use {{IPNI}} for a reference on who authored the taxon and when? I don't think so, but according to your logic, because I entered a search term and used the database, I might have! Absurd.
As to your other points on the lists, we don't write articles just for taxonomists. I would argue, given the nature of JoIPS and CPN, the list of taxa is important for a complete understanding of what the journal does. You're right that for most journals, which taxa described within them is mundane. But here and in other cases (like I mentioned above with some geographic restriction, like a journal of a succulent society in, say, Arizona), taxa described in the journal are a big deal. When both societies began, the journals were little more than notes on cultivation and field trip reports. As small societies with an extremely narrow focus (we're only talking about 600 or so taxa world-wide with carnivorous plants), the list of taxa informs the reader of the specific taxa described therein.
You say, "...describing a new species is a very ordinary, everyday event. Each year thousands of new species are described." Yes, of course. But again, you're not thinking about this in context of these journals. Again, the narrow scope limits it. There are only a handful of new carnivorous plant taxa described every year (that's only recently, earlier in the journals' lives, new CP taxa were rare). With respect to these journals and their narrow focus, the lists answer important questions. As it stands, I do not think the lists present the undue weight problem. The lists are small and comparable to other content in the article. It would be something different entirely if the list was 800 taxa long. Rkitko (talk) 13:52, 28 November 2010 (UTC)
(reply to Guillaume2303) You say that the JoIPS list is unsourced and represents OR (I'll come to this a bit later) and that such lists are, in general, not encyclopedic and not useful. And yet you're "fine with them being split off as separate lists"? I'm not sure how you can reconcile these two points. You also say that taxon descriptions are not particularly important or notable. If this is the case then why do journals, as you say, specifically list taxon descriptions to show how important they are (as opposed to other articles, such as field reports or even peer-reviewed analyses, which are also published in the CPN)? Getting back to the issue of OR, the JoIPS article states that "The Journal of Insectivorous Plant Society has published formal descriptions of the following taxa" and then provides a list of taxa, all of which are sourced to a reliable database which confirms that they were indeed published in this journal (and as you've shown there are other databases that could be used as a source here). The article doesn't make claims relating to the completeness of the list (although it is almost certainly complete, as far as taxa go at least) nor anything else that is not stated explicitly in the cited sources. The fact that information retrieval from this database requires a query search is immaterial. mgiganteus1 (talk) 14:00, 28 November 2010 (UTC)

Image captions in journal infoboxes

Can someone point me to the discussion where it was decided that captions shouldn't be used in journal infoboxes? There is a good reason why many infobox templates have a |caption= parameter: it allows editors to supplement an image with information and therefore give the reader a better understanding of what they're looking at. In the case of journal covers, captions can be used to temporally contextualise the images, particularly in cases where scans from old issues are involved. Perhaps the best example of the problem with the No Caption Dogma is that of Nature. The infobox image in this article is the first ever Nature cover, from 1869. To me this would seem a significant fact worthy of mention, yet it is a relegated to mouseover text because "[c]overs are not captioned in journal infoboxes". Going by current practice (or at least current practice by User:Guillaume2303), if I wanted to include this fact (at least in such a way that it was intimately associated with the image) I would have to remove the image from the infobox and place it elsewhere in the article (and leave the infobox empty or upload an unnecessary fair use image as a replacement). Even worse, someone unfamiliar with Nature could conceivably be misled into thinking that this is how Nature looks today; there is nothing in the article to clearly indicate otherwise. Now maybe I'm missing something here and there is actually a very good reason for excluding captions from journal infoboxes, but to me this seems to be anathema to common sense. A more compelling reason than simply "this is not how we do things" would be much appreciated. mgiganteus1 (talk) 09:56, 24 November 2010 (UTC)

  • It appears the particular issue with the Nature issue has been resolved. Other than that, providing captions with images in the infobox seems redundant. The images clearly have the title of the journal included in the image. The infobox, obviously related to the journal, has more information than would be contained in a caption already. In order to see the latest issue and contents of the article there are links provided (Home page, online access, and sometimes a link to the archive). There is also usually a link to the related Society web site if there is one. So providing captions for images in journal articles appears to be trivial. ---- Steve Quinn (talk) 07:27, 25 November 2010 (UTC)
    • It is debatable whether the edit to the Nature article (i.e. uploading a fair use image to avoid using a caption in the infobox) was an improvement. I would call it skating around the issue. I've already explained why caption use is not trivial: it temporally contextualises images of journal covers. This is precisely why captions are used in infoboxes for magazines, newspapers, and books (examples of each: Daily Mail, Scientific American, To Kill a Mockingbird). They are clearly not redundant because the infobox concerns the journal in general, whereas the caption is specific to the issue pictured. I'm not saying a caption must be used in every case, but at least give editors the option to decide whether it is desirable. Even if we were to somehow have up-to-date images for every single (surviving) journal then this still wouldn't be obvious to readers without a caption. Yes, we can force readers to follow the external links if they want to find out when the journal looked like this and whether it looks the same currently, but why? You still haven't provided a compelling reason for the complete exclusion of infobox captions, and I'm beginning to doubt that one exists. mgiganteus1 (talk) 15:48, 26 November 2010 (UTC)
      • Let's allow it. There are special cases where it can help, including cases where the image-taker should be mentioned, or the publication per se is not central in the image for some reason, if there were big format changes in the publication (e.g. from paper to online). Example: the article on L'Aérophile. I put a caption on the top image. I thought it was useful because the publication lasted many decades but the article emphasizes the early years, which may be rare for an article on a publication. A caption was allowed in the Infobox magazine template. (It was called a journal, but it wasn't academically peer-reviewed so we wouldn't use the same label now). An actual encylopedia or magazine article might well have a lead image with a caption. -- Econterms (talk) 17:59, 26 November 2010 (UTC)
  • I'm not so sure this is really necessary. The infobox is already packed with information as it is. Cases like L'Aérophile are rare. The Nature case was rather straightforward: the infobox should present current, up-to-date information on a journal and is therefore not the place to put historic covers, it should display a recent cover. Whether that cover is from May 2009 or April 2010 really is rather trivial. We are not showing all possible covers, just a sample to give an idea what a journal (nowadays) looks like. Historical stuff like the first Nature cover don't belong in the infobox, but should properly be placed in a section on the journal's history (and only if that is a significant history or otherwise notable cover). --Guillaume2303 (talk) 18:35, 26 November 2010 (UTC)
Allow it. Then when it is needed, it can be used. If it is not needed, it can be skipped. Allowing it does not mean it always or even usually has to be used, but it is available when there is a good use. LadyofShalott 18:23, 27 November 2010 (UTC)
  • It's kind of like the "peer-reviewed" field in the infobox, I don't see the utility of it, ever. (Nobody has yet managed to give me an example of a legitimate academic journal not using peer-review and I am not aware of a single infobox in which this field is used). So this would be yet-another field that would never be used. Could you give me an example of what you think would be a legitimate use of such a field in which relevant, non-trivial, encyclopedic info would be used? Up till now I have never seen captions with anything else than "cover of Journal of Foo, with sometimes the issue also mentioned. As I explained above, that's absolutely trivial. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 18:36, 27 November 2010 (UTC)

This edit and this discussion may be of interest to editors here. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 21:19, 6 December 2010 (UTC)

Journals redirecting to Lippincott Williams & Wilkins

The following redirect to Lippincott Williams & Wilkins

Should we keep them, or deleted them so they free up things? Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 08:39, 9 December 2010 (UTC)

  • All of the above appear to fit the accepted notability criteria for academic journals. So, I will be glad to wrtie the articles, and have the redirects go to these journals articles. I could probably do stub articles in one or two days, and have the redirects target the appropriate article. Then I could finish them within a week or two (hopefully). I am guessing this is probably the best way to go. ---- Steve Quinn (talk) 19:54, 9 December 2010 (UTC)
Well, I couldn't help myself. These are beginning as start-class articles :>). ---- Steve Quinn (talk) 01:30, 10 December 2010 (UTC)

Feedback

Could someone here respond to the WP:FEED request about a journal called Reproductive Health Matters (and the associated charity) at this discussion?

The usual thing to do is to reply at that page, and then leave a message for the (brand-new) editor (who may work for the group) on his/her talk page. Thanks, WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:59, 10 December 2010 (UTC)

Template:Science and technology in the United Kingdom

Rangoon11 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log) has created this template (Template edit historyhere). They then placed this template in approzimately 40 articles [36]. I notice that this template probably does not belong with a number of these articles. The articles I am talking about have a much broader scope than UK Science and technology. In any case, I will be reverting some of the edits in these articles. In particular the WikiProject Academic articles where this is not necessary, and probably does not belong. Furthermore, I am wondering if User:Rangoon11 should have sought consensus before placing this template in these articles. (I also started this discussion on WikiProjects Physics)---- Steve Quinn (talk) 04:24, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

After a second, and third look, this template is probably appropriate for most of the articles in which it is now placed. There is only a small number of articles (about ten) where it probably doesn't belong. Apparently I focused on the negative, and not the positive in this case. It is no big deal, and I am reverting the few edits, which I think are not appropriate. ---- Steve Quinn (talk) 04:51, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

Missing journals that don't look like they are missing

Because they have names that are common terms, the WP:JCW list them as "popular" journals, but not as "missing popular" journals. Citation count are in parens.

I made sure that the first 500 entries all had a note linking the journal, such as For the journal, see Urology (journal) on the urology article, or something equivalent (such as link to a disambiguation page containing a link to the journal).

In addition, if we create

Then we'll have articles on the 500 most cited journals (and some magazines) of Wikipedia. We can achieve this by the end of the month if we work at it. Only 21 journals, and we'll hit a pretty big milestone. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 04:26, 16 August 2010 (UTC)

C'mon people only ten to go! Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 04:39, 25 August 2010 (UTC)
Four left, and we've got a day! Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 17:40, 31 August 2010 (UTC)
Well a bit late, but I cleared the last one (Oncology Reports). Good job everyone! Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 08:03, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

BTW, we're now missing Bahá'í News. The reason it's so highly-cited looks like spam. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 15:26, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

AfD

The Journal of Indigenous Studies is at AfD: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Journal of Indigenous Studies. however, the article alerts are working again (hurray!!), so perhaps it is not necessary any more to post these notices on this talk page. If you want the updates to the article alerts listed on your watchlist, you have to put Wikipedia:WikiProject Academic Journals/Article alerts on it. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 19:37, 20 December 2010 (UTC)

...>...Done :>). ----Steve Quinn (talk) 20:14, 20 December 2010 (UTC)

Useful tool

On the project pace of WP France, I found a very useful too, that produces a watchlist for a complete project. This may interest some of the people here, too. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 00:01, 25 December 2010 (UTC)

I like this tool. ---- Steve Quinn (talk) 04:42, 7 January 2011 (UTC)

Language Teaching (journal) and Language Teaching

These two articles are about the same journal. I believe Language Teaching should be wiped and made into a redirect to Language education (you can see in the history it used to be a redirect), but as it actually has more content than Language Teaching (journal), the text should be moved there... I'm not sure how to fix it, so I would appreciate if someone had a look at it. --Kajervi (talk) 18:40, 7 January 2011 (UTC)

I can do a history merge and leave the more complete version at the better name, with both revision histories under that same name. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:45, 7 January 2011 (UTC)

 Done. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:52, 7 January 2011 (UTC)

Thank you! --Kajervi (talk) 19:46, 7 January 2011 (UTC)

Category names

There's a proposal here to rename the category "Dermatology journals" to "dermatologic journals" (which would have, I think, implications for the other category names in the "Category:Academic journals by subject area"). --Guillaume2303 (talk) 07:57, 8 January 2011 (UTC)

Another double article

Indian Journal of Sexually Transmitted Diseases and AIDS and Indian Journal of Sexually Transmitted Diseases are the same journal. Its actual, full title is "...and AIDS", so that's where it should end up. Again, the unnecessary article has better-looking content, so it could be preserved --Kajervi (talk) 09:16, 8 January 2011 (UTC)

Talk:Lists of journals#RFC

I create an RfC for the naming of several journals lists. Please comment there. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 01:31, 9 January 2011 (UTC)

Solving academic database mysteries

Today I decided to find out "what is the story" with the database entitled "Physics Abstracts". I have come across this when listing databases in the indexing part of academic articles. However, I could not find any descriptions on it. So I decided to take a different tack.

