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Mass deletion of journal articles

A whole bunch of journal articles were deleted earlier today as "spam" (see User talk:KeepM for a list). I don't think this was warranted (even though from comments posted on that talk page you can see that I was less than happy with this person's editing). However, several articles had been cleaned up by me and the promotional content of the others was at most a line about "intended readership", which I habitually remove from journal articles as being promotional, although others here may even think that this does not pose a problem. In any case, there was nothing wrong with those articles that could not have been corrected with a few minutes of editing. If one looks at the reasoning on the talk page of the user who proposed all these speedies (User talk:ThatPeskyCommoner), it becomes clear that following this reasoning hundreds (or even a couple of thousand) of "our" stubs would be eligible for speedy deletion as spam. I am not sure how to handle this situation (and as I am currently on vacation, don't really want to spend any time to look into this either), but perhaps others here have an idea what, if anything, needs to be done. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 20:48, 26 September 2011 (UTC)

WOW that's a lot of journals all at once. Anyway we can get them all undeleted? Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 20:50, 26 September 2011 (UTC)
  • 53, I think... See also here. I guess we can ask the deleting admins (I think there were 2) to userfy them, but I'm not sure I want 53 articles to clean in my userspace... And some I had already gone over and removed anything promotional... --Guillaume2303 (talk) 21:04, 26 September 2011 (UTC)

I took a look at one of them, Vehicle System Dynamics (journal). A large fraction of the article consisted of a list of topics copied and pasted from the journal's web site. Based on this, I think we should be careful asking for these to be restored — I think it could easily have been deleted under G12 instead of G11. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:29, 26 September 2011 (UTC)

  • You're right. However, part of why I am upset is that some of these articles had already been cleaned up by me and still got deleted. Not having admin rights, I cannot see any more which ones these were and what I changed... Meanwhile, LeadSongDog has started the laborious task of re-creating these journals. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 08:43, 30 September 2011 (UTC)
  • I can see from User:KeepM's that this person was repeatedly given feedback about copyright violations and essentially ignored that feedback. The mass deletion is understandable. At the same time, I don't like to see Guillaume2303's work to be in vain either. I reccomend restoring only those articles that Guillaume2303 made acceptable according to Wikipedia standards (policies and guidelines). Other than that I can't see restoring the other ones, except one by one to ensure these are not copyright violations. Also, perhaps this user should be blocked, or be subject to editng restrictions until this person understands the problem and the mess that this creates.
Guillaume2303, perhaps you can cobble together a list of deleted articles that you copy edited from your contributions page, and then we can request that these be restored. I know it is extra work, and an editors time is valuable, but I think we are in the midst of a rock and a hard place regarding this matter. ---- Steve Quinn (talk) 13:56, 30 September 2011 (UTC)
  • Hi Steve, that won't work: once an article is deleted, any edits you made disappear from your contributions list. Forget about it, it's probably more work to dig those articles out than to re-do them. I don't recall putting in a lot of effort, as I was more than a bit irritated with KeepM (now blocked) myself. However, what still worries me is that even though an editor in good standing had gone through them, they still were deleted. Following the reasoning that was use here, many of our articles could be speedied as "spam", too. We must have hundreds of stubs with as only external link a link to the publisher and no other references... --Guillaume2303 (talk) 14:16, 30 September 2011 (UTC)
  • OK - now I see the problem. If the mass deletion was only based on the external link back to the journal web site as a reference, then that is a faulty rationale. It was not the correct thing to do. I guess I did not grasp the problem. Yes, I guess we must ensure that this does not happen to the rest of our articles. It would not be appropriate to "speedy delete" these as apam. How can we make sure this does not happen? ---- Steve Quinn (talk) 14:37, 30 September 2011 (UTC)
  • However, (I meant to add) I still think restoring the other articles one by one is best in order to ensure these are not copyright violations. It is unfortunate. ---- Steve Quinn (talk) 06:24, 2 October 2011 (UTC)

An editor at this article insists on including the full tables of contents (of both the English and German versions of the journal, no less). Some input from other members of this prject at the article's talk page would be helpful. Thanks. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 15:28, 5 October 2011 (UTC)

This could use some extra eyes. Amongst other things it is proposed that any journal issue with some form of press coverage should be explicitly mentioned in the article. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 20:08, 8 October 2011 (UTC)

Open Access - Task force under WikiProject Academic Journals, or separate WikiProject?

Hi, I would like to ask your opinion on how matters of Open Access should best be handled. As a basis for discussion, I have set up Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Proposals/Open Access but if you think it would all fit into WP:AJ, then I would be happy too. -- Daniel Mietchen - WiR/OS (talk) 09:38, 27 October 2011 (UTC)

Created via AfC. It could probably use some clean-up like a proper infobox. I note that it was declined once as non-notable, but I've accepted it because it seemed on par with other journal stubs with similar indexing. ASCIIn2Bme (talk) 16:12, 29 October 2011 (UTC)

By the way, found interesting ranking info for marketing journals

At http://statmath.wu.ac.at/projects/jcr/ Could be used in all the articles on journals of that kind. ASCIIn2Bme (talk) 19:59, 29 October 2011 (UTC)

Hi! As a new page patroller, I came across the new article, History of scholarship. So far, I don't see that it's varies enough from Scholarly method or that the information in History of scholarship can't be put into Scholarly method but this is admittedly not my area of expertise. This and Wikipedia:WikiProject Education are the closest Wikiprojects I could think of to ask to take a look at the article and attempt to determine if the subject warrants its own article or not. I don't care about the outcome as long as there's more eyes on it than mine and a newish editor. He's been around for a while but I'm not sure that he's very familiar with our policies and guidelines. Thanks for you time. OlYeller21Talktome 18:12, 29 October 2011 (UTC)

Surprisingly, this article was created only a few days ago, and it's a stub. There was some wrangling over the external links as well. ASCIIn2Bme (talk) 20:24, 29 October 2011 (UTC)

promotional templates?

Some editors add templates at the bottom of journal articles related to the publisher (see American Journal of Sexuality Education for an example). Although adding them to articles on the different companies that belong to the same conglomerate makes sense, I wonder whether it is not a bit promotional to add them to each and every article about the products of these companies (in this case, journals). This particular example brought back memories of a COI editor, who created articles on Informa journals a while ago and included to each article external links to the Informa publishing division and the Informa main headquarters site (which I all removed as being promotional). I'd be interested in the opinions of other editors here. Thanks. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 08:55, 31 October 2011 (UTC)

Can someone figure out if this is notable enough for Wikipedia? ASCIIn2Bme (talk) 14:27, 5 November 2011 (UTC)

WP Academic Journals in the Signpost

The WikiProject Report would like to focus on WikiProject Academic Journals for a Signpost article. This is an excellent opportunity to draw attention to your efforts and attract new members to the project. Would you be willing to participate in an interview? If so, here are the questions for the interview. Just add your response below each question and feel free to skip any questions that you don't feel comfortable answering. Multiple editors will have an opportunity to respond to the interview questions. If you know anyone else who would like to participate in the interview, please share this with them. Have a great day. -Mabeenot (talk) 04:49, 9 November 2011 (UTC)

Inclusion in journal databases

I just stumbled upon this tool, where it is easy to check in which databases a journal is included. I tried it out for "Genes, Brain and Behavior", but running a search on the full title didn't give any hits. When running a search on titles containing "genes", though, I got the journal and a list of databases including it. Might be useful to other people here, too. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 16:06, 18 November 2011 (UTC)

This is definitely very useful. For journals with punctuation in their titles (which presumably will not be consistently reproduced in all A+I databases), I'm getting better results by performing title searches in conjunction with print ISSNs, perhaps this will help? Luke.j.ruby (talk) 16:54, 18 November 2011 (UTC)

Hello. Does anyone object to deleting this stub I created? The person who added the speedy deletion tag removed some info I added, about Judith Butler sitting on their Advisory Board, and about the location of its editorial office.Zigzig20s (talk) 19:56, 2 December 2011 (UTC)

Correction The article was never tagged for speedy deletion, it was PRODded. Although nobody used the time provided by PROD to improve the article and add reliable sources, it was dePRODded, so now it is at AfD (not PROD). --Guillaume2303 (talk) 09:08, 7 December 2011 (UTC)

External references to validate Scopus-indexed journals

Can I request some advice on inserting an external reference which would serve to validate and verify a journal's inclusion in SCOPUS? I attempted to do this with the entry for the journal China Information by including details of its SCImago Journal Rank (as an alternative to an Impact Factor as provided by ISI) along with specific information on its ranking and which categories it is included in according to the SCImago journal indexes. This change was later undone because this information is "not normally included" in entries for academic journals, according to the user who chose to undo this revision, and so the name 'SCOPUS' is simply listed as one of the indexes in which this journal is included. Yet, a handful of the other academic journal entries that I have started have failed Notability because, despite being indexed in SCOPUS, I do not yet know of an accepted form or format for an external reference which could validate a journal's status as being indexed in this database.

Can someone please advise me on this as I would like to of an accepted and valid way to do this. Luke.j.ruby (talk) 11:33, 12 December 2011 (UTC)

  • There are many statistics around. For better or for worse, the only one that is generally accepted is the 2-year IF. I don't think that an encyclopedia should lead the way in the adoption of other statistics (such as those from SCImago), whatever their merits, but should reflect current usage. WP follows, it should not lead... To cite inclusion into Scopus, I'd cite their master list, as follows: <ref name=Scopus>{{cite book |year=2011 |chapter=List of titles |title=[[Scopus]] |publisher=[[Elsevier]] |accessdate=the date you accessed this |url=http://www.info.sciverse.com/documents/files/scopus-training/resourcelibrary/xls/title_list.xlsx |postscript=.}}</ref>. Hope this helps. BTW, which journal entries "have failed", despite being included in Scopus? Usually, we take inclusion there as satisfying our notability criteria. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 16:48, 12 December 2011 (UTC)

Although this is not really an academic journal, but a magazine, reference is being made to WP:NJournals. This AfD has up till now only few participants and could use some input from experienced editors here. Thanks. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 08:32, 22 December 2011 (UTC)

Economic and Environmental Studies

FYI: The article about the economical academic journal Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Economic and Environmental Studies is listed for deletion. Night of the Big Wind talk 01:22, 23 December 2011 (UTC)

There's a discussion going on at this article's talk page about the correct spelling of the name. Input from editors here is welcome. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 19:23, 15 January 2012 (UTC)

Predatory journals

There's a list of "predatory" open access journals (meaning, that they are for profit, charge authors exorbitant fees, and pay minimal attention to peer review and digital archiving) here. I guess this is probably not a reliable source but we might want to pay attention to it anyway. We may have some articles on journals by these publishers that do not indicate why one might want to avoid publishing in their journals, and we probably shouldn't be using them as reliable sources. —David Eppstein (talk) 16:13, 20 January 2012 (UTC)

  • I have seen this list a while ago and while I agree that this is perhaps not a reliable source that we can use, I agree with the classifications made (at least for those publishers that I am familiar with). The quality of some of these journals is abominable and their peer review is almost non-existent. I say almost, because some of them keep inviting me to review papers (as those are journals on business and management, botany, and whatnot and I am a neuroscientist, no need to guess about the care with which reviewers are selected...). --Guillaume2303 (talk) 16:40, 20 January 2012 (UTC)

International Journal of Communication

I started a stub on the International Journal of Communication of the University of Southern California. But there is also a different International Journal of Communication (India) published in India. Is the one in California more notable than the one in India, or are they equally notable? If they are equally notable I could make International Journal of Communication a disambig and move the content at "International Journal of Communication" to International Journal of Communication (United States) WhisperToMe (talk) 14:45, 23 January 2012 (UTC)

  • Will notify him. As for databases, I have some links that may be helpful on my userpage. But things depend a lot on what field the journal covers. For medical journals, MEDLINE is very authoritative, for example, but it has hardly any relevance outside of life science/medicine-related fields. In general, DOAJ or Google Scholar are absolutely not selective. Index Copernicus uses info provided by users (without apparently any checking) and is not a reliable source. Etc... --Guillaume2303 (talk) 15:47, 23 January 2012 (UTC)
  • If you know of "exclusive" databases that cover humanities/social sciences, please let me know. It might be good to post this info on the WikiProject main page, so people can determine right away which journals are certainly notable. WhisperToMe (talk) 15:55, 23 January 2012 (UTC)
Okay - In particular I want to start articles on Pacific Rim Law & Policy Journal and Journal of Media Law - Which databases do I check them against? WhisperToMe (talk) 18:13, 23 January 2012 (UTC)

Okay, since so many groups indes Pacific Rim Law & Policy Journal, I went ahead and started that article. WhisperToMe (talk) 04:54, 24 January 2012 (UTC)

I have a basic command of Chinese, so I started zh:环太平洋法律政策期刊杂志, a Chinese article about the Pacific journal. WhisperToMe (talk) 01:07, 25 January 2012 (UTC)

Academic journal (the article)

I just came across this edit [2] in the sub-section entitled "Prestige". Up until this edit I thought that the being percieved as an authority, or as an expert, and garnering presitge as a result of unintelligible communication is a myth. Yet the reference cited for this paragraph backs up the assertion to some degree (not a myth?).

