Talk:The Cormac McCarthy Journal

GA Review

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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This review is transcluded from Talk:The Cormac McCarthy Journal/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: Mujinga (talk · contribs) 11:48, 22 August 2023 (UTC)

• Hi I'll take this on for review as part of the August 2023 GAN Backlog Drive Mujinga (talk) 11:48, 22 August 2023 (UTC)

  @Blz 2049: nice work, I'll put this review onhold for you to answer the queries below. If you need to take more than a week, that's fine as along as we are in communication Mujinga (talk) 13:12, 22 August 2023 (UTC)

  @Mujinga: Hi! Thank you for your review. As it so happens I read your article on the Securitas depot robbery with great interest when it appeared as today's featured article a while back, not having heard of the crime before. I appreciate the clarity and forensic detail you transmit with your writing. —blz 2049 ➠ ❏ 02:30, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

  @Blz 2049 oh that's great to hear you enjoyed reading the article about the Securitas heist! I have replied on the image licensing and the citebundling. I've also added another query under references2. When these three things are resolved I'll be happy to make this a GA. Mujinga (talk) 13:32, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

  @Blz 2049 so the image query is resolved, waiting for answers on the other two Mujinga (talk) 11:52, 27 August 2023 (UTC)

  @Mujinga: I count just the one outstanding comment, regarding prose and combining sentences, to which I've now responded. There's also your #References2 question about the Clarivate citations, which I've answered in part and Randykitty has answered in part, but you haven't replied yet so I'm unsure if you're satisfied with our response. Please let me know if you have remaining concerns about Clarivate or anything else! —blz 2049 ➠ ❏ 22:34, 27 August 2023 (UTC)

  @Blz 2049 great the Clarivate query seems resolved then, so it's just the query about the short sentences. Thanks for working this through, Mujinga (talk) 13:41, 29 August 2023 (UTC)

  happy to pass this now Mujinga (talk) 13:55, 4 September 2023 (UTC)

Good Article review progress box

Criteria: 1a. prose () 1b. MoS () 2a. ref layout () 2b. cites WP:RS () 2c. no WP:OR () 2d. no WP:CV () 3a. broadness () 3b. focus () 4. neutral () 5. stable () 6a. free or tagged images () 6b. pics relevant () Note: this represents where the article stands relative to the Good Article criteria. Criteria marked are unassessed

Status

• Article is stable, focused, broad and neutral

Copyviocheck

• earwig just highlighting names, will check for any close paraphrasing in spotchecks

Pix

• There are four images used in the article. They are all relevant but I'm doubtful of the rationale for File:Suttree - Cormac McCarthy.jpg, since I would expect this cover design to be copyrighted. I don't think it is covered by fair use except in an article about that specific book (I understad the rationale for the other book cover). What are you basing your rationale on, are there other examples?

• I agree that my usage of the image would not be covered by fair use. It's possible because the image of Suttree's first-edition dust jacket cover is in the public domain. While I understand your hesitancy here based on the relatively recent date of publication, I am confident that it is in the public domain.
  In US copyright law until 1989, there were a few ways a published work could (often inadvertently) enter the public domain. Published works had to include a compliant copyright notice, or else the possibility of copyright protection would lapse instantaneously upon publication. As quoted at Suttree - Cormac McCarthy.jpg, the US Copyright Office has specifically noted that dust jackets of hardcover books were not generically protected by the same copyright notice found inside the books themselves. Dust jackets from this time were required to display their own separate copyright notice in order to secure their copyright. This is a very different paradigm than copyright law throughout most of the world and in the United States since 1989, where these formalistic technicalities don't exist. For dust jackets published between 1978–1989, a publisher of a work without a notice had a chance to recover its copyright if and only if they registered the work with the Copyright Office within 5 years of publication. Random House published the Suttree dust jacket cover in 1979 and then failed to register it by 1984, meaning any copyright interest in the dust jacket cover lapsed. I've uploaded the entire Suttree dust jacket to Commons to make it easier to verify the lack of copyright notice, though note that I had to blur out some portions of text quoted from previously published sources, which of course were copyrighted separately and (more importantly) prior to the publication of the dust jacket. —blz 2049 ➠ ❏ 02:30, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