I started with World Cat, went through some college libraries, and then the Library of Congress. I discovered that Physics Abstracts (volume 1) was first published in 1898 [37]. It did go through some closely related name changes[38].

Presently, according to two sources, INSPEC Section A (Physics) is the successor to this database [39], [40]. It appears that the successors to Physics Abstracts became part of the Inspec database in 1980 [41]. I don't know when it became "Section A", yet. Anyway, I just wanted to let the project members, here, know that I am creating a redirect from Physics Abstracts to the Inspec article. I will probably do the same for the successor titles. Also, I might even write a section in the Inspec article.

Also, International Aerospace Abstracts is a print equivalent of CSA Illumina's Aerospace & High Technology Database [42]. (scroll down to "Print Equivalent") So, I will create a relevant section in the CSA article and a redirect for International Aerospace Abstracts, and Scientific and Technical Aerospace Reports ---- Steve Quinn (talk) 04:57, 7 January 2011 (UTC)

(A.K.A. Sherlock Holmes Jr.)
  • Apparently Inspec has several print counterparts [43], and it looks like Physics Abstracts, and Science Abstracts are two of these. The other two are Computer and control abstracts, and Electrical and electronics abstracts. ---- Steve Quinn (talk) 05:56, 9 January 2011 (UTC)
I have solved the riddle of "ISMEC Bulletin". I guess the best place to read about it is here (references are included). Appropriate redirects to this section, for the various titles, are to follow. ---- Steve Quinn (talk) 07:08, 10 January 2011 (UTC)
This might be of some interest (maybe) [44]. Perhaps, this is a good way to organize the CSA article. ---- Steve Quinn (talk) 08:06, 10 January 2011 (UTC)

Editor-in-chief

Just a note to bring to your attention that editor in chief has been moved to editor-in-chief, to avoid creating redirects in journal articles. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 13:11, 8 January 2011 (UTC)

  • I really can't recall seeing editor in chief spelled with hyphens. I don't think this is the most common spelling of the word. Check out the journal web sites which carry the title "editor in chief". I am inclined to have it moved back. Any other comments? ---- Steve Quinn (talk) 00:21, 10 January 2011 (UTC)
  • I wasn't enamored either, mainly because this project was never consulted and we link to this in thousands of articles. Apart from that, I have to admit that I used "editor in chief" only on WP and "editor-in-chief" off-WP (for instance, in email signatures of editorial decisions for the journal that I edit). --Guillaume2303 (talk) 08:59, 10 January 2011 (UTC)

Most of the text of this stub article was a direct copy of the journal's homepage. For the time being, I reverted to an earlier (even more rudimentary) version. Improvements are needed. -- Crowsnest (talk) 01:33, 11 January 2011 (UTC)

Copyvio?

Discussion at List of scientific journals in mathematics

CBM is trying to start a discussion at Talk:List of scientific journals in mathematics. It looks as if members of this project might have something to say. Hans Adler 21:32, 11 January 2011 (UTC)

The proposal is to redirect all the red-linked journal articles that are listed on this main space page, back to that very same page. It appears that the conversation has moved to the next section on the same page here. ---- Steve Quinn (talk) 02:41, 12 January 2011 (UTC)
The discussion is also about the list itself, independent of the color of the links. — Carl (CBM · talk) 12:37, 12 January 2011 (UTC)

Couple of active CfDs in need of more feedback

Category:Lists of academic journals (CFD) and Category:Academic journals by publisher (CFD) both have ongoing CfDs. Some feedback would be nice. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 23:37, 15 January 2011 (UTC)

Guidelines for Professional/Academic societies

Do we have any guidelines for notability for Academic societies? Queries have been raised about the notability of the Estonian Physical Society and WP:CLUB has been refered to. Is that the right place and if so could that be expanded a bit? (Sorry if this has been dealt with elsewhere - I have looked) (Msrasnw (talk) 10:21, 21 January 2011 (UTC))

This probably does need to be codified a bit more. Professional societies do have to meet the notability guidelines, but I would be surprised if national scientific societies for major sciences, such as physics, did not do so, although in some cases it may be difficult to find the sources which may not be in English. --Bduke (Discussion) 10:42, 21 January 2011 (UTC)

IGI Global

This appears to be a vanity academic publisher, except they work via outrageous pricing rather than chargin authors. I became aware of them when I received the usual book solicitation spam from them.

The article gives the impression that this is a proper publisher, but I could not find the necessary reliable sources for fixing the problem. (Unreliable sources were removed by User:IGI Global.)

Does anyone know how to find reliable sources about such publishers? They seem to be quite good at optimising for Google: The first page of hits for "IGI Global spam" goes mostly to their domain. Hans Adler 12:21, 22 January 2011 (UTC)

Other perspectives

The discussion has picked up over at Talk:List of mathematics journals#AustMS journal rankings. I would like more input from other editors for this discussion. Also, more discussion is likely to take place at Talk:List of mathematics journals#Problems remain ---- Steve Quinn (talk) 05:00, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

Help/Feedback

Me and some other person are revert warring of whether or not to place {{citation needed}} tags next to redlinks of such as Bulletin of the Astronomical Society of India in list of astronomy journals. These can all be confirmed by simple google search, and no one could reasonably dispute there existence. Placing the links means we create an asymmetry of treatment between journals which have articles and journals which don't yet have articles, or turn the list into a repository of links. Neither of which I think are viable options (WP:DIRECTORY). Any thoughts? Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 06:28, 21 January 2011 (UTC)

  • Well, I guess you know my position: remove the redlinks until an article has been created... Apart from that, I agree that it would be "unequal treatment" to put references with the redlinks. Too bad we have no "article needed" tag... :-) --Guillaume2303 (talk) 07:16, 21 January 2011 (UTC)
    • We do have an article needed tag: that's what a redlink is. So we shouldn't make redlinks unless there's good reason to believe that their subjects warrant articles. But for lists like this, as you say, the simpler policy is to just say no to redlinks. —David Eppstein (talk) 07:27, 21 January 2011 (UTC)
  • I think redlinks in journal lists should normally be removed, but there are some exceptions. The chemistry list, for example, lists at the top of the article, the top 20 journals according to different criteria. All are, of course, very important journals and they certainly should have articles, but sadly some do not. I will try to write some of them, but I am rather busy with other stuff right now. --Bduke (Discussion) 08:27, 21 January 2011 (UTC)
  • Well, it seems easy enough to just do one of two options. Either remove the unsourced journals from the list temporarily, until an article is created, or add a citation for the claims which have no other reliable source within Wikipedia. Wikipedia policy does call for any substantive claims in all articles—including "List of..." articles—to be verifiably sourced per WP:V, a core wiki-policy. Of course, it might also be advisable to keep the old list of redlinks on a Talk page for the List article, or perhaps on a page at the relevant WikiProject, assuming the project wants to actively work to get more articles or more sources. N2e (talk) 14:23, 21 January 2011 (UTC)

People who are dealing with this issue regularly really need to go read WP:LSC. The "no redlinks" idea is not policy. Editors at a page may freely choose to set such a standard in any given list (and it would be highly appropriate for, say, "List of people from England"), but there is no actual rule requiring this standard for any specific list. In fact, there are rules explicitly authorizing the opposite standard. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:36, 27 January 2011 (UTC)

  • Personally, I wouldn't mind if there were no redlinks. I agree that an article merits listing, if it has an article on Wikipedia. But, that is not likely to happen. So, the second best option is to have some red links that at least tend toward notability. And (per Headbomb) this is easy enough to determine with a google search. Therefore, I don't see a need for citations for redlinked articles, in a situation such as this. I mean these should already tend toward notability to be in the list - so no citations are necessary. Editors do comb through these lists from time to time, and the non-notable red-links are removed. Hence, once again, adding citations appears to be redundant.
It may also be a matter of WP:UNDUE. In other words, this reminds me of the guideline that suggests not placing national flags in the infobox, becuase this draws attention that is out of proportion for the journal article - MOS:FLAG. ---- Steve Quinn (talk) 19:22, 27 January 2011 (UTC)
  • That (LSC) is an interesting link. It says, for example: '"Creation guide" lists—lists devoted to a large number of redlinked (unwritten) articles—don't belong in the main namespace' and 'Every entry meets the notability criteria for its own non-redirect article in the English Wikipedia. Red-linked entries are acceptable if the entry is verifiably a member of the listed group, and it is reasonable to expect an article could be forthcoming in the future.' If one looks at List of mathematics journals and the discussion on the talk page there, that list consists of many redlinks accompanied by external links to their homepages. It's been argued that those ELs could be converted into references (countering the argument that we should not have in-text ELs), but all they do is confirm that the journal exists, not that it is notable, which is required for establishing that "it is reasonable to expect an article could be forthcoming in the future". --Guillaume2303 (talk) 09:29, 28 January 2011 (UTC)
WP:LSC certainly provides guidance as to which journals get listed, and which do not, in a "List of journals ..." article. But which journals ought to be listed does not override the core Wikipedia policy that all claims in Wikipedia ought to be verifiable, and if challenged, then within some reasonable time, an inline citation ought to be provided to make the claim verifiable. Cheers. N2e (talk) 20:33, 9 February 2011 (UTC)

File:Publications by year of establishement.png

See also: User:Headbomb/Publications by year
Useful? Who knows? Interesting? I think so.

Made this for kicks and giggles. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 07:04, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

Wonderful! I always wanted this data to go in this direction. I will use this immediately to compare to lanuching of aeronautical publications, and show when there's a burst of them relative to ongoing growth in journals overall. Thank you!! -- Econterms (talk) 18:25, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

Bad redirects

Medical journal and Healthcare journal both redirect to Public health journal. Problem: Public health is not the same as medicine or healthcare. Is there an actual article on medical journals somewhere? WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:23, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

  • I made those redirects, but there is indeed a problem here. Originally, that article was called "medical journal", but then someone came by who complained that nursing journals were being linked to it and that nursing was not part of medicine. As a compromise, the article was moved to "healthcare journal". Then someone else came around complaining that "public health" is not included in healtcare, so I moved it to "healthcare journal" and adapted the lead to be more inclusive. The problem is that I don't see a need at all for separate articles for "healtcare", "public health", "medical", or "nursing" journals. There probably aren't even any RS that make this distinction. In fact, some to think of it, perhaps the best solution would be to merge this article (and then also scientific journal) into academic journal, which does cover all of them. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 22:27, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

I would think that medical journals are distinct enough to have their own article. Perhaps we could move the current article there and have healthcare, nursing, and public health journals link directly to the generic academic journal? razorbelle (talk) 22:44, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

Nursing isn't really separate from "medicine". It's an artificial distinction that has more to do with historical politics than anything else. Nominally, nurses have a different conception of their relationship with the patient ('we'll work together to find a solution for you' vs 'you will follow my orders, because I'm the Doctor and I Said So'). The same can be said about "public health": it's just a different conception of the patient (from 'one individual human body' to 'society as a whole').
I don't mind having a separate article on the subject of academic journals on health-related subjects. Is there the possibility of unique content? Do sources compare, for example, the growth in number of journals or profitability in 'medicine' vs 'physics' vs 'humanities' journals? (I keep thinking that surely, somewhere, there must be publications that discuss the industry itself.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:47, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

Mechademia

Perhaps some editors experienced with journals about popular culture could have a look at this article. Thanks! --Guillaume2303 (talk) 12:36, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

Epilepsy Currents

A relatively new editor is changing this article claiming that the journal has a new publisher. However, none of the available sources confirm this and the editor does not provide any sources. In addition, he inserts POV language (see article history and current version). I have not re-reverted this morning in order not to violate 3RR, but would appreciate if another editor could have a look and see whether I am being unreasonable. For all I know the editor is correct and has some inside info, but as long as there are no sources, I think the article should not mention this putative change in publishers. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 07:17, 7 March 2011 (UTC)

With regard to the change in publisher only: for the 2011 volume the journal transferred from Wiley-Blackwell to self-publication through the American Epilepsy Society. The journal is listed as one of the "cessations transfer away" titles on the 2011 Wiley-Blackwell journal price list, available here. --AntonV (talk) 12:57, 7 March 2011 (UTC)

Citation templates now support more identifiers

Recent changes were made to citations templates (such as {{citation}}, {{cite journal}}, {{cite web}}...). In addition to what was previously supported (bibcode, doi, jstor, isbn, ...), templates now support arXiv, ASIN, JFM, LCCN, MR, OL, OSTI, RFC, SSRN and Zbl. Before, you needed to place |id={{arxiv|0123.4567}} (or worse |url=http://arxiv.org/abs/0123.4567), now you can simply use |arxiv=0123.4567, likewise for |id={{JSTOR|0123456789}} and |url=http://www.jstor.org/stable/0123456789 → |jstor=0123456789.