Personally, I am assuming that the majority of researchers do not purposely attempt to be unintelligible or over-technical just to impress. I am guessing that most who publish papers would most likely strive for clarity, relying on their work to speak for itself. Does anyone else have any insight or knowledge pertaining to this matter? Should this be in the article based on this reference? The reference appears to have been cited about 75 times [3]. ---- Steve Quinn (talk) 02:47, 24 January 2012 (UTC)

I have nominated the article Society for the Academic Study of Magic for deletion due to its apparent lack of notability. References in the article are all links to its website or journal. It was tagged for notability over a year ago and this issue has not been resolved since then. --Smcg8374 (talk) 13:01, 23 January 2012 (UTC)

  • Does Ulrich's Periodical Directory mention it? Usually I start an article about an academic journal, even without secondary sources, if Ulrich's has it in the database. WhisperToMe (talk) 14:45, 23 January 2012 (UTC)
  • I searched the website of Anthropology News [5] using the phrases "Society for the Academic Study of Magic" and "Preternature: Critical and Historical Studies of the Preternatural" and returned no results. WhisperToMe, do you have a reference for what issue of Anthropology News discusses the journal? I'm not clear what you mean by "Abstracted / Indexed"? Looking at the website for the Society's current journal [6] it would appear that no issues have yet been published (although their previous journal did publish a number of issues, but this does not imply notability). --Smcg8374 (talk) 03:25, 24 January 2012 (UTC)
  • The reference for the Anthropology News came from Google Books - If you insert the string "Society for the Academic Study of Magic" into the search page, you will be directed here.
  • The citation I have is Anthropology News, Volume 45, Issues 1-5. American Anthropological Association, 2004. p. 48.
  • If a journal is "indexed" it means that the content is hosted by other databases. The field says "abstracted/indexed" so it could be abstracted, or indexed, or both.
  • WhisperToMe (talk) 03:49, 24 January 2012 (UTC)
  • Thanks for finding these WhisperToMe. For a journal to be considered notable there must be evidence that it is considered influential in its field by third parties or that it is frequently cited (see Wikipedia:Notability (academic journals)). The fact that it is listed in Ulrich's does not show that the journal is considered influential or that it has ever been cited. The article that has been proposed for deletion is about the Society, rather than their journal. A single mention in what appears to be a "current events" notice in Anthropology News does not constitute 'substantial coverage' of this organisation by independent parties and hence does not meet notability guidelines. Oddly enough, even though Google books has a screenshot with a mention of the Society, when I accessed Anthropology News through my university library, I could not find any reference to the Society in this journal. Page 48 of Vol. 45 did not match the Google Books screenshot at all. A search of the journal (via Wiley Online Library) again produced no results for the Society. The Google Books reference does not appear to be a reliable source as it cannot be verified against the original source. --Smcg8374 (talk) 04:29, 24 January 2012 (UTC)
  • Thanks for the report. That's strange that the book you found didn't seem to have it. Did you check the index to see if it could be on a different page? Also, Ulrichs says that it's indexed by EBSCOHost, H.W. Wilson, and OCLC. I know EBSCOHost is a major academic database. WhisperToMe (talk) 04:49, 24 January 2012 (UTC)
I added a line in the article about the scholarly databases that the journal is indexed in. However, I recognize that that doesn't necessarily make the journal (or its parent society) notable, so the article may still need to be deleted. Phoenixred (talk) 19:01, 26 January 2012 (UTC)

Hindawi

An interesting discussion is ongoing on Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard. Comments would be appreciated. Granateple (talk) 21:08, 25 January 2012 (UTC)

Elsevier Boycott

With the Elsevier Boycott now at 3607 signatures, a lot of academics are asking "What [domain] journals are published by Elsevier?". The closest we have is List of Elsevier periodicals and Category:Elsevier academic journals, and Category:Academic journals by subject area. It is possible to do category intersections link Elsevier Anthropology journals, but this depends on good categorisation. What else can we do to improve public information the researchers need to make in order to decide whether they can sign the boycott? John Vandenberg (chat) 03:11, 4 February 2012 (UTC)

  • We could re-organize the "List of Elsevier periodicals" according to subject. I have to say, though, that your motivation for doing this is not "encyclopedic", we're not here to help people decide whether or not they can (or want to) sign a boycott, but to provide information :-) (And I have to add that I find that many academics partaking in the debates about OA, subscriptions rates, Elsevier's business strategy, etc. don't seem to be hampered by any detailed knowledge about what publishing entails... But that's another discussion and this is not the place for it). --Guillaume2303 (talk) 12:51, 4 February 2012 (UTC)
This is as good a place as any to have the discussion. Wikipedia has a direct interest in more accessibility to scholarly literature, and we should be supporting the movement if possible. And, Guillaume2303 - having done a bit of work over at the academic publishing article and a fair bit of research on the topi (for example, I largely drafted Academic_publishing#Publishers_and_business_aspects - see diff), I'd be interested in hearing your "other side of the story". II | (t - c) 19:04, 4 February 2012 (UTC)
More accessible journals is off course of Wikipedia interest. But that is not an issue at the boycott. High prices are the main topic. Unfortunately, I do not get the idea that someone has looked into what the costs and profitability are of those journals. Lower prices can mean two things: less quality or less journals. Night of the Big Wind talk 19:28, 4 February 2012 (UTC)
  • Or "less bang for the buck". Informa Healthcare sells the Journal of Neurogenetics for about 1600 dollars and you get 4 issues with (last year) 206 printed pages. You buy Brain Research from Elsevier and, yes, you pay 20K$, but last year you got for that money 59 volumes with 100-300 pages each. I know which one I find more expensive... And as far as OA goes: I have been EIC of a journal established in late 2001. For 8 years the publisher had to pour money into it and only now is it starting to get into the black (with probably 10-20 more years before it breaks even). If that same journal would receive $2500/article in OA fees, it would have been profitable years ago (actually, from the start; even Brain Research with 15-30 articles per issue would still rake in a lot of $$$ if it were completely OA). OA does not necessarily mean that academia as a whole pays less. Publisher have to make a living one way or another and OA an be very profitable (witness Springer's acquisition of BioMedCentral and the many shady OA publishers popping up all over the world). What I am afraid of is that my university will some day decide that, "hey, everything is for free online" and cut the library budget drastically. Those who think that the saved money would go to my lab's budget are dreaming, too many bean-counters are looking for savings. So the cost of publishing, up till now coming from the library budget, will now have to come out of my lab's budget. That's so much less money that I can use to do research. And don't forget that under the subscription model, there is a large contribution of industry towards financing the academic publishing enterprise (at least in the sicences, thigns may be different in the social sciences and humanities), which will decrease dramatically under an OA model, for the simple reason that industry is, relatively speaking, a larger consumer of publications than it is a producer. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 16:11, 8 February 2012 (UTC)

I do not propose that we support the Elsevier boycott. However there is a boycott, and academics are asking a reasonable question about academic journals, and it is information we can provide. I've found a few Elsevier journals which we're not in Category:Elsevier academic journals. John Vandenberg (chat) 22:43, 4 February 2012 (UTC)

Open access wikiprojects

Wikipedia:WikiProject Open Access has started recently, and there is some OA pages currently located at Wikipedia:GLAM/Open Knowledge Foundation Germany/Open Access Catalogue. John Vandenberg (chat) 00:09, 5 February 2012 (UTC)

As of today, there is only 1 vote in this AfD (not by a project member), so more opinions from knowledgeable editors here would be very welcome. Thanks! --Guillaume2303 (talk) 09:49, 5 February 2012 (UTC)

WorldCat journal list

I'm not sure how long this WorldCat journal list has been available. It contains 49868 (A-L) + 35967 (M-Z) = 85835 journal names with ISSNs. John Vandenberg (chat) 11:57, 8 February 2012 (UTC)

Elsevier sponsored journals

We have an article about Australasian Journal of Bone & Joint Medicine, which I dont think is notable as a "journal". None of the other journals mentioned at Elsevier#Sponsored journals have an article. I think there are two possible 'notable' aspects: the Australian legal civil case about this, and the "Elsevier Australian fake journal scandal" consisting of all the journals involved.

We also have an article about EMBASE and Excerpta Medica, which are responsible for this.

Excerpta Medica says it was acquired by Elsevier in 1971.

According to a press release, on 7 October 2010 Excerpta Medica was acquired by Adelphi (dab page) Worldwide, which is somehow related to Diversified Agency Services (DAS), a division of Omnicom Group. John Vandenberg (chat) 05:57, 4 February 2012 (UTC)

  • As far as I recall (but my memory is not always reliable and I didn't have time to check the sources), this particular journal was the first one to be covered in the press. So there are significant third-party sources on this one, whereas the others only received in-passing mentions in those sources (but please correct me if I'm wrong). Hence, ths meets WP:GNG, although I agree that if it weren't for the scandal, this journal would not meet WP:NJournals. What do you propose, merging this to the article on Excerpta Medica? --Guillaume2303 (talk) 12:54, 4 February 2012 (UTC)
    (this and this are good reminders of what happened) I havent been able to find any significant mentions of the other Australasian journals.
    Excerpta Medica was previously involved in a Wyeth-Ayerst medical ghostwriting scandal[7], and a smaller Johnson & Johnson one.[8]
    I am concerned that we would only be adding negative content to Excerpta Medica, and the negative events would all belong to the company before they were sold. Many of the pre-2010 Excerpta Medica websites and products are still owned by Elsevier (such as http://ThrombosisClinic.com/). Excerpta Medica website only mentions USA,UK and NL offices; no Australian office, so maybe the office responsible for Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine was sold off to someone else, or it still belongs to Elsevier..? John Vandenberg (chat) 02:39, 5 February 2012 (UTC)
AJBJM certainly is notable in the Wikipedia sense because of all the brouhaha that it caused. It's just not notable for the same reason Journal of Physics G is notable, but there's no real problem with that. Concerning Excerpta Medica having pattern of being a shitty publishers, if this can be established (as backed up by third party sources, and not just our own findings), then that should definitely be in the article about EM. If there's no real pattern, or no one really bothered to make a fuss about it, then I'd find it hard to justify inclusion of that material. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 17:46, 24 February 2012 (UTC)

Articles about states of journal article development

We have preprint, postprint, electronic article, etc that are all in need of some attention. It may even be worth considering a merge. Ideas? LeadSongDog come howl! 22:02, 19 February 2012 (UTC)

Teylers Challenge: academic journals

Allow me to draw your attention to the Wiki Project Teylers: a collaboration between Wikipedia and Teylers Museum (Haarlem, the Netherlands) to improve the content of articles related to Teylers Museum and its collections: Wikipedia:GLAM/Teylers/Multilingual_Challenge. Established in 1778, Teylers Museum was originally founded as a centre for contemporary art and science. Two scientific societies were established as part of the museum Teylers First or Theological Society, intended for the study of religion and Teylers Second Society, which was to concern itself with physics, poetry, history, drawing and numismatics. Both societies organized essay competitions and published their own proceedings: Verhandelingen van Teylers Eerste Genootschap (Proceedings of Teylers First Society) and Verhandelingen van Teylers Tweede Genootschap (Proceedings of Teylers Second Society). You can find more information on the history of Teylers Museum (and the societies) on a special website:Teylers Universe 1778-1826. From the late 18th century Teylers Museum has actively collected academic journals. For the Teylers Challenge we are still looking for people who'd be interested in writing / expanding articles on the museum's collection of academic journals! The museum can supply pictures and sources. Gjjanse (talk) 12:14, 28 February 2012 (UTC)

Could you provide a list of journals in their collection? John Vandenberg (chat) 07:32, 29 February 2012 (UTC)
They basically have uninterrupted journal subscriptions dating from 1778, including the philosophical transactions of the royal society in london. They bought new materials up to about 1940, when finances degraded due to WWII. Their own journal "verhandelingen...Teylers..." is itself quite notable. Jane (talk) 00:01, 6 March 2012 (UTC)
Among the journals in the Teylers Collection are complete editions of most of the 18th and 19th century learned societies and academies in Europe (London, Paris, Munich, Berlin, Vienna, Turin, Bologna, Genua, Lisbon etc). Notable are indeed the Proceedings of the two Teyler Societies used to publish the winning entries on the yearly essay competition of Teylers Eerste Genootschap and Teylers Tweede Genootschap: Verhandelingen van Teylers Eerste Genootschap(>1781), Verhandelingen van Teylers Tweede Genootschap (>1781) and the Archives du Musee Teyler (>1868). Teylers Museum also holds complete editions of the other three important 18th century Dutch Societies: Verhandelingen van het Bataafsch Genootschap (Rotterdam), Verhandelingen van de Hollandsche Maatschappij (Haarlem) and Verhandelingen van het Zeeuws Genootschap (Middelburg).Gjjanse (talk) 14:33, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