• To provide a little more info about how this aspect of US copyright law works, here's a counterexample of a work I once looked into but did not upload to Commons because it remains copyrighted: the original US edition dust jacket of Blood Meridian (1985). Here's an off-site high-res scan for reference. Note that this jacket contains two notices, "© 1985 Random House, Inc." (bottom of the back flap) and "Photo: 1981 © Mark Morrow" (back cover). Either notice by itself would have sufficed to protect the entire thing, as the law doesn't even require the name of the correct entity as long as some named entity is provided—so e.g., even though Mark Morrow didn't write the text on the dust jacket flaps, his notice alone carries all the required legal elements and it would secure Random House's copyright interest all by itself even if they had omitted their own notice (and vice versa). Furthermore the painting on the front cover of Blood Meridian is The Phantom Cart (1933) by Salvador Dalí, and Mr. Dalí's oeuvre of copyrighted works won't enter the public domain until January 1, 2060 (70 years after his death). His prior, separately established copyright interest remains valid even if Random House as a licensee had fumbled their responsibility to attach any copyright notice. None of that applies where the Suttree dust jacket is concerned. —blz 2049 ➠ ❏ 03:06, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for the reply. Your rationale does make sense to me, I just haven't seen it before and wouldn't say image copyright is my strongest area, so I'll ask for a second opinion Mujinga (talk) 12:47, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

I've asked at User_talk:GRuban#The_Cormac_McCarthy_Journal Mujinga (talk) 12:59, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

Great the second opinion is that the licensing is good :) Mujinga (talk) 14:18, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

• Not a pass/fail issue but would be great if you could add an alt description to File:Cormac McCarthy (1980 portrait, Lexington Leader).jpg per MOS:ACCIM

•  Done I'm all about accessibility :) —blz 2049 ➠ ❏ 02:30, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

References

• spotchecks on this version

  1 can't access, AGF

  2 While there are many periodicals about specific authors, The Cormac McCarthy Journal was—as of 2023—one of only three scholarly journals about an American author who was still alive at the time it began publication. - backed by source

  37 and the Knoxville News Sentinel, the last of which had originally printed two of the articles republished by The Cormac McCarthy Journal - backed by source

  27 As of 2013, Blood Meridian (1985) was the most-discussed of McCarthy's works in the journal, while bestsellers like All the Pretty Horses (1992), No Country for Old Men (2005), and The Road had also received significant attention - backed by source

• References are all high quality, there's a bit of inconsistency over using publisher location - most do, for example Peebles 2020 doesn't (and there's more)

• Help:Citation Style 1 recommends omitting the publisher location when the location is included in the name of the publisher or periodical, as is the case for several of my citations such as those from Cambridge University Press and the Knoxville News Sentinel. —blz 2049 ➠ ❏ 02:30, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

Oh that is interesting, I didn't know that! Mujinga (talk) 12:37, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

• if you are marking eg Harris with a padlock for access, then others eg Monk should also be marked that way

• This is actually not possible in the case of Monk. Check Help:Citation Style 1#Access indicator for named identifiers. When a link is provided as an identifier, like a DOI or ID# to a digital library like JSTOR, it's presumed to be restricted, so the only option available is to indicate if it's actually free. The inverse is true for normal URLs, which can have a locked gray or red padlock, but not an unlocked green padlock, because they're presumed to be free. I did a quick double-check of the sources and I think all the citations with URLs are correctly notated. —blz 2049 ➠ ❏ 02:30, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

Yes you are correct here, I had a niggling memory of a previous discussion about this and it was here - so hopefully second time round it'll stick in my brain. I'll give the refs another look just to check but I'm not anticipating any problems Mujinga (talk) 12:39, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

References2

• as an additional point, checking "Indexing and abstracting", I am finding some citations hard to verify:

  Anon. (n.d.). "Search [2333-3073]". Web of Science Master Journal List. Clarivate. Archived from the original on July 9, 2023. Retrieved July 9, 2023. doesn't verify "According to the Journal Citation Reports, the journal has a 2022 impact factor of 0.1.[43]" and "Emerging Sources Citation Index[39]"