The full list of supported identifiers is given here (with dummy values):


  • {{cite journal |author=John Smith |year=2000 |title=How to Put Things into Other Things |journal=Journal of Foobar |volume=1 |issue=2 |pages=3–4 |arxiv=0123456789 |asin=0123456789 |bibcode=0123456789 |doi=0123456789 |jfm=0123456789 |jstor=0123456789 |lccn=0123456789 |isbn=0123456789 |issn=0123456789 |mr=0123456789 |oclc=0123456789 |ol=0123456789 |osti=0123456789 |rfc=0123456789 |pmc=0123456789 |pmid=0123456789 |ssrn=0123456789 |zbl=0123456789 |id={{para|id|____}} }}


Obviously not all citations needs all parameters, but this streamlines the most popular ones and gives both better metadata and better appearances when printed. 10:49, 8 March 2011 (UTC)

Birkhäuser

May be a little off-topic here, but I don't know where else to ask. Can someone figure out what's the deal with Birkhäuser Verlag vs. the Springer math & science book series, which is still published under that imprint? We might need to create a dab for Birkhäuser. Tijfo098 (talk) 06:52, 17 April 2011 (UTC)

  • Strange. I had a look at the BV article (which is somewhat spammy) and the homepage of BV with their history. It sounds to me like Birkhäuser was acquired at some point by Springer, but that at some point part of that was split off again, with Springer keeping the sciences division and BV keeping architecture and related stuff. Perhaps a Google News search could lead to some press releases on this, usually publishers give those out with major acquisitions/spin-offs. And although not independent, that might lead us to the facts about this issue. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 09:50, 17 April 2011 (UTC)

Sino-Platonic Papers

I am in disagreement with some editors here about the meaning of "notability" and the insertion of claims about numbers of page views to a web site. I'd appreciate any opinions of other editors here. Please let me know if you think I'm being to harsh here. I would like to clarify that I have currently no intention to PROD this article or take it to AfD, but I do think that a "notability tag" is appropriate (until shown otherwise, of course). Thanks. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 09:47, 17 April 2011 (UTC)

Listing databases for journal articles

Some journal articles list <-- databases?--> that are completely trivial. With this I mean indexes like Ulrich's, Google Scholar, DOAJ, JournalSeek and such, which strive for completeness and are therefore not selective at all. This means that almost any journal will generally be included in them. We don't mention that websites can be found on Google either, so why include these? --Guillaume2303 (talk) 22:35, 23 January 2011 (UTC)

Because they are part of the indexing information? Being listed in Ulrich's doesn't make you special, agreed, and wouldn't go very far in establishing notability, but I don't see why there is a need to exclude Ulrich from being mentioned in our articles. We should strive to be complete about the information of a journal (within reason of course, including the entire editorial boards would be ridiculous, although the entire history of editor in chiefs would be fine). And since Ulrich is a good and reputable place to go to for indexing information, I don't see why we should forbid its mention in our articles. Likewise for the other databases. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 08:57, 27 January 2011 (UTC)
Note: I'm not speaking of "repackings" of databases, such as Science Citation Index vs Science Citation Index Expanded. That's just duplicate information. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 08:58, 27 January 2011 (UTC)
  • yes, those "repackagings" are even more trivial, of course (as are different portals: no need to list SciSearch if SCI is already listed). My problem is more with stuff like Google Scholar. For other subjects, we'd never dream of mentioning "can be found on Google". If some academic journal is not on GS, that would be worth mentioning... Same for the other mentioned databases. Not only does it not do anything to establish notability, I think that this trivial info detracts from what is really substantial. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 10:03, 27 January 2011 (UTC)
  • I think that when a journal or Thomson Reuter's Master List lists both Science Citation Index and Science Citation Index Expanded (also known as Sci Search), then both can be listed in our journal article. I have often thought that there must be a reason for listing both. According to the Dialog Bluesheets description "SciSearch contains all of the records published in the Science Citation Index, plus additional records in engineering technology, physical sciences, agriculture, biology, environmental sciences, clinical medicine, and the life sciences. (And) SciSearch is distinguished by many important and unique characteristics. "
I don't see this as duplicate information. Otherwise, why does a journal or the TR "Master LIst", bother listing both Science Citation Index and Science Citation Index Expanded. Also, I usually list Science Citation Index Expanded as SciSearch in the journal articles. Furthermore, I don't think it is up to us to leave it out - it is part of the information given - especially if listed in the Master Journal List. ---- Steve Quinn (talk) 13:22, 27 January 2011 (UTC)
  • Another reason for listing both is that "Expanded" is much larger.
  • Science Citation Index --- 3,700 scientific and technical journals across 100 disciplines -- backfiles to 1991 or 1980.
Further question -- Perhaps there has been some confusion when substituting "Expanded" with "SciSearch"? However, it seems that when both Science Citation Index and Science Citation Index Expanded were listed, the "Expanded" was removed from the journal articles. ---- Steve Quinn (talk) 13:53, 27 January 2011 (UTC)
I just noticed something else --- perhaps SciSearch is a web portal for both Science Citation Index and Science Citation Index Expanded.
Then, maybe, the distinction should be made between Science Citation Index and Science Citation Index Expanded, and not SciSearch. ---- Steve Quinn (talk) 14:09, 27 January 2011 (UTC)
  • I think that indeed the major distinction is between SCI and SCI-E. There is not much difference between the two, except that the latter is much larger. The reason to remove SCI-E if SCI is in an article simply is that SCI-E = SCI + other journal, meaning that any journal in the SCI is automatically also in the SCI-E, but not the other way around. Hope my hasty "math" is clear... SciSearch, as far as I know, is just a different web portal to the SCI, like the Web of Science. For WoS the same thing applies, if a journal is in the SCI-E then it is on WoS. WoS is a web portal to the SCI-E, Social Sciences Citation Index, Arts and Humanities Citation Index, and their equivalents editions of the Conference Proceedings Citation Indexes. WoS is part of Web of Knowledge, which also contains some other databases (including PubMed), so listing WoS or WoK is not unambiguous and it is much better to list the particular database in which a journal is indexed. Once those databases are listed, WoK or WoS are superfluous, because implicit. That, say, the SCI can be accessed through WoS/WoK is info that belongs in the articles on those databases/portals, not in all the different journal articles (just as who publishes which database belongs in the article on the database, not the journal article). IMHO... :-) As for SciSearch, according to Thompson/ISI its the database version of the SCI-E. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 15:16, 27 January 2011 (UTC)
  • Before this thread I tried to point out that when Science Citation Index and Science Citation Index Expanded ar both listed, it was "Expanded" that would get removed. If one was going to be removed, then maybe the other way around would have been better. It seems that you now see my point.
Pertaining to SciSearch I came to the same conclusion, until I saw this today - Science Citation Index - "Online via distribution partners" (which are:) "SciSearch via DIALOG, DIMDI, and STN: Updated weekly, backfiles to 1974" (and) "SciSearch via DataStar: Updated weekly, backfiles to 1980". ---- Steve Quinn (talk) 19:42, 27 January 2011 (UTC)
In other words, SciSearch now appears to be an access point for both Science Citation Index and Science Citation Index Expanded. ---- Steve Quinn (talk) 19:46, 27 January 2011 (UTC)

Sorry to resurrect an old discussion, but I think this specific thing might best be approached by a "hierarchy" similar to that established by Wikipedia:Manual of Style (record charts) for use of record chart. So you can say "if you have Database A, don't use B or C" and have an easy reference. Circéus (talk) 00:44, 3 May 2011 (UTC)

Including historical lists of impact factors in journal articles

There is a discussion going on at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Academic Journals/Writing guide that might interest some other people here. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 09:06, 30 April 2011 (UTC)

Proceedings of the IMechE

I've put together entries for two of the journals of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers: User:AntonV/Proceedings_of_the_Institution_of_Mechanical_Engineers,_Part_A:_Journal_of_Power_and_Energy and User:AntonV/Proceedings_of_the_Institution_of_Mechanical_Engineers,_Part_B:_Journal_of_Engineering_Manufacture. These are two of sixteen journals published as part of the IMechE's Proceedings. All the journals cover different topics and are entirely discrete, individual titles. I'd like to know whether people feel that the best way to cover the journals on Wikipedia is to set them up as I have done. Any suggestions welcome, thanks.AntonV (talk) 16:33, 24 May 2011 (UTC)

  • People have dealt with cases like this in different ways. There are the different sections of the Journal of Physics, for example, but also the American Journal of Medical Genetics. Most of the times, there is not that much that can be said about a journal anyway, so personally I prefer the latter option. It will make for a much more substantial article. Things like "scope" and "impact" can be handled in different sections and the different aspects of the different sections can easily be handled there. There are other examples (can't find one right now, but they're there :-) where people have even included multiple infoboxes for different sections into one article. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 17:34, 24 May 2011 (UTC)
  • Personally, I prefer one article per major section like Journal of Physics. However, sometimes there's not a lot to say about them, so a combined article like Nuclear Physics (journal) cover both Nuclear Physics A and B makes more sense. Note that there's a sort of middle ground between the two. If you got a 16-part journal, then this this is most likely a journal series like Physical Review, where each part is essentially completely disconnected with the other (aka PIME A seems to be distinctly notable from PIME B, etc.). Currently Physical Review has an "overview" article, with a table giving the basic info of the journals. But the individual parts also have their own article (bare in mind that for many individual parts, the articles haven't been written yet, so they redirect to the overview article in the meantime). Just pick what you think is best. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 08:47, 6 June 2011 (UTC)
    • Thanks very much to you both. I've decided to follow the Physical Review model, as a single page would, I think, have been unmanageabe, given that the 16 journals are all very different. The publication history of the journals is also quite complex, something that an overview page can cover in due course - for the time being, I've left it relatively short. I've drafted the following pages: overview page and individual pages for Parts A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J and K. I'll work through the last few and add categories and journal covers when they go onto the mainspace. AntonV (talk) 16:00, 9 June 2011 (UTC)
    • And the last few are now also done: L, M, N, O and P. AntonV (talk) 17:07, 9 June 2011 (UTC)

2010 Impact Factor release

As in previous years, the 2010 Impact Factors are due to be released towards the end of June (or early July). I was wondering - how are journal pages updated to reflect the new IFs? Is there a bot that can do that automatically? Or is it a manual task, where each journal is updated with the latest information one by one? If the data were available in spreadsheet format, would it then be possible to do a batch update? Seems fairly arduous if it's all done manually!AntonV (talk) 17:05, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