Proposing Edits to Bloomberg Law

Hey, I wanted to propose some changes to the Bloomberg Law article. It has been flagged for needing to be "wikified" so I tried to tackle a draft that would accomplish that. I've added a few sections that I thought best organize and explain the service. I tried to find assistance in the WikiProject:Law talk page with no luck. I would appreciate it if someone could take a look at my draft and, if found appropriate, please implement the edits into the article. My draft can be found in my sandbox here:User:RivBitz/Bloomberg_Law_Sandbox Thanks --RivBitz (talk) 19:23, 7 March 2012 (UTC)

  • Apart from some layout issues (see WP:MOS) your version looks fine and seems indeed to be an improvement over the (rather bad) existing version. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 14:38, 8 March 2012 (UTC)
    • I appreciate your feedback. I work on behalf of Bloomberg L.P. and realize that creates a conflict of interest with this article. (I have acknowledged the COI on the COI noticeboard here). To abide by Wiki guidelines on this issue, would you mind adding the edits to the existing article? Thanks!--RivBitz (talk) 18:35, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

Office locations of academic journal publications

What do you guys think about mentioning the locations of the offices of academic journal publications? With articles about other publications, like newspapers, magazines, etc. of all sizes, we would mention where their administrative offices are located. Therefore I believe the same should be the case for academic journals, if the office location is clearly stated.

For instance, one journal, Pacific Rim Law & Policy Journal, has its offices in the Law Library of William Gates Hall in the University of Washington ("Lowery C. Mounger, Jr. Pacific Rim Law & Policy Journal Suite - Room L180-183") - http://www.law.washington.edu/Gateshall/NamedSpace.aspx - The journal is a publication of the UW law school, which is based out of Gates Hall. The law library also houses the digital archives of the publication: http://www.law.washington.edu/PacRim/Issues/Default.aspx

For previous discussion, please see User_talk:Guillaume2303#Addresses_and_journals WhisperToMe (talk) 00:17, 29 February 2012 (UTC)

  • As WhisperToMe has linked to the preceding discussion, I won't repeat those arguments either. Just my position in a nutshell: For most academic journals, the "editorial offices" consist of the editors desk, whereever he may be in the world at any particular moment (editorial offices are almost exclusively electronic nowadays). For student-edited journals (mostly law reviews) that is perhaps a bit different, but in the case of the PRL&PJ, the article mentions that it is edited by students at the UoW. Exactly what building houses their offices seems rather trivial and unencyclopedic to me, even in this case where the offices can perhaps be located more precisely. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 09:37, 29 February 2012 (UTC)
    • I agree that listing the location of every journal's editorial office would not be encyclopedic. The mention that PRL&PJ is edited by students at UoW seems like sufficient information, while mentioning Gates Hall would be too much. And what if they moved? By clicking on "Official website" and then "Contact Us", an interested reader can find their current (and, presumably, more frequently updated) location in two clicks. Likewise, in IA, The Journal of the Society for Industrial Archeology, Guillaume2303 nicely integrated the academic affiliation of its editor into the text. The fact that Dr. Quivik's desk is located in Academic Office Building 5 seems not worth mentioning. Martindelaware (talk) 12:25, 29 February 2012 (UTC)
      • Based on the documents I found, and the e-mail I received, the office space is not the desk of a particular person, but rather a space dedicated to the journal itself. As for "And what if they moved?" - You just document the reliable sources as they come, i.e. there would be an announcement that X office is moving to Y location. WhisperToMe (talk) 16:14, 2 March 2012 (UTC)
  • Put me down in the 'don't see the benefits of this' column. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 13:59, 29 February 2012 (UTC)
  • I do not think one general policy is appropriate here. Academic journals differ from one another, some still have an editorial team (e.g. language editor, et cet), some do not. This is definitely not the most important piece of information, but I see no reason not to mention it in some cases (when sourced and appropriate). Sasha (talk) 15:19, 29 February 2012 (UTC)
    • New information: I e-mailed a person involved with the journal and she said that the office makes the students do editing work in that suite. I asked her if I could re-post her exact words on here; I have not received a response to that e-mail yet WhisperToMe (talk) 01:17, 2 March 2012 (UTC)
  • The e-mail isn't actually being cited as a source. The source would be the same one as I said above. But the e-mail, rather, is useful in disproving the assertion that the room is unimportant to the operation of the journal, as you guessed would be the case. This discredits the basis for your argument that the room stated in the link is unimportant. You said "For most academic journals, the "editorial offices" consist of the editors desk, whereever he may be in the world at any particular moment (editorial offices are almost exclusively electronic nowadays)." but there is no source saying this is the case for this journal, and the e-mail I got says this isn't the case for this journal, therefore that statement cannot apply to this journal in any sense. WhisperToMe (talk) 16:06, 2 March 2012 (UTC)
  • My point is and remains that this is an utterly trivial bit of info. Are we also going to mention whether they use Windows or Macs? What manuscript-submission software? Whether they perhaps use WordPerfect? What color wall paper? All absolutely trivial. The only thing worth mentioning is that it is edited at that university. Who cares in what building/floor/room. It's like mentioning in Obama's bio that he likes two lumps of sugar in his coffee (or none, whatever may be the case). Even though we might have reliable sources for this (interviewers often mention this kind of tidbits), nobody would deem that encyclopedic information worthy of inclusion either. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 16:22, 2 March 2012 (UTC)
  • Firstly, the location of an organization with a fixed office is a notable characteristic, and I believe there is broad support for this. XXX NGO is based in WWW building in Washington DC, YYY company based in Suite RRR in Building UUU in Atlanta, ZZZZ magazine offices are based in Dallas, etc. etc. - It should be no different for an academic journal with a fixed publication office. Secondly, to my knowledge color wall paper, manuscript submission software, etc. etc. would not be published. If somehow the detail/importance of the wallpaper was emphasized, it would be in an article about the building itself, and that would go in the University of Washington campus article. If the software got only a "trivial mention" in a source, then it would not be mentioned. It would only be mentioned if somehow there was a source saying "XXX program is really important for what we do, because of W, Y, and Z" - At the River Oaks Baptist School I included information from a source that discussed the kind of e-mail software they used.
  • Plus the basic questions of knowledge are: Who, What, Where, When, and Why - And a Wikipedia article should answer these questions. The "Where" is crucial for this article since it's a publication of the University of Washington Law School, which is based in the same building that houses the journal offices.
  • WhisperToMe (talk) 16:27, 2 March 2012 (UTC)
  • The "where" has been answered (University of Washington Law School) satisfactorily. And from this discussion it seems that you are the only one advancing the position that more detail is needed. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 17:03, 2 March 2012 (UTC)
  • Firstly, the comments other than yours that say "I don't see the benefit" may not take into account the revelation that the offices are not "traveling" and are the editing rooms - Secondly Sasha said "I do not think one general policy is appropriate here. Academic journals differ from one another, some still have an editorial team (e.g. language editor, et cet), some do not. This is definitely not the most important piece of information, but I see no reason not to mention it in some cases (when sourced and appropriate)." - Therefore you will have to wait and see if the participants come back and re-evaluate their positions.
  • Secondly, you said "The "where" has been answered (University of Washington Law School) satisfactorily. " - but the where also needs to include Gates Hall, as the law office controls the journal, Gates Hall has the law department, the editing takes place in Gates Hall. The law department is crucial to the journal. Gates Hall is the where for the law department. So Gates Hall is the where for this journal.
  • WhisperToMe (talk) 18:14, 2 March 2012 (UTC)
  • If you think that previous participants may have changed their minds you'll have to ask them to tell us here. Until they do so, I think the consensus is clear here and this discussion is over as far as I am concerned. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 18:58, 2 March 2012 (UTC)
In general, the location only matters to the extent that it may affect the content of the journal. For instance, if it is published in Vatican City or Bethesda Naval Hospital that might just bear on the objective neutrality it brings to certain topics. But for the vast majority of journals and topics, the location imports nothing more than trivia. Given wp:NOTDIRECTORY, the tendency of journals to relocate every few years, and the ease of looking up addresses elsewere should that become necessary, I'd suggest we need a good reason to mention them. An obvious exception is where the journal name relates to the place (e.g. Guy's Hospital Reports).LeadSongDog come howl! 20:47, 2 March 2012 (UTC)
1. About your point about previous participants, I was waiting for them to come back, but if they make no further response or do not explain why they still are against it, then I would ask the community to consider the replies outdated. The general principle I have learned is that if you can find new information that contradicts earlier arguments, those arguments cannot be taken into account, and the users who made these arguments have to go back and re-evaluate their points.
2. Taking into account wp:NOTDIRECTORY, there are times when seemingly "directory-like" things are crucial and important aspects. I would like to refer you to Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Schools/Archive_21#University_housing_for_families_and_school_zoning
3. It wouldn't make sense for this one to relocate (except maybe within the building it is already in). It is edited by the University of Washington Law School. The law department is based out of Gates Hall. I started William H. Gates Hall (Seattle) and I found the whole raison d'etre behind this facility is so the law school would have one facility for all of its departments. If the law school was to switch buildings, then the journal would. You said "An obvious exception is where the journal name relates to the place (e.g. Guy's Hospital Reports)." - Gates Hall is the designated law school building, and this is talking about a law journal, yes?
Gillaume says "For most academic journals, the "editorial offices" consist of the editors desk, whereever he may be in the world at any particular moment (editorial offices are almost exclusively electronic nowadays)." - This is clearly not the case for this one.
Then "For student-edited journals (mostly law reviews) that is perhaps a bit different, but in the case of the PRL&PJ, the article mentions that it is edited by students at the UoW. Exactly what building houses their offices seems rather trivial and unencyclopedic to me, even in this case where the offices can perhaps be located more precisely." - Based on the history of the building, and its raison d'etre, its impact on the law review and its departments is not trivial.
Martindelaware's point "And what if they moved?" is clarified by what I found. It would be a major development if the law department was to move, or if it outgrew Gates Hall.
WhisperToMe (talk) 22:19, 2 March 2012 (UTC)
  • I still don't think that the building in which this particular journal is edited passes the sniff test for notability, and if it were to change in the future, it would create an article maintenance issue. The statement that "It wouldn't make sense for this one to relocate" is based on speculation and not a convincing defense. Martindelaware (talk) 23:36, 2 March 2012 (UTC)
  • WP:SPECULATION says "Individual scheduled or expected future events should only be included if the event is notable and almost certain to take place." and "Wikipedia is not a collection of unverifiable speculation." - So it cannot be based on unsourced hunches. This Seattle Post-Intelligencer source says "Named in honor of William H. Gates, a 1950 alum, philanthropist and father-of-Bill, the new building increases the size of the law school by a third, gathering faculty, staff and students under one roof for the first time in 20 years." - The University of Washington says the same thing - That to me is not a violation of WP:SPECULATION to say it is likely to stay there, because the reliable sources clearly stated that the purpose is to house all of the law school. If they were going to not stay there, you would need a source saying so.
  • "and if it were to change in the future, it would create an article maintenance issue." - It would not be difficult to maintain. Academic departments do not frequently move to new buildings. While maintenance is a concern, things like US Census numbers, etc. are posted anyway, even though they have to be maintained.
  • WhisperToMe (talk) 04:16, 3 March 2012 (UTC)
  • This is going to be absolutely my very last contribution to this senseless discussion. People only sometimes come back to a discussion if there is something new or interesting. That is not the case here: the localization in Gates Hall never really was in doubt. I don't know much about buildings, so perhaps if you write an article about this building, then the trivial tidbit that the desks of this journal stand in it may be something to mention. Apart from keeping said desks dry, there is not a shred of evidence that this journal would be affected in any meaningful way if it were located in John Doe Hall. That's the difference with LeadSongDog's example: for that journal it would be a big difference if it were published in a different hospital, just as for this journal it would make a difference if it were published at, say, Yale University. In any case, if people don't come back here, that's because nothing of import has been added to this discussion, necessitating them to change their minds. By arbitrarily claiming that their opinions are outdated, you can drag this on ad infinitum, each time you bring up another argument. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 00:07, 3 March 2012 (UTC)
    • "People only sometimes come back to a discussion if there is something new or interesting." - I strongly believe that I have presented new material that needs to be considered. If one chooses not to re-evaluate new material, one's comments will become dated.
    • "That is not the case here: the localization in Gates Hall never really was in doubt." - The very first sentence, you said " For most academic journals, the "editorial offices" consist of the editors desk, whereever he may be in the world at any particular moment (editorial offices are almost exclusively electronic nowadays). For student-edited journals (mostly law reviews) that is perhaps a bit different, but in the case of the PRL&PJ, the article mentions that it is edited by students at the UoW." - so, yes, it was in doubt. Not the address/location, but the significance of the role of the building - I feel frustrated by the continued insistence that the address is not notable even after I mentioned the e-mail which said it was important to the functions of the journal.
    • "so perhaps if you write an article about this building, then the trivial tidbit that the desks of this journal stand in it may be something to mention." - William H. Gates Hall (Seattle) - And in my view the argument that it's a "trivial" mention is less convincing because I have been able to make a very well detailed article on this building.
    • "Apart from keeping said desks dry, there is not a shred of evidence that this journal would be affected in any meaningful way if it were located in John Doe Hall." - There is evidence.
      • This source from the UW Student newspaper: "There are many benefits to this centralized location, said Paula Littlewood, assistant dean of the School of Law. She said it would enhance the ability of students and faculty members to work together. In addition, it will enhance the collaboration with other programs at the UW."
      • This article about moving the law library talks about the effects of the old location: "Worst of all, the law school was built off the main campus by four blocks, and the lack of integration between it and the rest of campus impeded collaboration efforts" - This letter to the editor states that a school official said he wanted collaboration on Asian affairs, so the new location was desirable. I'm looking for another source that is saying exactly what this guy said.
      • This Seattle Post-Intelligencer source says "Intended to be the first of two phases, it was never expanded, forcing the dispersion of departments outside the school as it grew." (this refers to the building used before Gates) - it is framed as a bad thing. The article then says "Named in honor of William H. Gates, a 1950 alum, philanthropist and father-of-Bill, the new building increases the size of the law school by a third, gathering faculty, staff and students under one roof for the first time in 20 years." - Having all departments under the same roof is framed as a good thing
      • University of Washington says "For the first time in 30 years, all the programs of the School wil [sic] be under one roof--the library, the classrooms, the School's nine clinics and the offices of administration."
    • WhisperToMe (talk) 04:16, 3 March 2012 (UTC)