  Clarivate n.d. does verify that The Cormac McCarthy Journal is in the Emerging Sources Citation Index; it is not cited for the impact factor. Clarivate 2023 was added by another user, Randykitty. Accessing Clarivate's proprietary Journal Impact Factor info requires a Journal Citation Report (JCR) subscription, which I do not have, so I took Randykitty's insertion on good faith. Other GA-level academic journal articles like Celebrity Studies, The Accounting Review, and Genes, Brain and Behavior also have similar impact factor citations. —blz 2049 ➠ ❏ 05:18, 25 August 2023 (UTC)

This is how I reference a journal's IF: <ref name=WoS>{{cite book |year=2023 |chapter=Cormac McCarthy Journal |title=2022 Journal Citation Reports |publisher=[[Clarivate]] |edition=Emerging Sources |series=[[Web of Science]] |title-link=Journal Citation Reports}}</ref> An IF of 0.1 is rather pathetic, this seems to be a rather obscure journal (trivia like "one of only three scholarly journals about an American author who was still alive at the time it began publication" notwithstanding...) --Randykitty (talk) 07:46, 25 August 2023 (UTC)

@Randykitty: I appreciate your addition! And yes 0.1 does seem awfully low—I mean, it's quite literally the bottom of the barrel for a system rounded to the tenths place except for a flat 0.0. After you added that sentence, I curiously googled the phrase "has a 2022 impact factor of" and there looks to be just one other journal on Wikipedia in the 0.1 range, likewise tucked away in a niche humanities field. It would seem no one's talking about Cormac McCarthy as much as The Cormac McCarthy Journal . —blz 2049 ➠ ❏ 22:34, 27 August 2023 (UTC)

 Done Mujinga (talk) 13:38, 29 August 2023 (UTC)

Prose

• Also among "handful of sympathetic publications" - who is saying that?

•  Done Paraphrased to avoid the need for in-line attribution. —blz 2049 ➠ ❏ 02:30, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

• "In January 1997 the McCarthy Society went online at the website cormacmccarthy.com," suggest comma after 1997 and unlinking website

•  Done

• The first print edition of The Cormac McCarthy Journal appeared in 2001.[15] The Society published new issues of the journal on a roughly annual basis.[1] The journal became a member of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals.[17] The position of editor was mostly held by John Wegner of Angelo State University from its first issue until about 2009.[18] - bit choppy, suggest combining these sentences

• Each of those sentences carries a discrete fact attributed to each source and if I combined these sentences the sourcing of each piece of information would get muddled, or would be liable to become more muddled in the future with subsequent edits. I prefer to keep them disentangled. —blz 2049 ➠ ❏ 02:30, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

I take your point and I personally dislike it when a paragraph has a few references only at the end because verification becomes a pain, but if the referencing style affects readability I think that is an issue. I don't think much would be lost or made harder by doing something like:

The first print edition of The Cormac McCarthy Journal appeared in 2001 and new issues were published on a roughly annual basis.[1][15] The journal became a member of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals; the position of editor was mostly held by John Wegner of Angelo State University from its first issue until about 2009.[17][18]

Another option would be to bundle the citations - you could then bullet point what references what if it was a concern. Mujinga (talk) 12:43, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

@Mujinga: I combined the first two sentences in a revision that's pretty close to yours. However I'm just not seeing a way to combine the CELJ and Wegner sentences. The subjects seem too unrelated to naturally blend, and while I'm not as averse to semicolons as Cormac McCarthy was, I don't get the sense a semicolon here would improve readability. —blz 2049 ➠ ❏ 22:34, 27 August 2023 (UTC)

OK, you don't have to combine those two sentences, but if we take the rest of the paragraph it's still very jerky:

The journal became a member of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. The position of editor was mostly held by John Wegner of Angelo State University from its first issue until about 2009. During this timespan, several other scholars stepped in to handle the role of editor as needed. The online journal moved from the McCarthy society's website to the Texas Digital Library. Stacey Peebles of Centre College took over as editor in 2010.

I'd suggest combining some of these sentences together. Mujinga (talk) 13:40, 29 August 2023 (UTC)

@Blz 2049: just checking you saw this, cheers Mujinga (talk) 10:39, 1 September 2023 (UTC)

@Mujinga: I joined the two sentences about the 2001–2009 editorship together; let me know if you have further suggestions. —blz 2049 ➠ ❏ 21:31, 2 September 2023 (UTC)

yeah that reads better now, nice one Mujinga (talk) 13:54, 4 September 2023 (UTC)

• its central setting of Knoxville, Tennessee in October of that year. suggest cutting "in October of that year."