  • Up till now, this has been done manually. I don't think the data are available in spreadsheet form (and even then, there would certainly be problems with journal titles, as ISI uses its own idiosyncratic abbreviations), so I don't think that a bot could do this faster... :-( --Guillaume2303 (talk) 17:12, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

subpages

I found some (missing?) subpages of this project and categorized them under Category:Missing encyclopedic articles (science) and Category:Missing encyclopedic articles (academic journals). Cheers, —Ruud 20:20, 15 June 2011 (UTC)

Miscellany for deletion

I have nominated a project page for deletion, as it has not been used since 2007 and most info on it is stale by now. The discussion is here: Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:WikiProject Academic Journals/List of missing journals/Queue. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 16:44, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

COI editors

Two COI editors are editing Volume! The French journal of popular music studies and Baltzer Science Publishers. Issues range from POV to OR and SYNTH (and in the latter case also serious stylistic/WP:MOS problems). I have given up, but perhaps somebody else here would like a go at it. Note that User:Laurenzbaltzer mainly uses email, not talk pages (despite having been told that such is the more appropriate thing to do). --Guillaume2303 (talk) 13:04, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

Also this is a French publication, and it is in the French language. It may not belong on the English Wikipedia. Is anyone familiar with the guideline pertaining to this? Anyway, based on the problems with this article noted by Guillaume2303, and the fact that it is in French (not English) I am probably going to PROD it. Also, I am not seeing signifigant notice by other sources, and do not this journal indexed in the major databases. Also, based on the edit history it will probably end up being listed at AfD. ---- Steve Quinn (talk) 14:21, 6 July 2011 (UTC)
  • Well, as far as I know, all subjects are eligible for WP, regardless of the language they are published in or the language of the sources. We have, for example, articles on Le Monde (and similar for stuff from other countries). As far as I understand, if something is locally notable, it is notable enough for WP (the en.WP kind of being seen as the international WP). So it being in French and all sources being in French wouldn't seem to exclude it as far as I know. Of course, there is the matter that there are not many (or none at all?) independent sources, which is much more damning. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 14:35, 6 July 2011 (UTC)
I've had a look at the second, and have left a comment on the article's talk page. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:07, 6 July 2011 (UTC)
First, I was discussing the journal. I didn't notice that Baltzer Science Publishers was also part of this discussion. Second, yes the fact that the journal is a French publication would actually make no difference in regards to having an article. I got confused for a moment, and I didn't mean to hit on that point so strongly. Third, is notability an issue for this journal article? If I have time I will look into the company. Finally, there is something that can be done about inappropriate COI editing and removing appropriate maintenance tags without resolving the issues. ---- Steve Quinn (talk) 04:06, 7 July 2011 (UTC)
I proposed the journal "Volume!" for deletion. ---- Steve Quinn (talk) 05:51, 11 July 2011 (UTC)

WP:JCW updated!

I've been working with JLaTondre this past month so we get a bot doing the updates (JL-Bot) after over a year of nothing. Some new features were added, and the but could still use some tweaks here and there, but for the most part it should work fine.

Discussion is going on at

And there's a BRFA at

Make sure to shower JLaTondre with WikiLove and barnstars

Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 05:56, 10 July 2011 (UTC)

Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Books#Publishers cited by Wikipedia

A discussion about building a compilation of publishers cited on Wikipedia is going on at WikiProject Books. Since we have experience with this, I figured I'd let you know and ask for your participation in this discussion. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 20:58, 14 July 2011 (UTC)

All pre-1923 papers (aka public domain ones) from Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society are now available from torrents (Pirate Bay)

This story will probably hit the news big time. We'll probably need to update our article on Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, and follow what goes on at Wikisource. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 18:05, 21 July 2011 (UTC)

AfD

There is a current AfD, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers. To avoid charges of canvassing, I will avoid stating my opinion here. DGG ( talk ) 04:18, 23 July 2011 (UTC)

It is worth pointing out, however, that the AfD has been named by the nominator as a test case, with implications for many other articles. -- 202.124.72.35 (talk) 12:03, 23 July 2011 (UTC)
It is hard to know what is meant by "implications for many other articles". As far as I know, an AfD does not set precedence and the responses and results don't become the law of the land. And, in this case the land is Wikipedia. Steve Quinn (talk) 23:18, 23 July 2011 (UTC)

Nova Publishers

Some extra eyes here would be welcome. Thanks! --Guillaume2303 (talk) 20:19, 24 July 2011 (UTC)

First please see my latest edits in the edit history and on the article talk page.
Second, is this a reputable publisher? I refer to this in the Wikipedia article: "The publisher has been criticized for republishing public domain material in their journals (often chapters taken from early 20th century non-scholarly books) and for so-called "cross publication," where the same paper is republished in more than one collection" ---- Steve Quinn (talk) 03:28, 25 July 2011 (UTC)
Also, I am seriously beginning to think that this article, and this publisher does not merit inclusion. I am not finding anything that says there is any kind of vetting process for chapters of books, or journals. There is of course this one article [48] which indicates that the publisher's practices seem to be deceptive, and the quality of the journals poor. The publisher seems to be taking advantage of the avalanche of information available via the web, without much discrimination. Also, I have read a couple of discussion threads where graduate students are solicited to write a chapter for an upcoming book. The solicited chapters gets printed but there does not seem to be an actual review process. And so on... Steve Quinn (talk) 04:32, 25 July 2011 (UTC)
  • It looks like this publisher is perhaps notable because of the negative publicity they got. It certainly is one on the bottom rungs of the ladder... And they spam a lot, I get invitations to wirte chapters or edit books every couple of weeks from them. Thanks for your edits, I was already at 2 reverts... --Guillaume2303 (talk) 07:55, 25 July 2011 (UTC)

Subtitles and section titles guidelines

I've recently updated our writing guidelines for titles, however we don't really have strong guidance on this. So I propose we clarify things a bit. In a nutshell, here's what we currently recommend:

  • Location: The article should be located at the official full name of the journal (Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, not PNAS) unless it is universally known in an abbreviated form (FASEB Journal, not Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology Journal).
    • The: If the "The" is part of the official full name, the article should be located at that name (American Journal of Physics, not The American Journal of Physics, but The American Journal of Medicine, not American Journal of Medicine).
    • Subtitle: Subtitles are not part of the title. For example, use European Journal of Physics, and not European Journal of Physics: A Journal of the European Physical Society.
  • Capitalization: Use title case (American Journal of Physics, not American journal of physics).

And here's what I think we should do (with the usual provisions for the "the" and capitalization).

  • No subtitles in neither page titles, nor prose, aka
    • Neuropsychopharmacology, not Neuropsychopharmacology : Official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology
    • European Journal of Physics, not European Journal of Physics: A Journal of the European Physical Society
    • Etc..
  • Explicit subsection titles for "unlettered/unnumbered" subsections, aka
    • Journal of Physics: Conference Series, not Journal of Physics CS
    • Etc...
  • No explicit subsection titles for "lettered/numbered" subsections, in the page titles, but explicit them in the body text, aka
    • Journal of Physics B for article title, but Journal of Physics B: Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics in prose (first mention).
    • Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part A for article title, but Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part A: Journal of Power and Energy in prose (first mention)
    • Etc...

The main reason for this is that as far as search terms are concerned, the subtitles, or lettered subsection titles are usually completely ignored. Scientists will speak of Journal of Physics B or JPB or J. Phys. B., but no one will ever ask anyone "Hey how about that article published in Journal of Physics B: Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics." Likewise, for citations (both on Wikipedia and in journal articles), subtitles are ignored. So someone not familiar with "Journal of Physics B will search for "Journal of Physics B", or "J. Phys. B." and will never encounter J. Phys. B: Atom. Mol. Opt. Phys., and only very rarely the full Journal of Physics B: Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics. So there's a bit of WP:COMMONNAME in this proposal.

There's also the fact that this is the de facto convention for our articles, so making it de jure would let us hammer the odd-case out. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 20:24, 13 July 2011 (UTC)

  • Very sensible proposal and I strongly support it. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 09:11, 14 July 2011 (UTC)
  • I also think this is a good idea. One thing to note regarding the Proceedings of the IMechE - these are generally known by their subtitles rather than by their numbered subsections; so, as far as I'm aware, people usually refer to the "Journal of Power and Energy" rather than "Proceedings of the IMeche A" or similar. AntonV (talk) 16:01, 21 July 2011 (UTC)

Cleanup

Alright then our cleanup lists looks a bit like

  1. Abbia: Cameroon Cultural Review
  2. Acta Classica : Verhandelinge van die Klassieke Vereniging van Suid-Afrika
  3. Acta Zoologica: Morphology and Evolution
  4. Africa & Asia: Göteborg Working Papers on Asian and African Languages and Literatures
  5. Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research
  6. AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples
  7. AMBIO: A Journal of the Human Environment
  8. Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal
  9. Apeiron: A Journal for Ancient Philosophy and Science
  10. Archives: The International Journal of Medicine
  11. Athletic Insight: The Online Journal of Sport Psychology
  12. Atlanta History: A Journal of Georgia and the South
  13. Best Practice & Research: Clinical Rheumatology
  14. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition
  15. Bookbird: A Journal of International Children's Literature
  16. Chemistry: A European Journal
  17. China: An International Journal
  18. Chroma: A Queer Literary Journal
  19. Clinical Nurse Specialist: The Journal for Advanced Nursing Practice
  20. Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art
  21. Confluence: The Journal of Graduate Liberal Studies
  22. Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research
  23. COPD: Journal of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease
  24. Debatte: Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe
  25. Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought
  26. Diwa: Studies in Philosophy and Theology
  27. Dutch Crossing: Journal of Low Countries Studies
  28. Encounter: Education for Meaning and Social Justice
  29. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy
  30. ESAIM: Control, Optimisation and Calculus of Variations
  31. Fleet Street Reports: Cases on Intellectual Property Law
  32. Gamut: Journal of the Georgia Association of Music Theorists
  33. Gamut: The Journal of the Music Theory Society of the Mid-Atlantic
  34. Global Governance: A Review of Multilateralism and International Organizations
  35. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies
  36. Humana.Mente – Journal of Philosophical Studies
  37. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research
  38. Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy
  39. I/S: A Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society
  40. ICSID Review: Foreign Investment Law Journal
  41. Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy
  42. Intégral: The Journal of Applied Musical Thought
  43. IRB: Ethics & Human Research
  44. Izvestiya: Mathematics
  45. JGE: The Journal of General Education
  46. JOT: Journal of Object Technology
  47. Journal of Materials Science: Materials in Electronics
  48. Journal of Materials Science: Materials in Medicine
  49. Journal of Molecular Structure: THEOCHEM
  50. Journal of Polymer Science Part A: Polymer Chemistry
  51. Journal of Polymer Science Part B: Polymer Physics
  52. Journal of Software Maintenance and Evolution: Research and Practice
  53. Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment
  54. Journal of the European Optical Society: Rapid Publications
  55. Kailash: A Journal of Himalayan Studies
  56. Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy
  57. Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas
  58. Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics
  59. Logos: A Journal of Modern Society and Culture
  60. Luminescence: The Journal of Biological and Chemical Luminescence
  61. Management Science: A Journal of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences
  62. MCN: The American Journal of Maternal/Child Nursing
  63. Millennium: Journal of International Studies
  64. Mobilization: The International Quarterly Review of Social Movement Research
  65. Network: Computation In Neural Systems
  66. News from Nowhere: Journal of the Oxford English Faculty Opposition
  67. Operations Research: A Journal of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences
  68. Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies
  69. Pflügers Archiv: European Journal of Physiology
  70. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Physical, Mathematical and Engineering Sciences
  71. Philotheos: International Journal for Philosophy and Theology
  72. Photonics and Nanostructures: Fundamentals and Applications
  73. Presence: Teleoperators & Virtual Environments
  74. Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part A: Journal of Power and Energy
  75. Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part B: Journal of Engineering Manufacture
  76. Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part C: Journal of Mechanical Engineering Science
  77. Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part D: Journal of Automobile Engineering
  78. Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part E: Journal of Process Mechanical Engineering
  79. Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part F: Journal of Rail and Rapid Transit
  80. Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part G: Journal of Aerospace Engineering
  81. Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part H: Journal of Engineering in Medicine
  82. Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part I: Journal of Systems and Control Engineering
  83. Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part J: Journal of Engineering Tribology
  84. Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part K: Journal of Multi-body Dynamics
  85. Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part L: Journal of Materials: Design and Applications
  86. Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part M: Journal of Engineering for the Maritime Environment
  87. Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part N: Journal of Nanoengineering and Nanosystems
  88. Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part O: Journal of Risk and Reliability
  89. Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part P: Journal of Sports Engineering and Technology
  90. Professional Psychology: Research and Practice
  91. Program: Electronic Library and Information Systems
  92. Psychosis: Psychological, Social and Integrative Approaches (journal)
  93. QJM: An International Journal of Medicine
  94. Questions: Philosophy for Young People
  95. SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500-1900
  96. Sexologies: European Journal of Sexual Health (Revue Européenne de Santé Sexuelle)
  97. Sexual Abuse: A Journal of Research and Treatment
  98. Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity: The Journal of Treatment and Prevention
  99. SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies
  100. Stirrings Still: The International Journal of Existential Literature
  101. Structure and Dynamics: eJournal of the Anthropological and Related Sciences
  102. Supply Chain Management: an International Journal
  103. Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology
  104. The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus
  105. The Patient: Patient-Centered Outcomes Research
  106. The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs
  107. Theoria: Historical Aspects of Music Theory
  108. Thought: Fordham University Quarterly
  109. Thymos: Journal of Boyhood Studies
  110. Topic: The Washington and Jefferson College Review
  111. Velox: Critical Approaches to Contemporary Film
  112. Word Ways: The Journal of Recreational Linguistics
  113. Zygon: Journal of Religion & Science