Does anyone have examples of articles where the physical office location is an important element within the prose, and is well sourced with relevance in mind? (i.e. WP:UNDUE) John Vandenberg (chat) 07:07, 3 March 2012 (UTC)

Of any company/organization/institution? American Airlines#Headquarters, Continental Airlines#Headquarters, Houston Chronicle#Headquarters, Air France#Head office WhisperToMe (talk) 07:46, 3 March 2012 (UTC)
Note: I was asking about a physical office of a journal, not any institution. John Vandenberg (chat) 22:08, 10 March 2012 (UTC)
The Sunday Houston Chronicle has a circulation of nearly a million and the newspaper completely filled its headquarters building before its presses were decommissioned. I can't tell what the circulation of the PRL&PJ is, but it occupies several offices in a building with other uses. I don't think the comparison of a law journal to airline corporations with billions in assets is apt. Martindelaware (talk) 11:59, 3 March 2012 (UTC)
Alright - So what if I used a much smaller organization as an example? Wilmer_Hutchins_ISD#Headquarters - BTW: I don't know which elementary school it was, but if I had access to microfilm at Dallas libraries I probably could figure out which one. WhisperToMe (talk) 18:09, 3 March 2012 (UTC)
My opinion on the location of editorial offices of journals hasn't changed. It's useless trivia for 99%+ of journals. The only time it's relevant is for the rather big journals, with rather significant histories, but even then that's usually a concern about the publisher, or the editor in chief's affiliation, rather than the editorial office per se. Where the mail lands when you send something to Icarus is rather irrelevant. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 15:11, 3 March 2012 (UTC)
I can understand that the mailbox is not particularly noteworthy for the "99%" of journals. Here I am trying to argue for inclusion for the "1%" who do have editorial offices at the location. For those ones, I'm scouring the UW websites for the possibility that information specifically about these offices has been published. If that is the case then I think that would give an ironclad case for mentioning the editorial offices of those journals.
To your knowledge, what is the largest (in staff size) academic journal? Presumably it would be one of those "1%" of journals. I could see if I can find details about its offices.
P.S., Gillaume above used "What color wall paper?" as an example of a trivial detail. It turns out the Gates building had an architecture review done in a Seattle newspaper, and the architecture critic commented on the colors of the walls: William_H._Gates_Hall_(Seattle)#Architecture - Something like that detail wouldn't go in the journal article itself (unless a source mentions that the journal offices are really that unique compared to the rest of the building), but the idea is that someone can click the link and learn about the general aspects of the building itself.
WhisperToMe (talk) 18:24, 3 March 2012 (UTC)
  • I guess your latest post means that Headbomb's last comment is now outdated and can be ignored by the community, unless he confirms that he still hasn't changed his mind? What about "no" is so difficult to understand? Or are you just trying to wear everybody here down? The consensus is that this type of information is not encyclopedic and should not be included in journal articles. Stop wasting out time, please. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 18:49, 3 March 2012 (UTC)
    • Guillaume, I think the discussion had been progressing quite amicably, thank you.
    • Since the e-mails and the building's notability have surfaced, the other posters still argued that the publishing house locations are not notable. Anyway, I don't know why you had such a hostile reaction to "last comment is now outdated" - It's how discussions work on here. It's how AFD works, it's how DRV works, etc. etc. It's not so much the community "ignores" the previous post, so much as the community acknowledges that the points made were no longer valid (I.E. Guy A says "not enough sources," Guy B posts fifteen in-depth articles from an academic journal, so Guy A now has to respond to what Guy B posted). That's how it is, Guillaume.
    • Finally you say "The consensus is that this type of information is not encyclopedic and should not be included in journal articles." - This seems to be a consensus among a small set of editors (unless somebody posted about this on a noticeboard somewhere) - I have no plans to do this at the moment, but remember that a person who is told "no" by a small group of editors who feels he/she has a case can always go to Request for comment or any of the relevant noticeboards to get opinions from the wider community. If I find a source that talks in detail about the editorial offices of any academic journal, then I would then strongly advocate for inclusion of such information.
    • WhisperToMe (talk) 19:00, 3 March 2012 (UTC)
  • Comment: I found PLoS One is the world's largest journal. And the growth of that journal forced the parent organization, PLoS to move its headquarters. This PLoS announcement says: "We need to move because we’ve simply outgrown our existing location. With the rapid growth of PLoS ONE (soon to become the word’s largest journal) and the increasing volume of articles sent to PLoS following the NIH mandate (with hopefully more to come if the Federal Research Public Access Act becomes law), we need to get ready to expand even more." - So, I believe at least, in PLoS's case, the journal headquarters should be mentioned because of this. WhisperToMe (talk) 20:05, 3 March 2012 (UTC)
  • Although I already now know it won't make any difference, one more comment about PLoS ONE: I am actually one of the "academic editors" of this journal and so is my wife. I edit articles for that journal from my office (not anywhere near the PLoS ONE "headquarters". My wife edits mostly from home. And lest my office and our house now become part of the PLoS ONE article: there are about 4000 academic editors all over the world. They edit, they decide who gets to review what and what gets published. The main office (not the editorial office, but basically the publisher's office) checks whether submissions are complete and takes care of the production side of the journal. As for the consensus: you came here to ask for people's opinion, probably expecting they would go your way. Now that they don't, this is suddenly "just a small group of editors". If that is so, then why come here in the first place? And this is really my last comment here, you've worn me out. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 21:34, 3 March 2012 (UTC)
Firstly, Wikipedia assigns importance to a thing based on what sources one can find that discuss to the topic. I understand you personally may feel it's not important based on your personal experience. But if someone finds reliable sources (especially secondary ones) which bring up the topic and/or discuss the topic in detail, then the likelihood that the said aspect is given importance increases. Maybe next week or later this week I will go through a journal article and/or a book (if I can obtain them, the journal article is about Condon Hall and the book I think is about Dan Fenno Henderson, who started the Pac Rim Journal) and see what they discuss. If you are curious about how or why sources affect notability of a particular subject, please see the archives of a dispute that I was involved with, and see how sources affected its outcome: Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Schools/Archive_21#University_housing_for_families_and_school_zoning
I'm sorry to hear that you are worn out - but discussions can take a long time and/or involve lots of arguments. From my experience it's just how things go.
"As for the consensus: you came here to ask for people's opinion, probably expecting they would go your way. Now that they don't, this is suddenly "just a small group of editors". If that is so, then why come here in the first place?" - A dispute can start between two people. If that fails you go to a larger group of people (say a WikiProject). It's okay to go to a smaller group of people involved in a particular subject to ask for an opinion from them. But if that fails one can go larger - one can go to a noticeboard or an RFC. (you can't go to a similarly small group of people, or else that is inappropriate WP:Canvassing) I did not want to start an RFC right away, and usually one does not start an RFC right away. One starts small and goes gradually larger and larger if the dispute isn't solved. From my experience, the general practice for dispute resolution is to start small, then gradually work up.
Yes, I did expect to get the view that it is notable. :)
WhisperToMe (talk) 21:36, 7 March 2012 (UTC)
Update: I did do some searches for content about PLoS offices. I have not located any new sources that discuss these matters. With no sources discussing these things, there would be no discussion of the administrative offices in the PLoS journals WhisperToMe (talk) 14:27, 9 March 2012 (UTC)
Where the internal administrative day-to-day operation of a journal's publisher happens is irrelevant. The rest is factoid. We're not about to include every announcement a journal makes in our articles (e.g. http://blogs.plos.org/plos/2012/02/new-data-sources-added-to-article-level-metrics/). Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 15:29, 4 March 2012 (UTC)
"Where the internal administrative day-to-day operation of a journal's publisher happens is irrelevant." - Sources frequently discuss administrative day to day operations of organizations in relation to the organization's subsidiaries and/or products. If I find a source discussing the internal administrative day to day operations of the publisher and it has to do with its effect on the journal, or the journal's affect on the publisher, then in regards to the journal it is relevant. WhisperToMe (talk) 21:39, 7 March 2012 (UTC)
  • Outside comment I think it's normal and desirable to mention general locations, such as the city the headquarters are located in or the organization they're within. This provides useful information to the reader (What country is this publication based in? What organizations are they dependent on?). But I don't think I'd provide detailed locations, because readers don't need a street address and don't really learn anything encyclopedic about the publication from the specific building name/floor number/room number. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:38, 4 March 2012 (UTC)
    • From what I understood, posting a street address within the body of the article is too directory-like (it can be within a citation, and I often do put street addresses in citations), just like how phone numbers shouldn't be included in the article body. But on many occasions I have found sourced information regarding building locations and I've operated under the idea that buildings are to be specified (while street addresses are not). With publications, they are not always in the same building as the parent organization, i.e. the Houston Chronicle has its headquarters in Downtown Houston but the Spanish newspaper, La Voz de Houston, has its offices in a different Chronicle facility, a manufacturing plant to the west.
    • Anyway, for the Pacific Rim journal, after the discussion unfolded, the consensus here is that if the only source are the directory pages, then the building should not be specified, even though there is substantial activity at the office (first find) and the building itself is notable (second find). Even though the contents of the e-mail convinced me that the office is notable in relation to the building, I'm aware that I cannot use the e-mail as a formal source for an article. What I'll do is see if I can find a published source (preferably secondary) that either explains the significance or relationship that the building has with the journal, and if I do find it, I will let you know.
    • WhisperToMe (talk) 20:38, 4 March 2012 (UTC)
By way of example, this entry for PLos One in the NLM index gives a city, but not a street address. Likewise for N Eng J Med and for Lancet. And that is in an index catalogue. Less established journals and many societies' journals regularly switch publishing houses. To avoid recentism, articles would need to list all the various addresses over the years if they were to list any. It is simply a bad idea to list overly wp:PRECISE addresses. In the case of this particular review, the sources might justify a statement to the effect that it moved from off- to on-campus for proximity to the library, but is even that really noteworthy to a general reader? My above mention of Guy's Hospital Reports as a counter-example should have been obvious in its meaning, but evidently wasn't: the journal takes its name from the institution, so the place is relevant to the article. LeadSongDog come howl! 18:39, 9 March 2012 (UTC)
I work on "headquarters" sections dealing with many companies, particularly international airlines. I am aware that locations change, and so to avoid recentism I do try to list past and previous locations - i.e. Continental Airlines#Headquarters lists the company headquarters from the start until the consolidation with United. Sirna Therapeutics (a very tiny company) has something similar. For airlines, Flightglobal.net is a great resource for that since it lists many past addresses (since about 1968) and locations (since the 1940s/1950s?) of airline companies. For all types of organizations I use web.archive.org (1995-) and Google Books (older).
"In the case of this particular review, the sources might justify a statement to the effect that it moved from off- to on-campus for proximity to the library" - Well, that was not the reason. The source says that the growth of one journal, PLoS One, and the increase in submissions to the organization's journals in general caused the company to find a larger office space in another building. Despite the name, the "Public Library of Science" is more or less a journal publisher. It did not move in order to be closer to a library.
WhisperToMe (talk) 00:52, 10 March 2012 (UTC)

This discussion could use some input from editors from this project (even though strictly speaking this concerns a magazine, not an academic journal). Thanks. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 15:19, 15 March 2012 (UTC)

I'm not really sure what to do with this article ... or even if it's under this project's scope. See my message at its talk page. I've marked the page as needing attention from WikiProject Africa as well. Graham87 03:40, 15 March 2012 (UTC)

Time to resubmit WP:NJOURNALS as a guideline?