•  Done

• was eventually published in 2013 - suggest " was published in 2013"

•  Done

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Did you know nomination

The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by Vaticidalprophet (talk) 23:29, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

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• Comment or view
• Article history

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Cormac McCarthy c. 1973

• ... that The Cormac McCarthy Journal is one of the few academic journals about a specific author from the United States founded while its subject (pictured) was alive? Source: Shelton 2023 (link).
  • Reviewed: Template:Did you know nominations/Bork tapes
  • Comment: The source specifies that there were only three such journals listed on the MLA Directory of Periodicals shortly after McCarthy's death, the other two being Philip Roth Studies and the James Dickey Review. However, I hedge with "few" because there have likely been more of these journals that just aren't currently listed in the MLA Directory of Periodicals—for example, there's the defunct Pynchon Notes (1979–2009; ISSN 0278-1891—homepage for back issues) about the still-living Thomas Pynchon. Still, it's a rare distinction. Specifying "academic journal" narrows the scope of the claim—for example, a fanzine dedicated to a living author would not count.

Improved to Good Article status by Blz 2049 (talk). Self-nominated at 03:06, 7 September 2023 (UTC). Post-promotion hook changes for this nom will be logged at Template talk:Did you know nominations/The Cormac McCarthy Journal; consider watching this nomination, if it is successful, until the hook appears on the Main Page.

• New, interesting GA that reads well and looks properly sourced. Hook is short, interesting and supported in the article and source. QPQ is done. The picture looks good and appears to be in the public domain, going by the info on Commons. Well done! Ffranc (talk) 11:21, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

Notability

I hate to pee on the party, as obviously a lot of effort has gone into this, but having looked at several references, I do not see how this is notable. It misses WP:NJOURNALS by a mile, nor do I see the in-depth coverage of the journal, as opposed to its subject sufficient to meet WP:GNG. Even the reference for the hook in the above DYK nomination is nothing more than an in-passing mention. Perhaps I have missed something, so before taking this to AfD, perhaps Mujinga or Blz_2049 can list those references that actually treat the journal in depth? Thanks! --Randykitty (talk) 16:16, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

• @Randykitty: I don't see how the journal misses the notability criteria "by a mile". As I read WP:JOURNALCRIT, The Cormac McCarthy Journal pretty clearly meets criterion 1 ("considered by reliable sources to be influential in its subject area"), criterion 2 ("the journal is frequently cited by other reliable sources"), and/or criterion 3 ("historically important in its subject area"). All of these criteria are considered relative to the field in question, which in this case is modern American literary studies. I discuss citation frequency and impact factor more below.
  You suggest WP:GNG requires "in-depth" treatment of the journal within at least one discrete source, divorced from any broader treatment of the journal's subject or subject area. But that's not the case. In-depth coverage of a journal within at least one single discrete source is not required, let alone coverage in isolation from the journal's subject matter. WP:GNG says "Significant coverage is more than a trivial mention, but it does not need to be the main topic of the source material" and "no fixed number of sources required since sources vary in quality and depth of coverage, but multiple [secondary] sources are generally expected". There's plenty of nontrivial treatment of the journal in scholarly and journalistic sources, and those that describe its impact within its field of study typically describe it as influential and important for its role in establishing McCarthy studies as a recognized author-specific area of scholarship within American lit studies.
  I don't know what point you're trying to make about the DYK hook reference. Not every cited source in a Wikipedia article must also therein establish its subject's notability. The primary criteria for selecting DYK hooks are verifiability and quirky tendency to elicit a general reader's curiosity, so I'm not sure why you seem to imply a DYK hook reference would be unusually more likely to justify its subject's notability. The fact is verifiable. The source is reliable. That's all they need to be for their purpose. This strikes me as an irrelevant point that just muddies the waters.
  In the GA review, you raised the issue of its low journal impact factor (JIF) in passing; I now take that comment to be an implicit concern about WP:JOURNALCRIT criterion 2. I get that a super-low JIF can be a red flag for journals, particularly for those in STEM fields. But a journal having a low impact factor is also not inherently disqualifying and doesn't make it non-notable. Its JIF doesn't measure, for example, citations to the journal in the many book-length treatments of McCarthy's work. As the University of Sussex Library notes of Arts and Humanities Journals: "In fields where monographs are the dominant format for scholarly communications, metrics based on journal citation data cannot convey a complete picture of journal impact." For what it's worth, the Journal Citation Reports assigns the journal a field-normalized journal citation indicator (JCI) was 2.62 for 2021 and 1.08 for 2022, where 1.0 represents the average citation count for a given category—meaning The Cormac McCarthy Journal has actually been performing a bit better than average within its field of American literature, citability-wise. This kind of contextualization between academic fields with different citation practices is exactly what JCR intended when they introduced the JCI metric: "Providing this information ... will increase exposure to journals from all disciplines, helping users to understand how they compare to more established sources of scholarly content. By incorporating field normalization into the calculation, the Journal Citation Indicator will also allow users to compare citation impact between disciplines more easily and fairly" ("Introducing the Journal Citation Indicator: A new, field-normalized measurement of journal citation impact", 2021). I've now added the JCI to the article for that reason. The Cormac McCarthy Journal may not be lighting the world on fire, but it's not nearly as deficient as a glance at its impact factor alone might suggest.
  Look, I'm not saying that this is the most significant journal ever or anything. I marked this article as low-importance within every WikiProject it falls under. But "low-importance" ≠ non-notable. —blz 2049 ➠ ❏ 00:40, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