One should exercise care when moving these pages, as those may be the legitimate title. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 16:45, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

Asian Journal of Environment and Disaster Management

This journal is currently at AfD. The article creator has posted a notice on my talk page that the journal is indexed in EBSCOHost. I'd be curious to hear whether people here think that is sufficient for notability. You can respond here or at the AfD, of course. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 12:37, 2 August 2011 (UTC)

That should probably be mentioned on the AFD page. I'm assuming inclusion in EBSCO has been verified, and that EBSCO's a selective database? Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 13:53, 2 August 2011 (UTC)
  • No link was given and I haven't had time to verify this. I also don't know whether this is a selective database. Hence the question here before mentioning this in the AfD. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 14:19, 2 August 2011 (UTC)

Editorial board listings, again

There is a discussion at Talk:The Nautilus (journal) about whether or not editorial board members should be listed in journal articles. Other opinions of editors here are welcome. It would be good if we can get a consensus on this issue and then add it to the journal writing guide, so that we're done with this once and for all. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 19:15, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

I have somewhat mixed feelings about this issue. Some information about the members of the editorial board may be useful if the board includes some notable scholars - such info, in and of itself, provides a degree of indication of notability and stature of the journal. On the other hand, many journals have rather large editorial boards, and including them would make the entry look too much like some sort of a directory listing. My feeling is that if the editorial board is rather small (say around 4-6 people), it may be OK to include a listing of the entire board in the article about the journal. For anything bigger than that (certainly for boards with 10 or more members), I think that listing the entire board would not be advisable, and it is better to mention a few individual notable members of the board in the prose portion of the article, rather than in a list. Nsk92 (talk) 01:59, 3 May 2011 (UTC)
  • I think that would make this a bit capricious and difficult to define when to include or not to include. My own feeling is to include them only if they are notable and there are sources describing that they actually did something for the journal. (Or sometimes against it: the case a few years agp where some editorial boards of Elsevier journals resigned to start up competing journals). With 99% of journals, ed. board members only lend their names to the masthead, but don't actually do much (except, perhaps, act sometimes as a reviewer, but hundreds of other people will do that, too). The other way around makes some more sense: mentioning in a bio that someone is on a board, because that is a sign that at least the editor of that journal thinks this person is important in the field. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 05:50, 3 May 2011 (UTC)
  • I concur with User:Guillaume2303. Information must be backed up by reliable, secondary sources. Also, nobody cares about the editorial boards of academic journals. I can say that because no secondary sources exist that would allow the creation of an article on such boards. Therefore the whole topic is not notable. Abductive (reasoning) 10:14, 3 May 2011 (UTC)
  • Perhaps in other disciplines things are different, but in my own discipline, mathematics, editorial board members do much more than "lend their names to the masthead". They actually do the substantive work of running the journal: choose and contact reviewers for quick preliminary opinions about a paper; if in-depth reviewing is recommended, choose and contact the referee(s) for the substantive in-depth review; communicate with those referees as well as the authors regarding various revisions that the referees request, then, depending on the specific practices of the journal, either make the actual decision regarding the paper or forward their recommendation to the chief editor and/or the entire board for the final decision. In most math journals the chief editor is mainly responsible for two things: deciding to which specific member of the editorial board to assign a specific paper for handling; and overseeing the production logistics of the journal. As an editorial board member myself, I can tell you that all this requires quite a bit of work which is substantive and not merely symbolic. Nsk92 (talk) 10:55, 3 May 2011 (UTC)
  • That sounds like in math board members function like associate editors in my area. And, in fact, although they do indeed do a lot of work, we don't list those either... --Guillaume2303 (talk) 11:05, 3 May 2011 (UTC)
  • In math, the prevailing model is that there is an editor-in-chief (sometimes 1-2 of them), and the editorial board, whose members are not subdivided into further categories. In most math journals the handling editor for a paper typically makes the actual decision on whether to accept it or reject it; for a smaller number of journals (but still a significant fraction of the total), such decision is made by the editor(s)-in-chief or the entire board after the handling editor forwards his/her recommendation together with the referee report(s). Nsk92 (talk) 11:36, 3 May 2011 (UTC)
  • Yes, that's exactly the same for AEs in my field. The journal of which I am EIC (Genes, Brain and Behavior) has 2 EICs (one has just been added, not yet completely official: slated to take over at the end of the year) plus 10 AEs. The latter handle manuscripts and make a recommendation which the EIC almost always follows. There is also an editorial board, but they are seldom involved in day-to-day dealings. Still, we only list the EIC, because that is the person who makes important policy decisions and such. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 12:16, 3 May 2011 (UTC)
  • I would very much welcome any comments anyone might have in response to my remarks at Talk:Dionysius (journal) in connection with listing some of the better-known members of the original editorial board. Gadamer for example was regarded by many as the leading philosopher in the world at the time (1977). Surely there's something wrong with a protocol that makes it impossible for his relation to the journal to be mentioned. It seems to me that the involvement of such people helps to establish "significant history" and for that reason some flexibility ought to be permitted. Best regards, Tillander 20:02, 5 August 2011 (UTC)
  • There's nothing against including this if you have a reliable source that tells us what exactly he did. If all we have is just the fact that he was listed on the inside front cover, that's no reason to include somebody in the article, that's just name-dropping (what is what most editorial board listings are about anyway). --Guillaume2303 (talk) 20:26, 5 August 2011 (UTC)

Abbreviation standards

Hi. I recently came across edits by a member of this project (User:Headbomb, edits starting with [49]) switching the abbreviation of the Annals of Mathematics used in citations on wikipedia articles from "Ann. of Math." to "Ann. Math.". I raised this issue on the user's talk page (here), but I wanted to get a wider participation in the discussion. I disagree with these edits as the journal itself, when citing previous articles, uses "Ann. of Math.", and perhaps more importantly, so does every other mathematics journal (and it is the abbreviation suggested by the American Mathematical Society (see [50])). The reason given for the changes was that "Ann. Math." is the "proper" abbreviation according to ISO 4:1997. While this ISO standard is, I'm sure, quite useful, I don't think that blind adhesion to it is the way to go (nor do I think it agrees with the general way wikipedia determines disagreements). Basically, my point of view is that if an academic journal, and the entire academic community of which it is a part, use a common abbreviation that differs from that suggested by the ISO (and from out-of-community officials such as the library of congress in the case of Annals of Mathematics (see here)), then the former should be used. I have at least two reasons: (1) it will be the most recognizable abbreviation, (2) it is the prerogative of the journal, and more generally the academic community it is a part of, to set the abbreviation. Thanks. RobHar (talk) 21:18, 25 July 2011 (UTC)