It's been at least a year since we tried having it adopted as a guideline (ah bureaucracy...). I mean all journal deletion discussions without exception were measured against WP:NJOURNALS, and WP:NASTRO was built with heavy influences from WP:NJOURNALS and it passed as a guideline. It might be time that we try again to have this adopted as a guideline. This way, we could get {{notability|journals}} to display a message relevant to journals, similar to

rather than a generic message about notability. I'm rather busy with time, so if someone (Guillaume?) could lead there charge here, that would be great. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 21:46, 22 March 2012 (UTC)

Hi Headbomb, you're right that NJournals has been successful in the sense that it is being used to good effect in deletion discussions. Before embarking on another attempt to get it adopted, do you have any indication that we would have a better chance than last time? Remember, we got slammed from both sides, some thinking it was too permissive, others finding it too restrictive (I think that's a good indication we got it right, but all of those people are going to vote "oppose"...). I'm hesitant to investing a lot of time and effort into this again with the risk that it won't work again this time (and, who knows, perhaps reduce its current utility at the same time, I've seen things like this backfire before...) --Guillaume2303 (talk) 10:17, 4 April 2012 (UTC)
No idea. All I know is if this can't get into the notability template because it's not 'officially' a guideline, there's something wrong with somewhere. The current mood seems to be about arguing whether the guidelines overturns or supplements the GNG, with the guidelines that overturn the GNG deemed unfit for adoption. And all that needs to be done about that is to write somewhere that the guideline supplements, rather than overturn the GNG (aka rewrite Note 11 a bit). We might also combine a few bullets like Note 4 & 5 together. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 13:39, 4 April 2012 (UTC)
We might also want to expand the note on using selective/topical indexing databases as the driving indication of notability, rather than Google Scholar, DOAJ , and similar general and non-selective ones. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 13:42, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

There's a discussion at this talk page about the inclusion of large amounts of information in the journal infobox. Participation of other editors in this project would be appreciated. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 10:07, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

Wikipedia:HighBeam

Wikipedia:HighBeam describes a limited opportunity for Wikipedia editors to have access to HighBeam Research.
Wavelength (talk) 16:23, 5 April 2012 (UTC)

This category is not named like all other subject-specific journal categories (which are all named "xxxxx journals"), but I can't immediately think up a good name for this one. Any ideas? Do we even need a cat like this? --Guillaume2303 (talk) 21:48, 12 April 2012 (UTC)

I think "Nationalism journals" works in terms of format, but all three of the titles in this category are also in the category "Political science journals". In my opinion, that's good enough, and Nationalism is too narrow. But then I haven't been part of this project and may not understand the degree of specificity intended - I see subcategories for Futurology and Biography, for example, which are pretty narrow too. (Actually, I'm also confused by the relationship between "Category" & "Discipline", which often don't seem to match - Disciplines for these Nationalism titles are "Intl Relations" or "Interdisciplinary") Cataobh (talk) 03:41, 13 April 2012 (UTC)
Well, I reorganized the category tree a long time ago and kept almost all cats, so some are just historical holdovers. I agree that some are too narrow, unless a specialty has more than 3 or 4 journals, I don't think a separate cat is necessary or even useful. I'm not sure that "nationalism studies" would fall under "international relations", because sometimes this is within-country (although if the country later splits-up, it becomes "international relations"...) Political science journals seems the right place for these "journals about nationalism". 3Nationalism journals" would suggest something differently than what they actually are (i.e. nationalistic journals, instead of journals reporting on studies of nationalism). --Guillaume2303 (talk) 03:55, 13 April 2012 (UTC)

References in infoboxes?

Do we need to reference everything that is in an infobox? See this example where an editor insists on including a reference for a journal abbreviation (that the link given does not even mention the journal but just goes to a search machine is secondary for the moment). Any opinions will be appreciated. If this has to be done, we'll have our work cut out for us... --Guillaume2303 (talk) 10:52, 29 April 2012 (UTC)

No, citations in infoboxes are not required. Normally, all the information that actually requires citations is repeated and cited in the article body. WhatamIdoing (talk) 14:01, 29 April 2012 (UTC)
(re-above, out of sync comment) For the complex infoboxes, the notion that all of the information is included in the article is not necessarily true, and if it is in the article, then does it not need citation in some form there? I agree that citing things in infoboxes redundantly is not good, and there are a number of infoboxes which include footnote sections which can be used to set aside the inline citations which can definitely break the flow of an infobox. --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 00:01, 1 May 2012 (UTC)
I guess that then changes the question to: do we need a reference for a journal's ISO abbreviation? --Guillaume2303 (talk) 14:27, 29 April 2012 (UTC)
I say nope. It's the standard ISO abbreviation after all. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 00:04, 30 April 2012 (UTC)
Many standards are not publicly available but need to be purchased .. sometimes at enormous cost. I do not think that we can blithely say that if it is a standard it need not be referenced. --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 23:57, 30 April 2012 (UTC)
For journals in the NLM, a simple search on LocatorPlus with (e.g.) ISSN "1463-1326" gives a link to the appropriate catalog entry, which includes ISO abbreviation, at no cost. Most ISO journal abbreviations also appear as "Abbreviated title" at the lccn linked record, in the example case, at [9]. LeadSongDog come howl! 16:14, 1 May 2012 (UTC)
For journals not in the NLM (which covers already a huge number and certainly not only medical journals), there are other free sources here and here. In addition, the ISO abbreviations follow simple rules (I'm a bit short on time and cannot immediately find the link, but these rules are available somewhere for free, too). We don't need a reference for something simple like an acronym and, although I admit that an ISO abbreviation is less trivial, I feel it is the same here. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 16:38, 1 May 2012 (UTC)
I don't want to drive this into the ground, but it does bother me a bit that the rationale seems to be (from the past two comments) that if something is easy to find then it need not be cited. I'm just trying to apply the same standard to this piece of data that we hold others to. I won't belabor it further, though I will suggest something in a separate thread I'll start momentarily. --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 00:58, 2 May 2012 (UTC)
It's pretty simple: wp:V calls for us to cite those things that are challenged or likely to be challenged. The ISO abbreviations have been unlikely to be challenged. In the event that they are, they are easily sourced. So where's the problem? LeadSongDog come howl! 03:59, 2 May 2012 (UTC)

Neurohospitalist

Could someone take a look at Neurohospitalist, which seems to have info about The Neurohospitalist in it? WhatamIdoing (talk) 14:02, 29 April 2012 (UTC)

  • The article on the journal was deleted last January after having been PRODded for not being notable (it still is not listed in any database). I have removed the (rather spammy sounding) description from this article (which is about the profession, not the journal), but left an external link to the journal. Hope this helps. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 15:03, 29 April 2012 (UTC)

I am involved in an edit war with a few editors on this journal who insist on adding information that I think is not properly sourced and tendentious. As manuscripts are reviewed by the editorial board, I also feel that it is justified to say that the journal is "peer-reviewed". But perhaps I'm wrong, so I'd appreciate if some other editors here could have a look. Thanks. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 21:24, 14 May 2012 (UTC)

Added an infobox, some citations, and did a touch of cleanup. Hope that helps, but feel free to re-work it as needed. Ulrich's lists the journal as peer-reviewed. Phoenixred (talk) 19:36, 18 May 2012 (UTC)
Great job, thanks! --Guillaume2303 (talk) 20:04, 18 May 2012 (UTC)

This article is at AfD and the input of editors with expertise in this area would be welcome. Thanks. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 14:24, 22 May 2012 (UTC)

Wikimedia Foundation endorsing Access2Research

Hey all

The Wikimedia Foundation has decided to endorse Access2Research and its petition to make research funded by the US government publicly accessible. This will be done by way of a blog post on Friday morning PST; as noted, we are not trying to speak on behalf of the community, but just the Foundation itself. You can read more in the FAQ, and leave any comments or questions you might have on its talkpage.

Thanks! Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 19:24, 24 May 2012 (UTC)

Journal of Clinical Neonatology

Another editor has created Journal of Clinical Neonatology. Ther article may benefit from the attention of experienced editors. Eastmain (talkcontribs) 05:18, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

  • I'm on it. It had some copyvio, so I had tagged it for CSD. I didn't remove the copyvio, given that the journal is obviously not notable (the listings in reputable databases claimed in the article are not supported by their own website and given that they have only published 2 issues yet, are completely impossible). I have now PRODded the article. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 05:35, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

This AfD has been relisted several times for lack of input. Opinions are welcome to finally get a decision in this AfD. Thanks. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 10:25, 17 June 2012 (UTC)

Notability Academics

There is currently a discussion underway for five or six proposed changes to the WP:Notability (academics) guideline. The discussion is taking place here. In addition, there is an RFC in place. Also,a relevant discussion that preceded this set of proposals begins here (General Notes & Caveats). ---- Steve Quinn (talk) 21:33, 17 June 2012 (UTC)

Notability for Terry A Osborn

This article Terry A Osborn came up on Alex Search Bot. I have reviewed it and to me it does not appear to merit inclusion. The first six or seven in-line external links are nothing more than a mention of this person in newspaper articles. Other sources seem to summarize this person's essays. I am not seeing anything that demonstrates notability. I tagged it for notability and lack of in-line citations. I think it should be PRODed, but I am looking for other opinions. Thanks. ---- Steve Quinn (talk) 03:27, 16 June 2012 (UTC)


Per Notability guidelines for academics, 8. The person is or has been the head or chief editor of a major well-established academic journal in their subject area, this person merits inclusion. Wikivol (talk) 23:33, 20 June 2012 (UTC)

2011 Journal Citation Reports are now available

For anyone who has a subscription to the Journal Citation Reports database, the 2011 data are now available. Phoenixred (talk) 18:56, 28 June 2012 (UTC)

History of astronomy journal and publisher

Would anyone be interested in creating an article on Acta Historica Astronomiae. It is used in a fair number of Wikipedia articles as a reference, and seems to be fairly notable. Am also trying to work out what to do with the redlink Harri Deutsch Verlag (the German publisher). Not sure what the name and history of that publisher is. There are various forms of the name around, possibly due to history of mergers (not uncommon in the publishing industry). Can anyone help there as well? Some links: [10], [11], [12]. Carcharoth (talk) 06:24, 5 July 2012 (UTC)

Request

I don't know if this is the proper place to ask for this, but could someone take a crack at making an article on the Journal of Business and Psychology? SilverserenC 02:49, 26 July 2012 (UTC)

The Springer site is their "homepage". Most journals have not a special dedicated site, but a couple of pages on the publisher's site. The redlink is gone! --Guillaume2303 (talk) 19:15, 2 August 2012 (UTC)
Thanks for all the help and fast response! SilverserenC 21:42, 2 August 2012 (UTC)

Indexing

Notability of learned societies with weak coverage

You may find this discussion of interest. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 19:42, 10 August 2012 (UTC)

Andhra Pradesh Journal of Psychological Medicine (APA J Psychol Med)

Another editor has created Andhra Pradesh Journal of Psychological Medicine (APA J Psychol Med). The journal's notability is uncertain. Eastmain (talkcontribs) 06:28, 15 August 2012 (UTC)

It's been around for 24 years and it's published by a legitimate professional society, the Indian Psychiatric Society, rather than some fly-by-night commercial publisher. So my first impression is it's probably good enough to stay. —David Eppstein (talk) 06:49, 15 August 2012 (UTC)
Commented on talkpage. It doesn't help matters that the article title is borked. LeadSongDog come howl! 18:28, 15 August 2012 (UTC)

Chinese names of Intellect Ltd. journals

How many of you write for the Chinese Wikipedia? I found Intellect Ltd. posts the Chinese names of its journals. If someone wants to start new journal articles in Chinese, one could write a new English article and translate it into Chinese, or use the English article as a source for an article in Chinese.