• Wow, I didn't expect a wall of text in response to my simple question. So, just to pick a random assertion: on what source(s) is "those that describe its impact within its field of study typically describe it as influential and important" based? --Randykitty (talk) 09:44, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

• Re: "wall of text": Well... Yeah. You want to delete this thing I spent time on. And I don't think your challenge was so "simple", unless I'm meant to uncritically accept your premises and your selective interpretation of site policy, which I don't.
  Re: "on what source(s)": I recommend you read the article itself. You may compare the individual claims and citations there, where it counts. I'll admit that I didn't cite any particular source that can be quoted as saying "The Cormac McCarthy Journal is influential, prominently cited, and important enough to meet Wikipedia notability standards" in those exact words, nor do I (nor would I ever) use those exact words as such in article prose. But I'll respond to any specific challenge to the article prose itself. I'm not going to be drawn into this ridiculous shadowboxing.
  I'm curious what basis there is to exclude mention of any other possible scientometric index other than JIF. Is there policy to this effect? Because if so I haven't seen it cited so far. Maybe some users of a not-especially-active WikiProject deemed it so some time in the past, but I don't yet see why I'd have to accept some unstated consensus uncritically.
  Besides, I don't see what's so wrong with introducing one additional scientometric index. I understand that there are a variety of different proprietary measures, which makes it all the stranger that we seem to have picked one proprietary winner. I mean, are we sponsored by JIF™'s Clarivate?? Just kidding! Because, of course, Clarivate also provides JCI™, the index I'm trying to incorporate, so it's not even like I'm trying to smuggle in some wild unknown unproven party, let alone some untested competitor. This is literally the exact same institution, providing a different metric, a newer metric—one they've introduced to address criticisms and shortcomings of applying their own JIF to the exclusion of any others. Really feels like it would be unwise if we apply this single, admittedly limited measure—to a more exclusive, universal, exacting standard than its own proprietor advises—when we go about estimating significance. —blz 2049 ➠ ❏ 10:52, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

• OK, I take this as you saying that your assertion about the importance if this journal is not based on any source saying this, but on your synthesis of multiple in-passing mentions and such. Why don't you point me to your most important sources? If those are satisfactory, I'll leave this article alone. That will save us all the effort of an AFD. As for the JCI, there are two reasons, one (less important) practical: It's already difficult enough each year to update the IF, if we list more stats, that will become almost impossible. The second reason is more fundamental, though. WP is supposed to reflect what happens in the real world. Now I don't know about you, but I've never heard an author say "let's submit our important manuscript to the Journal of Foo, because it has a high CiteScore/JCI/SNIP/take your pick". Like it or loathe it, but the only thing that authors/science evaluators/grant reviewers/etc look at is the IF. It's not the function of WP to right this wrong (and I personally think it's a wrong), it's our function to reflect real life. --Randykitty (talk) 12:24, 12 September 2023 (UTC)