I think we should be spelling out journal names within citations here anyway. Abbreviated names are good when you're dealing with a small community of researchers who you can reasonably expect to know what the abbreviation stands for. Wikipedia articles should be accessible to a wider audience than that, and spelling out the names is a step (admittedly a very small step) towards reducing jargon. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:26, 25 July 2011 (UTC)
Spelling it out completely is indeed what I tend to do on wikipedia, I think it makes sense. RobHar (talk) 02:43, 26 July 2011 (UTC)
On the page Annals of Mathematics I think we should list the ISO abbreviation in the infobox, because that is somewhat standardized across Wikipedia. For articles that have citations to the journal, I agree we should write out the journal title unabbreviated in the citations. That is the most accessible way to do it, and there is no reason here (unlike in journals) to save space. — Carl (CBM · talk) 22:15, 25 July 2011 (UTC)
I think that the infobox should be able to handle an ISO abbreviation and a "common" abbreviation. One should certainly be able to just glance at the infobox and know whether or not "Ann. of Math." is a commonly used abbreviation for the annals. RobHar (talk) 02:43, 26 July 2011 (UTC)
  • Most scientific fields use the ISO abbreviations if they cite journals using abbreviations (some journals write names out completely). There are exceptions. Apparently math is one. Law is another, where most (but not all) US journals follow the Bluebook. I think the easiest solution is to do what I generally do for law reviews, that is including the ISO abbreviation in the infobox and putting the Bluebook abbreviation in the lead: "Foo journal of Law (Bluebook abbreviation: F. J. Law) is a law review...". The same could be done here (if it is felt to be a serious enough problem): "Annals of Mathemathics (commonly abbreviated as Ann. of Math.) is a mathematical journal..." I do like the idea espoused above that we only should use full journal names within citations in WP. Some editors have used some quite fanciful abbreviations in the past and this would remove a lot of ambiguity. Would it be possible to have a bot change the most common abbreviations? --Guillaume2303 (talk) 08:13, 26 July 2011 (UTC)
This debate doesn't concern what we should do in the articles about the journal itself. It's about whether to use |journal=Ann. of Math. or |journal=Ann. Math.. I was doing some cleanup, so I switched the non-standard Ann. of Math. to the standard Ann. Math. mostly based on the reason that this is what anyone would expect to see, or at least what most people familiar with journal abbreviations would expect to see, as the of is completely superflous (J. Math. Phys., not J. of Math. Phys. for example). Apparently maths differs from all other fields, because it would be (and is) Ann. Phys., Ann. Biol., Ann. Sci., Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci., etc. in all other articles. I'm not particularly surprised, as mathematics has always done things in weird ways.
As for bots changing abbreviations to full journals, that's not a good idea as there will inevitably be abbreviations which it does not recognize, and then we'll end up with 13 fully spelled journals, and 4 abbreviated ones in an articles where the journals were consistently abbreviated. Maybe a semi-automated script would be better there, but it would be take quite an endeavor to develop it to be even semi-useful. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 14:34, 26 July 2011 (UTC)
"mathematics has always done things in weird ways" that's a helpful comment. The annals probably has a "non-standard" abbreviation because it dates back to 1884, thus preceding the creation of the ISO by over 60 years. You should check into your statements before making them: the article Annalen der Physik also lists "Ann. der Physik" as an abbreviation, and Planck's article which is linked to in the references section uses the abbreviation "Ann. d. Phys.". There's nothing standard about an abbreviation that isn't used. The ISO standard is just a guideline that may or may not be followed. I would also guess that there are more people who are aware of the annals of math than there are that are "familiar with journal abbreviations", in addition to the fact that anyone familiar with journals abbreviation will understand "Ann. of Math." just as well as "Ann. Math.". RobHar (talk) 17:15, 26 July 2011 (UTC)
  • I agree 100% with RobHar's proposal: the infobox should be able to [show both] an ISO abbreviation and a "common" abbreviation. That's a good approach -- it is flexible and resolves a longstanding problem on these articles. Here are five more cases where it would be helpful because the ISO abbreviation is practically never used: (1) Journal of Economic History is always abbreviated as JEH. I've seen that thousands of times. (2) Australian Economic History Review is abbreviated AEHR. (3) Enterprise and Society is abbreviated E&S. (4) Historical Social Research is abbreviated HSR in English, and probably differently in German (which in that case is relevant to the infobox). (5) Social Science History is always abbreviated SSH. Those abbrevations are not the ISO's. Using a search engine I can find a smattering of cases where the ISO abbreviation is used in some of those cases, but I don't recall seeing them in print, ever. Re: "mathematics has always done things in weird ways" -- pfft. Sarcasm is chancy on a wiki but I agree with RobHar here too. Mathematics is per se legitimate and its customs significant on math journal wiki articles! And in the social sciences and history it seems to me that the ISO abbreviations are not often used except when they coincide with the shortest natural abbreviation. ISO standards are good in principle, but when there are actual de facto standards they should be shown. FYI a related past discussion is on the template talk page. -- Econterms (talk) 14:18, 4 August 2011 (UTC)
A possible tweak to the template would be to have an "Abbreviation (ISO)" line and an "Abbreviation (common)" line. I'm not sure how previously written pages using the simple "Abbreviation" line would be affected. -- Econterms (talk) 14:28, 4 August 2011 (UTC)
  • ISO abbreviations are an internationally accepted standard. I don't know of any journal that in reference lists is indicated by its acronym (AEHR, HSR, whatever). Acronyms are often used informally among colleagues, rarely (if ever) in bibliographies in other journals. That there are historically different abbreviation is not surprising. That goes for everything else, from paper size to electrical plugs. That's exactly why ISO exists, to standardize these things so that we can keep talking with each other across countries and disciplines. I don't see any use in listing acronyms. In rare cases, where a certain discipline consistently uses abbreviations deviating from ISO standards, they can be mentioned in the article (such as Bluebook abbreviations). Adding this to the infobox, which is used in thousands of articles where the most-used (or often only-used) abbreviation is the ISO one will only lead to confusion. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 14:43, 4 August 2011 (UTC)
  • Agreed that such acronyms are not often used in formal reference lists and bibliographies. However here's a case where the abbreviations are used without explanation; in the vita of this well-known economist are listed journals he has refereed for, sometimes using common/standard abbreviations. Notably he uses "AER" to refer to one of the most widely cited journals in the world, without explanation. But the Wikipedia article on this journal lists only one abbreviation -- Am. Econ. Rev -- which is never used within the field, to my knowledge. (This, sixth, case where the de facto abbreviation is not shown on a journal article is a slightly comical/painful one since "AER" is probably used a thousand times as often as that abbreviation in speech, emails, casual writing, and on the Web.) The Wikipedia article can serve to clarify unexplained things and confirm a user's best-guess as in this case; thus, this is a use for listing an acronym in an infobox. Re the existence of the ISO and its definitions -- yes, the ISO is a good thing, and articles can sensibly refer to the ISO abbreviation in some way, and especially in those cases where the ISO abbreviation is the "only-used" one. We can agree to agree on these cases. But we have an exciting opportunity to improve here: Wikipedia articles are supposed to describe, encyclopedically, the world as it is and not enforce or advocate the benefits of a particular standardization. Here we can make a small change, and do that descriptive job a tiny bit better. I have now made a specific proposal at the Template talk:Infobox journal#Draft proposal regarding journal abbreviations. There is opposition to it. I invite comment from WikiProject-Academic-Journalistas. -- Econterms (talk) 16:11, 4 August 2011 (UTC)
  • AER is an excellent example of the ambiguity of acronyms. As is appropriate, this disambiguation page lists the Am. Econ. Rev., so people searching for this journal using the acronym will find it. The journal itself does not use the acronym in its reference lists (see here). Even the CV you link to above only uses acronyms in the list of journals that he has reviewed for (indeed a minor part of academic CVs), but uses full journal names in his list of publications. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 16:20, 4 August 2011 (UTC)
  • I mostly agree with Guillaume2303 here. ISO is the standard and should be understood by people across different fields (Int. J. Mod. Phys. will be recognized as International Journal of Modern Physics by most people who ever dealt with abbreviation). NLM uses ISO, so there's no "different" NLM abbreviation. "Common" abbreviations will be obvious (Journal of Physics A → JPA) so there's no need to list them in the infobox (although they certainly can be used in prose like in Earth and Planetary Science Letters). However, the bluebook abbreviation for law journals seems to be a recognized standard, so I wouldn't object to listing it in addition to the ISO one. But journal articles aren't and shouldn't be compendiums of abbreviations. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 15:39, 4 August 2011 (UTC)
  • I agree completely with Headbomb here. I don't really object to including the Bluebook abbreviation into the infobox (it would save a lot of effort explaining things to the single-purpose editors who generally create articles on law journals), but it does seem to be some overkill to change an infobox for just a small minority of cases (US law journals). Also note that some law journals (even in the US) do not follow the Bluebook but go with a different style guide. (Can't give an example off my head, but am sure I've seen them). --Guillaume2303 (talk) 15:45, 4 August 2011 (UTC)
Given that a) mostly editors will copy-paste citations found elsewhere into articles and that b) they or others will sometimes then try wikilinking to the article about that journal it seems reasonable to have measures in place to ensure those wikilinks are redirected to any extant article or at the very least ensure that the searchbox can find it. To do that we need to somewhere capture the various abbreviations and capitalizations commonly seen in the literature. That will include those used in the journal (for self-citations), those used in major topical indices, and those used in other journals on related topics. Of course there may be some question of wp:UNDUE arise for the form of some interdisciplinary citations (medical vs legal, e.g.) but within a discipline it should be fairly straightforward: if an abbreviation is seen to be repeatedly used, we should capture it at least as a redirect.LeadSongDog come howl! 21:21, 5 August 2011 (UTC)
Yes, but redirects are not the issue here. Let's stay on topic. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 22:30, 5 August 2011 (UTC)

I decided to be WP:BOLD and add the nonstandard abbreviation to the lead of Annals of Mathematics. Feel free to revert/revise as you see fit. I agree that the infobox template ought to allow for a little more flexibility. Jowa fan (talk) 06:48, 9 August 2011 (UTC)

I reverted it. It really is useless trivia that some people abbreviate it "Ann. of Math." rather than "Ann. Math.". There's a case to be made about mentioning a non-ISO abbreviation that will be used by the article itself (see the use of "PNAS" in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America or "PRL" in Physical Review Letters), but this one isn't. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 07:01, 9 August 2011 (UTC)
  • "Useless trivia" is the right expression, since, as we have seen above, this is not an abbreviation used by "everybody in mathematics", but only by some people, others using the standardized ISO form. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 08:14, 9 August 2011 (UTC)
  • The edit was sensible, non-damaging, and apparently drafted by a person who knows that particular journal -- a key relevant community whose internal ways of communicating with one another actually do matter. The information added was of course not "useless trivia" and such language is not helpful. Reverting this edit did not improve the encyclopedia. Please editors express your views at the place where we can jointly set a standard right now: Template_talk:Infobox_journal#Draft_proposal_regarding_journal_abbreviations. -- Econterms (talk) 10:21, 9 August 2011 (UTC)
It's not because an edit is sensible and non-damaging that it belongs. I can add that the journal Nature was mentioned in PhD Comics in the Nature article and it would be factual, verifiable, and non-damaging (and if I were not aware of Wikipedia guidelines and conventions on journal articles, this addition would be made in good faith). However, at the end of the day, it would still be irrelevant and useless trivia. The guidance is simple. The infobox takes the ISO abbreviation, because it is a standard one recognized in all fields (biology, math, physics, law, chemistry, ...). Other abbreviations may exist, but none with the standing and recognition of the ISO ones. Progress in Physics is abbreviated PP by some people, PiP by others, Prog. Phys. by other people, and Prog. in Phys. by others. So what? We are not repositories of indiscriminate information. Mention the dotted ISO one in the infobox, create redirects for the others, and if the journal's name is too cumbersome to use in prose, then mention the abbreviation you will use in the article (usually the undotted initials of the journal). Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 15:17, 9 August 2011 (UTC)
  • Which is what we are doing now and an international standard (ISO) we have. Making this edit while this discussion is ongoing is inappropriate and I agree with Headbomb's revert. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 10:25, 9 August 2011 (UTC)
I feel like you people don't listen to any counter arguments. As I mentioned above, the site you listed that uses "Ann. Math." is a German site. The American Mathematical Society, i.e. the most-respected math society in the world, lists the abbreviation as "Ann. of Math." and the most commonly used math review website in the english language, mathscinet, uses "Ann. of Math.", the journal itself uses "Ann. of Math.", all other journals I've ever read use "Ann. of Math.". It is completely ridiculous to say that mentioning that "Ann. of Math." is another abbreviation is "useless trivia". It's not trivia at all, it's the most commonly used (by far) abbreviation for the journal. It's almost like you're saying that nowhere should we mention that the US uses non-metric units, and every article should be in metric because the metric system is an international standard. Let's please realize that "non-standard" and "not agreeing with the ISO standard" are entirely distinct concepts. They may overlap significantly with the journals you commonly deal with, but before this discussion I had never even heard of the ISO standard and I assume that a vast majority of the people accessing the Annals of Mathematics articles have similarly never heard of the ISO standard. RobHar (talk) 18:10, 9 August 2011 (UTC)
Which doesn't change the fact that this is ultimately trivia and completely irrelevant to the article. No (well-written) journal article mention either the ISO or non-ISO abbreviation in prose, except those who make use of it because it would be cumbersome to use the full name of the journal at every occurrence. The Astrophysical Journal doesn't mention Ap. J. for this very reason, likewise for Physical Review which doesn't mention Ph. Rv., etc... This has been explained several times now. If anyone isn't listening, it's you. As for the American Mathematical Society being the most respected mathematical society in the world, I very much suspect that the folks from the European Mathematical Society or others would disagree about the AMS' opinion being the be-all-end-all went it comes to deciding what they should do. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 19:35, 9 August 2011 (UTC)
Now I'm really confused. I did say "feel free to revert", but I expected to see some more consistent reasoning. Over at Template_talk:Infobox_journal#Draft_proposal_regarding_journal_abbreviations you say "If it's got some common name in the field, mention it in prose". Which way do you want it?
Personally do I think it would be best to restrict the abbreviations to the infobox, ideally. But if the infobox gives only the ISO abbreviation and omits a commonly used alternative, then a misleading impression is created. Therefore some exceptions need to be made (maybe temporarily, if the infobox ends up being changed). I don't understand why inclusion of common abbreviations should be opposed so strongly; to some people it may be useful, to others it's unimportant, but in any case it does no harm. I'm very puzzled by the use of the word irrelevant, since it is very clearly related to the topic of the article. Jowa fan (talk) 01:00, 10 August 2011 (UTC)
At the infobox I mentioned abbreviations such as using EPSL for Earth and Planetary Science Letters use in prose. AKA we would not write "Earth Planet. Sci. Lett. publishes original research... " (ISO abbreviation), but "EPSL publishes original research..." is perfectly fine. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 03:07, 10 August 2011 (UTC)
So, you don't think that the most common abbreviation should be mentioned in the prose, nor should it appear in the infobox. So, you think that the only abbreviation that should appear in the Annals of Mathematics article is the one most almost no one uses in practice. That's just unhelpful. Also, you seem to take every argument exaggerate the claim then call that absurd and think your job of arguing is done. Saying the AMS is the most-respected doesn't make it the "be-all-end-all" capable of imposing its decisions on everyone else. Even if it did, the EMS wouldn't care too much for the issue at hand since the Journal of the EMS uses the abbreviation "Ann. of Math.", as well (see for example the freely available sample article here). On the other hand, you seem to think that the ISO is the "be-all-end-all" capable of imposing its decision on the AMS and the EMS. And you seem to be acting as its personal enforcer on wikipedia. Do you work for the ISO or something? RobHar (talk) 00:33, 10 August 2011 (UTC)
Am I saying the AMS/EMS should bow to ISO? No. Am I arguing that? No. I'm saying Wikipedia has an international readership and should follow international recognized standards understood across all fields. Libraries and indexing services follow the ISO above all else, so that is why we follow the ISO as well. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 03:07, 10 August 2011 (UTC)
That argument applies equally well to the metric system. Also, I would argue that the ISO is not recognized in mathematics. Anyway, we're not saying that wikipedia should not follow the ISO, we're saying that in the case of notable exceptions, wikipedia should list them. However, we appear to find ourselves in a situation where you are instead preventing any and all wikipedians from adding any non-ISO abbreviations on journal pages (unless, of course, it might alleviate the prose). RobHar (talk) 05:12, 10 August 2011 (UTC)
If the authors take their BibTeX from MathSciNet, they are going to get the MathSciNet abbreviations, because those are what MathSciNet gives in the BibTeX it provides. The fact that MathSciNet uses the Ann. of Math abbreviation is exactly the reason I think it should be mentioned in the article, because MathSciNet is such a well-known source for citation info. — Carl (CBM · talk) 00:49, 10 August 2011 (UTC)
  • I just want to have a look to see if these citations are widely used: Am. Econ. Rev [51], Ann. Math [52], and Ann. of Math [53]. It appears that Ann. Math and Am. Econ. Rev. are both used by the research community for citations. ---- Steve Quinn (talk) 20:54, 9 August 2011 (UTC)
  • Pretty much every result for "Ann. Math." in the search you've linked to is actually a result for "Ann. Math. Statis." or "Ann. Math. Stat.". Google searches in cases like the one at hand are generally quite hard to do properly. RobHar (talk) 00:21, 10 August 2011 (UTC)
  • Sure, not all, but most. And most of the occurrences of Ann. Math. are either physics journals (generally decades old), or simply decades old. In the latter case, if you start looking through the examples, like the first occurrence in Milnor's article in Advances in Mathematics, well go to the September issue of Adv. Math. and you can see that they now use "Ann. of Math." (even though before the ISO standard existed they used "Ann. Math."). Or the result from the Pacific Journal of Mathematics on the second page of results, if you look in their current issue, they also use "Ann. of Math.". All I'm trying to say is that a link to a naive google search is not a very strong source because it's very difficult to get anything substantive out of it. RobHar (talk) 05:06, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