The journals are listed at http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/journals/ WhisperToMe (talk) 04:59, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

Open access journals

AFAICT, here the policy is to put this category in Creative commons licensed journals, which is a subset of open access journals. I've so fixed the guidelines. --Aubrey (talk) 12:12, 26 September 2012 (UTC)

Since there doesn't seem to be delsort list for this area...

A somewhat related article Global Politician has been nominated for deletion. I'm making a note here because GP has been widely cited in books, many of them academic ones, so the criteria we normally use for journals probably applies in this case to some extent. Tijfo098 (talk) 15:10, 29 September 2012 (UTC)

Hello all, Not too long ago, I created the above-referenced article, with the intention of strengthening coverage within Wikipedia of scholarly journals related to Urban and regional planning. This article has now been nominated for deletion. I'd appreciate your input to this discussion at: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of planning journals . Thanks, DA Sonnenfeld (talk) 21:57, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for input on this. The decision was keep. Sincerely, DA Sonnenfeld (talk) 11:22, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

Editorial transition at Organization & Environment

Hello, a disputatious editorial transition is underway at the academic journal, Organization & Environment, published by SAGE. Editors in this WikiProject interested and skilled at helping maintain NPOV may wish to watch/ contribute to this article. Thanks, DA Sonnenfeld (talk) 11:30, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

Birkhäuser

I've redirected Birkhäuser Verlag and wrote a {{sia}} at Birkhäuser because I thought that the complex history of acquisitions and splits which resulted in BV being only an architecture imprint (or incorporated company) did not do justice to Birkhäuser's long tradition of science and math publications, which continues as a parallel imprint of Springer. Some help referencing/expanding the history section there wouldn't hurt. Insofar the PR of various companies had a field day there. Tijfo098 (talk) 04:41, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

Regarding publication types (per journal) and publication structure

I had a lengthy discussion earlier today with a vendor of natural language processing (NLP) software which I have access to at my workplace. During the discussion it came up that NLP is significantly enhanced if the structure of a publication is known and the algorithms applied accordingly on a section-by-section basis. I am wondering how people here would react to the following:

In order to enrich DBpedia with accessible content concerning the structure of academic publications, which varies a great deal depending upon the publication type and outlet, it would be useful to provide an infobox at the journal level which allows organized collection of information about a) publication types within a journal title and b) structure of each publication type (i.e. section headers) within that journal title.

Such information is reported in most cases in the Instructions to Authors or equivalent document for most journals (e.g. for "Journal of Biological Chemistry" and "Archaeology, Ethnology and Anthropology of Eurasia"), so that the information can be sourced, though that source would be primary rather than secondary. The main question, I think, is whether the types of articles and their internal structure are encyclopedic content. Personally, I think that the article type information is encyclopedic, but the internal structure is more almanaic (akin to content of an almanac) than encyclopedic; content at Wikipedia:NOT#STATS suggests that ephemeris-type content is not desired, but that less tabular but nonetheless potentially mundane almanaic content might not violate principles (there used to be an essay on almanac content, I think, but I can no longer find it). Thanks for your thoughts. If there is a general consensus that this would be a good addition to the content of academic journal articles, then I will spend some time on the templating; I don't want to waste time on something which would not be welcomed by the community. Regards --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 23:56, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

Scientific Research Publishing

See a new thread I just started, Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard#Scientific Research Publishing. Relatedly, I've been creating redirects from the journals of theirs that I find cited here to our article on the publisher; I don't think most of these journals can support standalone articles. —David Eppstein (talk) 00:22, 20 October 2012 (UTC)

An editor, Jack1144 is adding a lot of links to this article and creating articles for its journals (at least one up till now) and its founder. Some of them are apparently indexed by Scopus, which would meet WP:NJournals. However, he also seems to be adding text like "Jane Doe is a founding editorial board member of Journal of Foo published by Omics Publishing Group" to many articles and there the addition of "published by etc" is superfluous and should be removed. This editor has also added article processing charges to the article on BioMed Central, which seems contrary to what we usually do on WP (i.e., not mentioning prices of products, services, etc, unless there is a specific reason to do so). As OPG is listed as a "predatory" OA publisher, some more eyes on this editor's contributions would be welcome. Thanks. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 18:28, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

  • PS: I have also noted that most articles on editorial board members were created only recently, all by different new editors (often this is their only edit), with very similar edit summaries and editing styles. Thsi smells of sockpuppetry... --Guillaume2303 (talk) 18:40, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

I recently came across a newly created article Comparison of Research Networking Tools and Research Profiling Systems. I am not sure it fits within the scope of this WikiProject, but there doesnt seem to be a more appropriate WikiProject for research, grants, publications, bibliometrics, funding opportunities, etc. H-index is included in WPAJ.

Anyway, this comparison needs some love, and many of these tools do not have a Wikipedia article. John Vandenberg (chat) 02:26, 5 November 2012 (UTC)

Epigraphia Zeylanica

Another editor has created the article Epigraphia Zeylanica. The article would benefit from attention by other editors. Eastmain (talkcontribs) 20:00, 12 November 2012 (UTC)

Hi all, sorry to bother you but this is probablt the best place to discuss it. I wrote an article about an academic journl, confluenze. The journal is young, it is in the humanities/social science field and (thus) is not indexed in Scopus or WoS. It has been ranked recently in A class from National Agency for the Evaluation of Universities and Research Institutes (which is independent and reliable )kind of)). I know that it can be compared to older journals or very big one, but I would like to know if Scopus/Wos/ISI are the major criteria for inclusion (because that would be not so roght, IMHO, for many reasons). Thanks for the patience. --Aubrey (talk) 15:14, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

  • No they are not the only ones. We accept inclusion in any major selective database as evidence of notability (note that "we" here refers to almost all members of this project, but does not necessarily apply to other editors, who often argue that even such listings are not enough evidence for notability). --Guillaume2303 (talk) 15:31, 25 September 2012 (UTC)
I understand (and that is a bit reassuring, as you know there are kinda systematic issues with whole Wos/ISI thing, and this is one of the reasons there Open Access is so important). So the question goes back to the specific Confluenze article, I guess, I'll reply there. --Aubrey (talk) 10:22, 26 September 2012 (UTC)
I can't elaborate further (it's complex and I don't have the skills neither the time), but the point is that the current publication system and the ISI way of creating a core list is "dangerous" and biased.
If you are interested, you can read Open Access and the divide between “mainstream” and “peripheral” science from Jean-Claude Guédon (pdf). --Aubrey (talk) 12:26, 26 September 2012 (UTC)
it's widely accepted as being an accurate indication of the extent to which mainstream journals get cited by other journals in the same subject. It is biased the way the international scientific information in science is biased, towards English language journals published in the leading scientific countries in those fields of science & social science that depend upon publication of journal articles. This does not represent all the scientific activity in the world, and various other national and geographic areas have constructed similar indexes of their own publications. By the inherent nature of its construction, it reqiires three years of journal issues before the index can be calculated, so even the best new journals cannot appear. (I think ISI has sometimes included them anyway with a single year factor called an Immediacy Index. )
confluenze is a journal in the humanities. ISI does not calculate impact factors in these journals, and includes only a relatively small number in its citation indexing (a few more than it used to, since it and Scopus have been trying to leap-frog each other). this is entirely rational, because such fields of study do not depend primarily upon journal articles, but upon monographs; since there are a relatively smaller number of these large-scale productions than there are journal articles, since an individual publishes many fewer, and since because of the manner of research and publication the length of time for a work to be substantially cited is much increased and the citations will be much more widely dispersed. I think that Garfield had an essay on why ISI made this decision in his collected papers. Perhaps this question should be revisited with the growth in the last 10 or 20 years of journal article publication is some fields--the publication of monographs is so cost-ineffective that fewer and fewer are published, and even excellent universities now consider articles in good journals as suitable for evaluation of tenure in some humanities subjects, whereas formerly they required books, and considered everything else minor. A few relatively old-fashioned ones still do require the traditional 2 books, at least one not based on the thesis. Citations in books in the humanities have been analyzed in a few publications, the results are, indeed, relatively useless as compared to those for scientific journals. Influence in the humanities is harder to quantitate. DGG ( talk ) 05:17, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

Public Relations Journal

An article relating to this project Public Relations Journal, has been nominated for deletion see Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Public Relations Journal. Regards ★☆ DUCKISPEANUTBUTTER☆★ 15:45, 4 January 2013 (UTC)

Rocks

Over at WikiProject Geology/Meteorites we're having a month long focus to eliminate red links either by starting new articles or by finding appropriate link targets within existing articles. We'd be very glad of WikiProject Academic Journals' help with any of the following:

Not sure that one refers to a journal at all. It might be a textbook by Brian Harold Mason, first published in 1952. The fourth edition (1982) is edited by Carleton B Moore OCLC 8476143. Mineralogical Magazine is ISSN 0026-461X and Physikalische Berichte is ISSN 0031-9260. LeadSongDog come howl! 07:23, 11 January 2013 (UTC)
You guys are quick. Notice you've done Mineralogical Abstracts as well. Many thanks. We've found one more hidden in our big list of red links; most likely the last:
That one's a bit tricky too. You're probably referring to this, specifically the fiche denoted "2. Astronomie. Astrophysique. Physique du globe." though a general article would be better. On French-language Wikipedia, fr:Bulletin signalétique is a redirect to fr:Pascal (base de données), describing a bibliographic database. Is that the bulletin that you are looking for? LeadSongDog come howl! 20:50, 16 January 2013 (UTC)
There isn't even an article on German Wikipedia about de:Physikalische Berichte (Physics Briefs), though this source was rather dismissive, essentially saying that it's easier to use English-language briefs covering the same material.
For each of these, we'll need some secondary sources to indicate they're worthy of note. LeadSongDog come howl! 21:16, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

I started an article on this small academic publishing company soon after I joined Wikipedia. It has since merged with The Nucleus Group/Nucleus Global for which we don't seem to have an article, but appears to retain an independent brand. It was tagged last year for notability by an editor who has since retired, and I'm uncertain as to whether it is worth trying to retain it or not. It currently publishes two journals (one of which has an impact factor of 3.16), as well as educational books, and it runs several series of conferences/workshops (in the past, including the well-known drug resistance workshop [13]). Espresso Addict (talk) 14:32, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

  • Hi, I had a look at the article. Definitely a minor player, this publisher. Surprising that they have offices in three different parts of the world, though. If there were an article on the Nucleus Group, this could be redirected there, but that is a redlink (and given the paltry info on their website, I doubt we could even create a stub). Both journals are notable: one has an impact factor, the other is in MEDLINE (not just PubMed via PubMed Central). Not sure that this would meet our notability criteria for companies, but I don't see much harm in having a neutral short stub. I've gone ahead and tweaked the article a bit and deleted the notability tag. --Randykitty (talk) 15:00, 23 January 2013 (UTC)
  • Thanks! Personally, I think it's useful to have articles even on the smaller academic publishing companies, if only to give an indicator of the reliability of the material that they publish, but it can be very hard to find truly independent references for them. Espresso Addict (talk) 15:42, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

Country of publication

I have worked on a few academic journal articles recently and would like some advice. The infobox has a country parameter, which I thought was for the country in which the journal is published. However, this parameter has been removed in some cases (such as at Z. Naturforsch. A and Organic Geochemistry). I have been told that country is not used when the journal has an international scope, but I note cases like Journal of the American Chemical Society are listed as published in the US. Is there a clear policy on when the country parameter should be used? Thanks. EdChem (talk) 13:41, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

  • Most journals are indeed too international for a "country" parameter to make much sense. Even the country where a journal is published is not always unequivocal. Take, for example, large international publishers such as Springer Science+Business Media, Wiley-Blackwell, or Elsevier. These are based (legally speaking) in Germany, the US, and The Netherlands, respectively. However, all three also have offices in other countries and any given journal can have its publisher based in any of those. The editor-in-chief is often located in yet another country. And journal production can take place in another two countries. So for WB journals, the following list of countries can apply: Publisher (company) legally based in the US (John Wiley & Sons), publisher (person) based in the UK (WB offices in Oxford), editor based in some other European country, typesetting done in India, printing done in Malaysia, and journal co-owned by some international society (with a legal seat in yet some other country, but with president, secretary, and treasurer in even more different countries). Obviously, the "country" parameter does not make much sense here. We make an exception for journals that are published by a national society, where we do list the country (even though I personally think this could be deleted, too, I know of too many "American Journal of..." with an EIC outside of the US...). Hence, "United States" is mentioned for the Journal of the American Chemical Society, but we don't list them for journals without a clear connection to any given country. Please also note that there are nowadays some "predatory" publishers that create "journals" to make a quick buck out of the OA movement. I know of one such publisher, based in India, having established several journal called "British Journal of" or "American Journal of", without any connection to any national society or any other justification, in an effort to sound legitimate... Hope this explains a bit. --Randykitty (talk) 14:35, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

Journal of Global Health

I have just restored this article after I (erroneously) deleted it under CSD G4 the other day. The article doesn't qualify for speedy deletion, but I am not sure whether or not it passes WP:NJOURNAL. (It does not seem to pass WP:GNG.) Could someone who has more experience with this type of article take a look, and nominate it at WP:AFD if necessary? Thanks — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 08:48, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

  • Not having access to the deleted version, I could not compare them. However, the claims of coverage in the article do not check out and it still is not notable, so I have taken it to a second AfD. --Randykitty (talk) 11:41, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

There's an ongoing discussion here that may be of interest to participants to this project. --Randykitty (talk) 12:25, 22 February 2013 (UTC)

Notable articles

Many journal articles have a section named "notable articles". Some articles may be notable in and of themselves (because they generated controversy or documented an important advance in our knowledge), in which case we will have independent reliable sources to justify our choice. More often, however, these lists are not based on any discernible criteria and just seem to represent the preference of whatever editor who added them to the article. I firmly believe that we should only include notable articles based on clear and objective criteria. One criterion that is often used is the number of citations received and I agree that presenting the articles that received the most citations is a clear and objective criterion. In this case, how many articles should be listed? I have seen anything from 1 or 2 to 10 or more, with the number based on a more-or-less random criterion ("more than x citations", for example). To make things a bit more objective and systematic, I propose that we adopt a fixed figure for the number of articles to include (when basing ourselves on citation data, presence of RS supersedes everything, of course). Taking a cue from sports ("gold - silver - bronze" :-), I propose to limit ourselves to the three most-cited articles. Opinions welcome! --Randykitty (talk) 14:55, 22 February 2013 (UTC)

I strongly support three. This would be a nice selection. Five or ten is too much. --Shisha-Tom (talk) 19:50, 23 February 2013 (UTC)

An important journal with a long history is likely to have included far more than three "notable articles". The best way to describe this is not to make a list but to write a history section that describes these articles and their place in the history of whatever the discipline happens to be. Whether writing such a section is possible or not depends on the availability of good sources, but I hope members of this project aren't going to run around removing such sections if someone would actually write them, based on some rather silly artificial limit agreed upon by a handful of people on this page. --Hegvald (talk) 20:46, 23 February 2013 (UTC)

  • You misread what I wrote above. I said clearly that if we have independent reliable sources, then there is not much discussion necessary about whether or not to include a certain article. However, I am talking about situations where the only sources we have are the numbers of citations that articles have received. In those cases I propose to limit those lists to 3. And sometimes I encounter history sections where someone apparently just looked at a journal's tables of contents and distilled a history from that. Those I delete as inadmissible original research. But if we're lucky enough to be able to have a well-sourced history section, nobody in his right mind should remove that. --Randykitty (talk) 22:13, 23 February 2013 (UTC)

This article could use some more eyes. Thanks. --Randykitty (talk) 16:06, 2 March 2013 (UTC)

IEEE Trans Antenn & Prop coverimage.gif

file:IEEE Trans Antenn & Prop coverimage.gif has been nominated for speedy deletion -- 65.92.180.137 (talk) 05:15, 4 March 2013 (UTC)

This AfD may be of interest some participants of this project. --Randykitty (talk) 17:41, 27 March 2013 (UTC)


There have been some recent drastic changes to this page that have been reverted, and need further discussion. I've made an initial comment on its talk page. DGG ( talk ) 15:38, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

New category proposal: Category:Academic journals by country

This is so journals like Polish Sociological Review can be linked in category tree to their countries (in this case, obviously Poland). I think that the Category:Academic journals by country would be appropriate for that. It would be a subcategory to Category:Media by country and type and Category:Academic journals. (and in case anybody wonders, it would be a complimentary, but no a duplicate, category to Category:Academic journals by publisher). --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 04:28, 5 April 2013 (UTC)

  • Hi Piotrus, thanks for posting here instead of just barging ahead! If you look through the archives, this proposal is something that regularly comes up, but never gets consensus. The reason for this is tht modern academic publishing is very much an international effort. Even a more "localised" journal like the one you link to has an editorial board from all over the world. In the life sciences and medicine this trend is even stronger. There it is not unusual to have an editor in a European country (say, France, but the editor may originally have been from yet another country) for a journal from a British publisher with offices in Oxford, which is owned by an American company (Wiley-Blackwell, for example), with associate editors from half a dozen other countries, and the journal being typeset and printed in India and Malaysia... Now in what country are we going to class this journal? (This is not just a made-up example). Several journals that had a "national" title have dropped this in the last few decades (e.g. the New England Journal of Medicine became NEJM and the British Medical Journal became BMJ). There is even an open access publisher in Pakistan or Bangladesh who names its journals "British Journal of...", without any apparent relation to the UK, making things even more complicated. This is also reflected by the confusion that we often see in the "country" field in infoboxes. I regularly see journals published by Elsevier with "United States" in that field. Of course, they have offices in the US. They even own subsidiaries/imprints that are mainly US based (Academic Press and Cell Press, for example). But their headquarters is in the Netherlands and Elsevier itself is owned by a British-Dutch consortium. In short, I think it is better not to go there. --Randykitty (talk) 07:33, 5 April 2013 (UTC)
  • First, I agree with Randykitty and support his view. Second, I would like to add as German author more arguments against such a category. Hundred years ago many important journals in medicine and (bio)chemistry had German names (e.g. Zeitschrift für physiologische Chemie or Biochemische Zeitschrift) and published in German. Today most of these journals changed to English names (e.g. Biological Chemistry or FEBS Journal), have international editors and publish in English only. It would'nt make sense to try a national allocation of these journals. And for a particular national journal such as Deutsche Apothekerzeitung it is also not neccessary to introduce such a category. --Shisha-Tom (talk) 10:27, 5 April 2013 (UTC)
  • I agree with Shisha-Tom and Randykitty that many journals are international and regional categorization would not be useful for them. However, I think for this category to exist we need not provide evidence that it is useful in the majority of cases, but rather, that it would be useful for a significant number of articles. As a guideline, I think that if someone found three sets of twenty journals which were distinctly characteristic of each of three different regions, then that would persuade me to agree that this category ought to be created to serve the demographic that would want to see those categories. For international journals, I would be in favor of them being without regional categorization and simply not being represented within this category. I do not think all categories need to represent all potential members a set. Blue Rasberry (talk) 13:25, 5 April 2013 (UTC)
    Well, distinctly local journals do exist, but they are not often notable. For example, the Science Citation Index frowns upon journals with an editorial board that is exclusively composed of people at one institution or within one country (removing one way for journals to become notable). Hence, even the journal linked to by Piotrus above (publishing in English) includes academics from other countries in its board. I haven't checked, but I don't doubt that the journal also includes articles from non-Polish authors. A journal that really is, say, Dutch, that is: written in Dutch, with a local publisher (not Elsevier...), with a Dutch editor and only Dutch editorial-board members, is rather unlikely to become notable, unless they cause some kind of a scandal causing coverage in reliable sources (something usually quite rare for academic journals). I doubt that we have significant numbers of articles on such journals... --Randykitty (talk) 14:23, 5 April 2013 (UTC)
    Notability for journals is difficult to determine. There are some essential journals and publications which do not meet WP:GNG, and the majority of journal articles on Wikipedia are stubs with no citations and which may never be developed beyond their infoboxes. Piotr, are you asserting that you have enough identified enough Wikipedia articles on journals to merit creating this category? Randykitty, if he does have these collected, would you look with me at them to comment on whether they are notable as Wikipedia articles? If there exists a set of valid articles which would benefit from categorization, then why not categorize them? First let's see the articles though. Blue Rasberry (talk) 14:56, 5 April 2013 (UTC)
  • I usually go by WP:NJournals, which is a bit more lenient than GNG for journals (as I think it should be). But, yes, let's see whether there are notable journals that without much doubt can be categorized to a single country. --Randykitty (talk) 15:12, 5 April 2013 (UTC)

Mariners Weather Log

Today, the article Mariners Weather Log was created. I have not created an article about a journal before. Could someone from this project look it over, and see if I have the right idea? I believe I used the proper infobox. It definitely needs more referencing, which will come with time. Thanks for whatever help you can provide. Thegreatdr (talk) 21:23, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

PLOS Medicine

Hello, I'm an associate editor at PLOS Medicine (Paul Simpson) and I'm seeking advice from the WikiProject Academic Journals group. Currently the wikipedia page for PLOS Medicine is under populated and not very useful. We'd be keen to see this updated so that it provides a useful description of the journal and ideally this would be done by an independent group. Would members of this project be interested in doing so or know of others who would? I'd be happy to help or provide information if this isn't considered a conflict of interest. Thanks for your help in advance. Pjsimpso82 (talk) 15:04, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

  • Have a look at our writing guide to see what a good article on a scientific journal could/should contain. You're welcome to add such stuff yourself. I have added the journal to my watchlist and will go over your edits from time to time, so that nobody can complain about COI. --Randykitty (talk) 15:14, 28 January 2013 (UTC)
  • I agree with Randy. Your contributions are most welcome, and thanks for being willing to adhere to guidelines. Also, please feel free to add to or work on the other PLOS articles such as PLOS Biology. In addition, I appreciate the accessibility of this journal. ---- Steve Quinn (talk) 15:50, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

Hello, following on from our discussions here and bearing in mind the discussion on notable articles below I've made some updates to the PLOS Medicine page. I'd be grateful if members of the group would take a look to make sure the edits are fair, especially given my competing interest (I'm an editor at PLOS Medicine) --Pjsimpso82 (talk) 09:46, 18 April 2013 (UTC)

Could anyone who comments on this please do it at Talk:PLOS Medicine? Also, I encourage people to comment in any way. This seems like an excellent opportunity to have a discussion about the relationship between academic journals (which are the source of so much content here) and Wikipedia. Blue Rasberry (talk) 15:28, 18 April 2013 (UTC)

Journal metrics

I think that it is time that we have a centralized discussion here about which metrics we are going to include in journal articles. There are 2 (separate) issues to consider here. 1/ Is inclusion of a certain metric encyclopedic and of interest to our readers and 2/ the very practical issue that all these metrics change yearly and need to be updated. In this respect I'd like to note that we are currently doing only a mediocre job of updating the metrics (almost exclusively impact factors) in our articles, with many articles displaying 2008 or 2009 values (the most recent being 2011). I assume here that there is widespread consensus for including the IF in the journal infobox and in the article. ("IF" referring here to the "classical" impact factor based on 2 years of citation data). This reflects the wide acceptance of this metric in the scientific community (notwithstanding much criticism) and its widespread use to evaluate research and researchers (I personally don't agree with this practice, but this WP should reflect current practice and not what we deem necessary/desirable). Below I list some other metrics that I occasionally encounter in journal articles. I'll give some remarks here and there on what I think of their value (or lack thereof). At this moment, I routinely remove almost any metric from journal articles, apart from the IF. I would like to know whether this has community consensus or, if not, what statistics are appropriate to include and how we are going to handle updating them.

  1. The 5-year impact factor. Until not too long ago, nobody really cared about this metric, but recently some publishers have started adding this one to their journal pages. Often this seems only to be done if their journals rank better using this metric instead of the classical IF, but Elsevier, for example, now includes them systematically on all journal pages. In my personal experience, researchers still largely ignore this metric. Until this changes noticeably, I'm not in favor of including it in articles.
  2. SCImago Journal Ranks. This is based on the SJR metric, which is conceptually similar to the PageRank algorithm used by Google. I find the idea behind it attractive and an improvement on the simplistic "mean citations" that is the common IF, but in practice, not even publishers mention this ranking on their own websites and as far as I can see, most researchers completely ignore this metric.
  3. Index Copernicus scores and rankings. This, I think, is a no-brainer. IC is user-contributed. It includes almost exclusively journals from minor publishers (meaning that the major publishers don't even bother to enter their data). Its ranking methodology is primitive and debatable (with journals getting more points if they have structured abstracts, not really an accepted measure of journal quality...). IC is not selective at all, as far as I can see, anybody who sets up a website and calls itself a journal can enter their data into IC and get a score and ranking.
  4. Circulation data. Almost always this information is only available from the publisher itself (and hence not independent). In the current electronic age, basically irrelevant.
  5. h-index. Depends heavily on the age of a journal. Although within a few years this metric has become very popular to evaluate researchers , it is hardly ever used for journals.
  6. Number of articles published. I have seen this in different forms: number in the last two years (probably taken from the Journal Citation Reports), or as lifetime total. I don't think this is very useful information. Also, lifetime totals are very difficult to verify (even publishers rarely provide them).
  7. Number of citations. This, too, can be found as two-year totals (from the JCR) or as a lifetime total. The last one is, again, basically unverifiable. These last two metrics are also somewhat redundant with the impact factor (which is not dependent on the size of a journal). I have seen this metric used by publishers (usually if it is a journal getting many citations because it is large, but has a low overall impact factor).
  8. Eigenfactor and Article Influence scores. In concept somewhat similar to the SJR. Since a few years, these metrics are included in the JCR. I have never seen them used, though.
  9. Immediacy index. Provided by the JCR. Rarely used even by publishers themselves.
  10. Journal cited half-life. Provided by the JCR, rarely used.