I don't really care about the infobox, but the fact that MathSciNet uses "Ann. of Math" and that the journal itself uses that abbreviation makes a mention of that abbreviation in the article seem qite relevant to me. It is perfectly possible that someone could see "Ann. of Math" in the journal itself and look at our article to see if that really is a reference to the same journal. — Carl (CBM · talk) 00:28, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

We're not about to list every abbreviation used by every organizations out there. Astronomy journals often, but not always, refer to The Astrophysical Journal as Ap. J. Others refer to it as Astrophys. J. Others refer to it as Astro. J.. Others refer to it as AJ. Other omit the "The" and refer to is at Astrophysical Journal. There's no sense (or reason) to mention this in the article. Why does Annals of Mathematics deserve a special treatment and have one of its abbreviations be explicitly mentioned in prose for no other reason than be mentioned that the abbreviation exists? Why that one over Ann Math? Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 02:48, 10 August 2011 (UTC)
Why that one over Ann Math? The fact that you need to ask is alarming. Please reread the comments above. There are several editors proposing that it should be mentioned, and giving reasons. The fact that you have written more words on this subject than everyone else put together does not give you the right to override a consensus. Jowa fan (talk) 04:56, 10 August 2011 (UTC)
  • What consensus? Headbomb is not alone in his opposition to this proposal (and let me also point out that there is kind of a divide between the two "sides" in terms of experience with editing articles on academic journals). --Guillaume2303 (talk) 05:04, 10 August 2011 (UTC)
There's a divide between those who have experience editing academic journal articles, and those who have experience editing mathematics articles. The latter know for a fact that Ann. of Math. is by far the most common abbreviation of the annals and that it is silly not to list it. The former won't even acknowledge that Ann. of Math. is by far the most common abbreviation. A simple way to solve the specific issue of the annals is simply to seek consensus on that article's talk page. Whether or not the academic journals wikiproject has or does not have a guideline on the subject has no effect on an independently reached concensus on a specific article's talk page per WP:IAR. Once WP:MATH is involved and is told that they can't list the generally accepted abbreviation of what is usually considered one of the top, if not the top, journal in the subject, I'm pretty sure the consensus will be clear. RobHar (talk) 05:22, 10 August 2011 (UTC)
  • OK, we need to get out of this impasse. I propose that for Ann. Math., we change the lead to "Annals of Mathematics (sometimes abbreviated Ann. of Math.)". I remain strongly opposed to any confusing changes to the infobox used on thousands of journal articles. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 05:28, 10 August 2011 (UTC)
I propose that we don't, otherwise we'll need to add abbreviations to the prose of thousands of articles. Mentioning the abbreviation, regardless of whether it's Ann. Math. or Ann. of Math., in prose is awkward and little-to-no value to the article. And we most definitely should not modify the infobox to accommodate it. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 06:01, 10 August 2011 (UTC)
Whether we need to mention something in other articles is irrelevant. There are two main sources for bibliographic information in mathematics: Mathematical Reviews and Zentralblatt MATH. The point of mentioning the abbreviation in the article is so that people can look it up if they need to use it. If the two services use different abbreviations, that's a very relevant fact for the article, because a reader who goes there to look up the abbreviation will need to realize that it will vary depending on which of those two sources they get their information from. — Carl (CBM · talk) 10:48, 10 August 2011 (UTC)
I thought is was clear by now that Ann. of Math. is a rare exception to the usual conventions. For those journals where the ISO abbreviation is the most commonly used one, there's no need to make any change. I thought this was the case for all but a handful of journals. Jowa fan (talk) 06:27, 10 August 2011 (UTC)
No!! This is a general issue in several fields. I listed at least five journals above at least -- including top journals in economics and sociology on which we've been getting this (from my point of view) annoyingly wrong on Wikipedia for years. The ISO abbreviation is literally distracting and irrelevant in the journals I use and write about; I believe the people who say it's not wrong, but it's not informative. -- Econterms (talk) 13:03, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

I think it is becoming clear that this is a question about the individual article, rather than a general question. Therefore I am going to start an RFC on the article's talk page. — Carl (CBM · talk) 11:03, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

  • Please don't refocus there because the issue is general and recurrent as I've noted above. A very few editors have taken a tidy-shopkeeper point of view that consistency with the ISO abbreviation is somehow more important than covering the field-specific form of communication. Like RobHar, I am flummoxed as to why; it seems not to make sense, and is an extreme view. ISO standards are not always used, are not always best, and have sometimes been overwhelmed by alternatives historically. Our job is not to support or oppose a particular monopoly standard on journal abbreviations, here. The standard we can set is what's in the infobox and the articles. It is possible to rectify the substantive problem by changing the infobox in a way that has no effect except in those cases where an editor chooses to list a common abbreviation; we can make some kind of policy that there should not be a long uninformative list of them. If that solution sucks then propose another at the template page with the policy discussion. But please please do not save Ann. of Math. article and abandon the many other journal articles and good people who want them to have more flexibility. Observe how astonishingly polarized the discussion is: Jowa fan made a creative good faith edit to try an alternative which would improve the situation, and notified others here, and this was described, absurdly, as "inappropriate." I was accused of canvassing inappropriately and a proposed new infobox line characterized as "confusing" which it isn't. Another editor was sardonically asked about an imagined conflict of interest. It's crazy-making, sick-making, and enemy-making. Let us crack this problem, which is not hard. Please do not abandon 90% of the problem cases to save one. The issue would then fester and could come up again. (I'll find more cases if you want more evidence on this; there's no shortage.) -- Econterms (talk) 13:03, 10 August 2011 (UTC)
    • I agree that our job is not to pick the best system, and that we should make sure that we describe common practice. But that has to be done at an article-by-article level. Settling the issue for Annals of Mathematics doesn't mean that other people can't also discuss whether some more general principle applies. But I am not personally interested in the general issue of journal articles; I am interested in mathematics articles, and Annals of Mathematics is one of those. The right place to discuss a single article is on its talk page, particularly when there are multiple WikiProjects that have the article in their scope. — Carl (CBM · talk) 13:10, 10 August 2011 (UTC)
  • Ok, I hear you, and hope it works for you. Your arguments regarding that article work for me but I lack the specific relevant knowledge to take a stand there. -- Econterms (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 17:25, 10 August 2011 (UTC).

RFC on abbreviation at Annals of Mathematics

Per my comment above, I have opened an RFC at Talk:Annals_of_Mathematics#RFC:_should_both_abbreviations_be_mentioned_in_the_lede about whether two abbreviations should be mentioend in the lede. — Carl (CBM · talk) 11:06, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

Great... a third place. WP:FORUMSHOP at its best. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 13:58, 10 August 2011 (UTC)
The RFC is not about the infobox, so at best that makes two locations: here and on the article talk page. But the RFC is not about any general principle, it is about that particular article, which should be discussed on the talk page of that article. The article has its own particular circumstances that make it worth discussing separately, apart from the general rule of thumb. — Carl (CBM · talk) 14:11, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

RFC on identifiers

There is an RFC on the addition of identifier links to citations by bots. Please comment. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 15:56, 15 August 2011 (UTC)

Journals Relating to Postmodernism

I have been thinking about this short guide to journals having to do with postmodernism: http://www.hu.mtu.edu/~rlstrick/401/pomojrnl.html I note that we already have articles for the first two of the five journals the author mentions: Diacritics (journal) and Postmodern Culture I'm thinking that perhaps articles on the other three might be a good idea: http://www.rodopi.nl/senj.asp?SerieId=PMS http://cultronix.eserver.org/ http://www2.swgc.mun.ca/animus/ Are these worth writing articles for? Any thoughts would be appreciated. I hope I'm raising this in the right place. Best regards, Tillander 08:20, 16 August 2011 (UTC)

  • I have created the article for "Animus" but remain uncertain about "Postmodern Studies" and "Cultronix". Although "Postmodern Studies" is described as a "journal" by the "Guide to Postmodern Journals" it nevertheless describes itself on its own webpage as a "series", and I note that it appears at "irregular intervals" (though they promise at least one volume a year) and also that some volumes are monographs rather than collections of articles. Surely this is a series rather than a journal as commonly understood. Can a series have a wikipedia page? With Cultronix regularity seems to be a problem. There have only been five issues, and the first three of them appeared in 1994 and 1995. The fourth and fifth issues are not dated but seem to have appeared in the late 90s; they are at any rate at least ten years old. Should I describe this journal as defunct?

ERA2012 journal list

The Australian Research Council has published the draft ERA2012 journal list in Excel format. http://www.arc.gov.au/era/current_consult.htm John Vandenberg (chat) 00:02, 6 September 2011 (UTC)

They have retained the same "eraid" for the journals which were in the 2010 ERA journal list. 1657 journals have been added. The much debated "ranking" has been removed and a ForeignTitle field has been added. John Vandenberg (chat) 04:57, 6 September 2011 (UTC)

Is one impact factor enough?

Further information: Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Academic Journals/Writing guide § Impact factor only the most recent?

I am told that there is a long-standing consensus in WP Academic Journals that only the single-year impact factor is provided for a journal. The key arguments are (1) that nobody pays much attention to the other factors, and (2) extra statistics may violate the WP:NOTDIR policy. Well, (1) I pay attention. The single-year impact figure can vary a lot from year to year if the journal published a small number of articles. For example, the impact factor for Reviews of Geophysics jumped from 8.0 in 2010 to 9.5 in 2011. Does that mean that the journal suddenly got a lot better? No, it's probably just statistical fluctuations because only 80 articles were published. The number of publications and the five-year impact make the interpretation more clear. Another reason to include the number of publications - if you compare just the impact factors for Reviews of Geophysics (9.5) with Journal of Geophysical Research (3.3), you'd think that the former is a more important publication. Not true - RG published 80 articles in 2010 while JGR published 2995, so the total number of citations for JGR is far greater (and review articles tend to get more citations than original research). As for (2), I read the policy and see no application to this case. RockMagnetist (talk) 16:11, 7 September 2011 (UTC)

Another thought - the impact factor is what a potential author would like to know (is my article going to be highly cited?). But as a measure of the journal's overall impact, the total number of citations may be better. RockMagnetist (talk) 17:15, 7 September 2011 (UTC)

  • There are several arguments against listing all the indicators that you have been including in several articles (5-year IF, immediacy index, number of articles published, total number of citations, cited half-life). First of all, I don't think that WP should be a mirror for the Science Citation Index. There are databases for these things and we should only include those that are (at least currently) deemed the most important ones. There are all kinds of arguments against using the IF as the only indicator (Eugene Garfield being the first to argue this), but the list can become endless. Are we also going to include the citation parameters calculated by Scopus? How about SCImago (their metrics are also included in the SCI now)? How about the Index Copernicus? Let's also include the rankings given by the Australian excercise mentioned just above... or, no, they just abandoned those rankings... At this point, like it or not, its the 2-year impact factor that is being used by everybody, from the bean counters that take it as a shortcut to evaluate the "quality" of a researcher's list of publications to scientists looking for an outlet for their research. It's the only metric that all publisher's list (often rather prominently) on their journal homepages. In the rare cases that they feature another metric, you can be certain that it is because the journal looks bad by IF alone... I think Elsevier is currently the only one that systematically includes the 5-year IF, but I think that at least 99% of all academics have no clue what that is... There is a more minor second argument, too: all these metrics change every year. It'll be a huge amount of work to keep all that stuff up-to-date, just the IF is already work enough... In all, I very strongly feel that until habits in the real world change, we should follow what is customary and list only the "normal (that is, the 2-year) IF. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 17:46, 7 September 2011 (UTC)
I don't feel strongly about 5-year IF, immediacy index, or cited half-life, and I hear you about the difficulty of maintaining a long list of metrics. I'll stop adding those. On the other hand, there should be a little flexibility. In Journal of Geophysical Research, I think it makes a lot of sense to add the total number of articles and citations, because the impact factor alone grossly under-represents the importance of this journal. Don't worry - they're not gateway statistics and won't lead to harder stuff. RockMagnetist (talk) 18:08, 7 September 2011 (UTC)
  • I really am very doubtful of that, too (not of the need for flexibility, of course). But is number of citations really a measure of the importance of a journal? I think that this is why the IF was invented. Compare two journals (obviously, in the same field): one publishing 100 articles that have been cited 1000 times (IF=10). Another publishing 10,000 articles, that have been cited 2,000 times (IF=0.2). I think it could be argued that the second journal only gets twice as much citations because of the huge volume it publishes of apparently mostly low-quality articles. I doubt anyone would argue that it is twice as important as the more selective journal. Of course, you can probably come up with other examples and we can talk about this very long. Fact is, that whether you and I agree about this or not is not really relevant, because it would be just our opinions. What really counts is that in the real world, nobody really cares much about the total number of citations that a journal garners, whereas everybody avidly awaits the results of the yearly sweepstakes (i.e., the annual issue of the Journal Citation Reports)... --Guillaume2303 (talk) 18:57, 7 September 2011 (UTC)
I think your examples are extreme, and unlikely in practice. However, as long as I am free to make the occasional exception (in particular, for JGR), I am willing to restrict my statistics to the IF. RockMagnetist (talk) 19:20, 7 September 2011 (UTC)
I really don't see why Journal of Geophysical Research warrants an exception here. That it has a 2-year IF of 3.3 or 5-year IF of 3.5 (or whatever) is pretty inconsequential. Ranking is a lot more important (15th out of 165), and only to established the ballpark of where a journal lies (no one will go "15th? Obviously it's a joke until it manages to climbs to 12th or above". Total number of citations isn't something I'd personally include, but if it's combined with the number of publications, I'm not really against it. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 23:59, 7 September 2011 (UTC)
  • Headbomb, please note that the number of citations is all citations in a given year to all articles ever published in a journal, whereas number of articles concerns only a given year. I think neither should be included for reason of being rather trivial. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 13:30, 8 September 2011 (UTC)
I didn't realize that. So the total number of citations is misleading; I have removed it, but I still like the total number of articles. RockMagnetist (talk) 15:59, 8 September 2011 (UTC)

Scopus

Up till now, we take inclusion in Scopus as sufficient evidence of notability. However, User:DGG has already remarked several times that Scopus seems to become less and less selective. Recently, I've been dealing with a COI editor creating articles on journals published by Berghahn Books. Most seem to be borderline notable at best. Several of these journals were recently included into Scopus (and this was put on the journals' homepages as soon as the COI editor understood that we take this as evidence for notability. Now in principle I'm fine with leaving everything as it is, but I'd like to hear some more opinions about whether or not we should continue regarding Scopus as a selective database, or regard it more like Google Scholar. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 14:07, 15 September 2011 (UTC)

If the journal suddenly became listed after conflict on Wikipedia, I would check that those journals are actually indexed in Scopus instead of just take claim to be indexed in it at face value. But if we're talking of journals like Social Analysis, it seems to be pretty well covered in humanities databases (like the BHI, which seems to be particularly selective amongst humanities journals) and I really don't see how it shouldn't be regarded as a notable journal. I stumbled on a few of the articles on Berghahn journals (~3–4), and I've yet to see a notability problem (although most of them could have used some copyediting love). Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 14:27, 15 September 2011 (UTC)
That was indeed my first hunch, too, but they check out and are in Scopus. But the Berghahn journals were just the immediate reason for this post. If there are other selective databases, notability follows. But my question is more about what people here think of Scopus in and of itself, regardless what is happening with the Berghahn journals. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 14:37, 15 September 2011 (UTC)
Unless we've got demonstrably unnotable journals that are being systematically indexed in Scopus (there will always the occasional exception), or some other tangible reason to think the Scopus Content Selection and Advisory Board is becoming less selective or less objective than they were in the past, I don't see why we should change our attitude on that database. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 14:46, 15 September 2011 (UTC)

Unfortunate interaction between template and wikiproject

See Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Academic Journals/Journals cited by Wikipedia#Unfortunate interaction between template and wikiproject

Let's hold the discussion in one place only. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 15:16, 25 September 2011 (UTC)

Conflicts of Interest and academic journals template

Hi, I've been making additions/edits on Wikipedia on-and-off since May 2010, primarily in relation to academic journals. I would appreciate some advice on Wikipedia's conflict of interest policy, as I work at SAGE, an academic journals publisher.

I've been very conscious of the NPOV requirement when editing any journals pages and have largely confined myself to setting up or correcting entries based simply on the standard journals template. However, I've only just read through the COI guidelines in detail, from which it seems I shouldn't be creating any new journal pages at all, given the potential conflict of interest.

I can see there are various steps I can take to comply with the COI guidelines (such as adding details about me to my userpage). Additionally, though, do you know whether I should avoid engaging with this area directly, i.e. confining myself to talkpage requests for edits/additions, even where the edits/additions are non-controversial, such as adding a missing infobox to a journal page or setting up a templated page for an ISI-ranked journal? The COI guidelines would seem to indicate all direct edits/additions should be avoided, including where a template is being followed. Any advice would be appreciated.

Many thanks. AntonV (talk) 13:59, 7 March 2011 (UTC)

Personally, if you create good articles, the COI thing doesn't bother me. You can take a look at Wikipedia:WikiProject Academic Journals/Writing guide and Wikipedia:Notability (academic journals). If the result of your editing looks something like Journal of the National Cancer Institute, or Genes, Brain and Behavior (which was mostly written by its editor) you're doing things right. If it's full of weasel words and peacock terms such as "Foobar Journal is a leading journal publishing the highest-quality research in the field", you're doing it wrong.
Things that should be mentioned are editors-in-chiefs (founding + current, and a completely chronology can be given too), the publication's history (year of establishment, mergers, renames, splits, spinoffs, subjournals/special issues), a brief description of the scope, frequency, current publisher, past publisher, if the journal is the official publication of a society (or societies), impact factor with explicit ranking (such as 6th out of 135 in the category ____, rather than 6th in the category ____), indexing and abstracting information, etc. Things that are not important are the editorial board, the "mission" of the journal, and lists of authors.
Best thing to do is create an article on a missing journal (perhaps in your userspace at User:AntonV/Journal of Foobar). Once you're done, come here for feedback. As a general note, newer journals tend to fail notability requirements, so I would start with the older SAGE journals. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 14:30, 7 March 2011 (UTC)
Thanks very much for the detailed response - sounds good to me. I'll create future pages in my userspace and then ask for feedback here (and will bear in mind the authoring guidelines you mention). AntonV (talk) 14:56, 10 March 2011 (UTC)

I've started putting together some basic entries for some ISI-ranked SAGE journals in my userspace: User:AntonV/Adaptive Behavior (journal), User:AntonV/Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology and User:AntonV/Asia Pacific Journal of Human Resources. These just contain basic bibliographic details really; I'll add covers to them when I transition them to the main Wikipedia site. I'd be grateful for any comments or suggestions. AntonV (talk) 10:41, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

Three more basic entries that I think are ready to be moved to the main name space: User:AntonV/Autism (journal), User:AntonV/Body and Society and User:AntonV/Building Services Engineering Research and Technology. I'll add covers and categories when I move them over.AntonV (talk) 15:45, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

Hi, apologies if this belongs in its own section, but my concern is closely related to this one. I have started some entries on academic journals in the last few months after extensively analysing the authoring guidelines including the COI, Neutral Point of View, Notability (academic journals), what Wikipedia is not, Verifiability, and others, as well as reviewing and engaging in discussions with other users. As I currently work at SAGE, an academic publisher, similar to AntonV (talk), I am very keen not to fall foul of these guidelines and as such the entries I have started are of a style and contain only content that I have been careful to ensure adheres to them and remains completely unbiased throughout, and which I have compared to a number of entries started by key contributors to this project. I am doing my best to achieve this unbiased approach, but I would appreciate input and feedback, positive and negative, on what I have done so far, and advice for the future if necessary. Some examples would include: European Journal of Women's Studies, Clinical Rehabilitation, International Social Work History of the Human Sciences, and Critical Social Policy. Some of these pages have been reviewed by other users connected to this project already. As I say, feedback or clarification would be appreciated as I contribute to this project. Luke.j.ruby (talk) 09:38, 27 September 2011 (UTC)

Category:Arts journals and Category:Art journals

There is a proposal to merge these two categories and input from editors from this project is welcome. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 08:41, 30 September 2011 (UTC)

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