Given the above, I propose to continue including only the conventional two-year IF in journal articles for the moment. We should keep a close eye, though, on usage of especially the SJR and the 5-year IF and perhaps in future include it in the infobox. At this point, however, I think it is too early.

Comments welcome! --Randykitty (talk) 14:47, 22 February 2013 (UTC)

I agree that updating all these indices in the journal articles would be a grind and it is unclear how much they add from an encyclopedic point of view. Perhaps the main bit of information one gleans from these is a sense of the importance or notability of the journal. In that regard, some of these indices could be important meta-information for other editors to indicate notability. For instance, for better or worse, impact factor is quoted in WP:NJournals as a direct sign of notability. Not to hijack your question, but would, or should, any of these other indices be considered and contributing toward notability? If so, then we should allow them in the articles. It seems to me, for instance, that the 5-year IF should be as effective as the IF in conferring notability. --Mark viking (talk) 18:11, 22 February 2013 (UTC)
I am busy to update impact factors in journals related to life sciences and chemistry. I also add the information on the ranking of the journal in the category/categories. Ranking is really important and the value of an impact factor of 5.000 (e.g.) differs considerably between the categories. Recently, I started to add the information about total citations but if it will be a consensus to omit such informations I would remove this part from the articles again. --Shisha-Tom (talk) 19:48, 23 February 2013 (UTC)
  • As a general consideration, the basic impact factors as published by SCI for many years were influenced by SCI's original orientation of SCI to experimental biology, a field where a 2 year impact factor makes sense & even an immediacy factor is meaningful. This is of course not true for many other fields, and they were asked repeatedly by many people, myself included, to publish factors for longer periods. Nothing much happened until they first encountered a competitor, Scopus, at which point they more seriously began making changes, some making a stronger product, some finding additional products to sell.
  1. Thus the 5 year factor, is I think very important, and should always be included. It show the longer term effectiveness of the journal

Taking the factors in turn as numbered above

  1. Scimago (and Eigenfactor) apply the pagerank algorithm, the degree of connectedness between different journals, thus increasing the score of citation by more important journals.. This general method well explained by our WP article, essentially increases the scores of the most important journals and increase the extent to which larger journals will appear higher in the ratings. This tends to provide a closer match to the actual importance scientists in heavily researched areas. To the extent this matches the way scientists in those areas -- which naturally represent the majority of scientists-- value them, but decreases the rank of those journals that may be very important but only to a small number of people. Both values are also available for free, which gives them a great advantage for use in of WP, since anyone can find them. The main distinction is that Scimago is based on the Scopus data base, and Eigenfactor upon JCR. Scopus includes a considerably greater range of journals, but this necessarily includes a great many less important ones. (Scopus & SCI have been competing with each other to add journals, even at the cost of selectivity.) The advantage of including Scimago is that it provides a number of some sort for journals that would otherwise have none, but which will still be at least borderline notable--and to have a standard of comparison it is necessary to include it for the more important journals also. (Sciimago uses 3-yr citation data, by the way.)
  2. IndexCopernicus is a way of ranking the very minor journals, but the inclusion criteria and ranking are not really objective]--it's designed to highlight the importance of journals from other than the major academic-publishing countries the We do not usually have articles for journals included only there, but if we make the argument that we should overcome our cultural bias by including more journals, it can be the only number available. I would not routinely list it. It's almost worthless for demonstrating notability
  3. Circulation data that appears in the official statement for journals sent through the US mail as the special lower-cost magazine rate is absolutely reliable, but not all journals are. It's not correct that the publisher is the only source An approximate figure is usually given in Ulrich's, a database found in larger academic libraries. The Ulrich's data is professionally evaluated, I consider it reliable. But since many journals are online only or their importance is mainly online, circulation data is of limited value. Publishers sometimes but rarely give number of subscribing libraries. There's a reason: the numbers for even major journals are sometimes embarrassingly low, often in the low 100s. (This has been made a less relevant number by the tendency of the major publishers to sell journal packages, which often result in a lot of minor journals being added for very little additional money. The purpose of such packages is a way of freezing in subscriptions to journals that would otherwise be discontinued.) Library holdings can also be found in WorldCat, but they do not indicate whether it's a current subscription unless you check each individual library catalog.
  4. h-indexas applied to a journal is almost meaningless. It is particular insensitive to what is the most important factor: the publishing of very important articles, which are always a minority and lower the count. the index rewards mediocrity. I would not give it in an infobox or in the text, even if the publisher highlights it. .
  5. Number of articles published, is a simple traditional number. It figures indirectly into the Scimago and Eigenfactor calculations, but it's understandable on its own. It does not necessarily indicate importance, but it is information that is useful to the reader. Number of issues a year isn't a substitute, because some will be very small.
  6. Number of citations goes into the calculation of the impact factor. It is relevant, because it goes back further in time. It's not essential.
  7. eigenfactor, discussed above. It's being used widely enough that we should include it. It has the great advantage (along with Scimago) of being freely available.
  • Immediacy index depends on the exact time of year articles were published, and how rapidly the citing journals are published. It corresponds in some degree to a journal being "hot". I don't think it irrelevant, but it isn't essential, especially as it is not self-explanatory.
  • Journal cited half life is a very useful figure for journals in slow moving fields. I certainly use it in analyzing journals. But the necessity has been reduced by the availability of both 2 and 5 year impact factors, whose comparative numbers indicate roughly the same thing.
  • Rank in field -- I added this one. The differences between different fields in impact factors make it necessary to give an indication of what the raw number means. JCR assigns journals to rough subject categories, like "organic chemistry". An impact factor of 2 is mediocre for a journal in experimental medicine or cell biology or mathematics ; it is very high for a descriptive science like botany. (This distinction also applies to h-index and our AfD discussions on academic tend to ignore this.) In addition, the number in each category varies widely. It therefore makes sense to differentiate this ranks 13th of the 15 journals in category X and this ranks 13th of the 230 journals in category Y. JCR often assigns multiple categories, and that should be given. (The JCR categories , despite the well-founded objections to some of them, are the ones currently universally used, and we could do worse than copy them for our own categories)
  • other things I don't suggest we include it, but in evaluating journals I rely very heavily on some other factors. One of them is the JCR table of just which journals they are that cite a journal--Typically a low quality journal will not be cited by many high quality journals. A complementary factor is the JCR table of which journals which a journal cites. A low quality journal cites mainly journals higher quality than it. The two factors taken together also reveal . Almost all journals do cite their own articles more than any other, which is reasonable considering the subject interest of its own articles is likely to be about the same, and many individuals submit many of their papers to the same journal. These two factors take interpretation, and I wouldn't normally use them here. (If a journal is very often cited by a known very high ranking journal, the publisher will say it clearly in their own advertising) But it also reveals the pernicious "self=-citation" where an editor makes sure that a journal cites its own articles very heavily in proportion. A third, which is subject to the effect of cultural bias -- but national & cultural bias is very real in science -- is whether the work comes from known important laboratories. The pagerank algorithm tends to reflect both to a considerable extent. Obviously, this depends on personal judgment and knowledge of the field, & is hard to quantitate separately, and I wouldn't use it here. (Again, if a journal is particular strong in these the publisher will say it in their own advertising.) A related factor is whether the papers are mostly supported by a major granting agency.A fifth, equally or more subject to cultural bias, is whether the papers in the journal use up-to-date techniques. Obviously we can;'t use this here, but faculty do use it--I learned about this by some experimental biologists. It corresponds well to whether faculty want a journal subscribed to, which is of course the main factor for any library. It too depends on judged and is unquantifiable. A very dangerous factor is reputation -- which is used very heavily by the Australian journal rankings, which I therefore ignore. Faculty use it, but it tends to reflect the journals that were important twenty years ago when they were graduate students. It can't be validly quantitated, though some granting agencies foolishly attempt to do so. Librarians see it in faculty request for subscriptions to journals that ceased publication, or changed title.) An additional factor librarian use is which libraries subscribe. If only the 5 or 6 wealthiest universities in the world have it cataloged, a journal can usually be ignored. But if every major theological seminary gets a journal that appears otherwise mediocre, it's important--if you a a librarian in that subject, and it should be important for us also to avoid bias of less popular fields. It can't be quantitated, of course. DGG ( talk ) 17:46, 13 April 2013 (UTC)
Wow, great summary of the various metrics considered. Not to get off topic, but the useful information presented by you and Randykitty make me think that a WP article on this, something like Journal bibliometrics, would be a useful addition to the encyclopedia. We have a general article on Bibliometrics and specific articles like Impact factor, but as far as I can tell, nothing on the general topic of journal metrics. Thanks, --Mark viking (talk) 21:45, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

Metrics/notability criteria for conference proceedings?

ECOOP, a computer conference, was recently prodded for notability and then deprodded. Its talk page puts this conference under the purview of WikiProject Academic Journals, so I thought I would ask here: what determines the notability of a conference with peer-reviewed publications? I think of these conference publications as much like academic journals, but I haven't seen metrics like impact factors associated with them. WP:NJournals indicates that these conferences aren't reliably counted in citation services. List of computer science conferences claims to list the most important conferences, but it isn't clear if there are any dominant, generally accepted measures of importance there. WP:GNG often fails for these conferences for the same reason that it fails for academic journals; people aren't often motivated to write reliable articles/news stories about the journals themselves. If there is no specialized policy for conferences, are there informal tests that folks in this wikiproject use to judge importance or notability? Thanks for your advice, --Mark viking (talk) 00:25, 24 April 2013 (UTC)

One factor which would persuade me is to see the publications produced by the conference recognized as reliable sources in references to content added to other Wikipedia articles. I feel that if something is good enough to be used many times as a reliable source then it could have an article. Blue Rasberry (talk) 13:30, 24 April 2013 (UTC)
  • I don't completely disagree with the sentiment behind this remark, but in practice, that is not a workable definition of notability. I have seen cases where people "seeded" references around WP to their pet journal (or pet project or pet whatever). Conferences are more difficult than journals. Like journals, there rarely are articles written about them. coverage in popular media is generally at best a brief notice in a local newspaper that such and such conference is coming to town. I'm not enough familiar with computer science to know whether there are selective databases specializing in this stuff. One indication might be if papers presented at such conferences (and subsequently published in their proceedings) are frequently cited. WoS probably is not a good source for that, but Google Scholar might be. And, of course, if a conference has an associated proceedings-type series, that could be indexed or have an impact factor and perhaps be used as a proxy for the conference itself. Given the few reliable information that we usually have about journals/proceedings series and conferences, a combined article about the publication and the conference would then make the most sense and notability might be easier to establish. --Randykitty (talk) 13:48, 24 April 2013 (UTC)

Hello WikiProject Academic Journals members, I started this new stub yesterday. I am not experienced with writing articles about scientific journals and as a result, you will see, if you check it, that I am having difficulty knowing what to use as reliable sources to back up its notability. Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks, Invertzoo (talk) 15:48, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

Do any of you have access to Journal Citation Reports? if so I would be very grateful if you could look this journal up for me and see what the impact factor and ranking is. It's a malacology journal, you know, Mollusca, invertebrate zoology, biology. I don't know how specific the categories are. I have sent an email to ask the AMNH library if they would look it up for me, but I doubt that they will have the time to do that. Thanks for your help! Invertzoo (talk) 17:35, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

Is the new category Category:Predatory open access journals appropriate? In the article in this category that I'm most familiar with, Scientific Research Publishing, we're careful to say that it has been accused of being predatory (and by whom) rather than that it is predatory. But putting an article in a category doesn't allow us to make such fine distinctions. —David Eppstein (talk) 11:45, 8 April 2013 (UTC)

In fact we have at least one excellent source here showing, perhaps against the vested interest of its publisher (Nature), how perilous the term is. I can't see how the present name of the category could be applied without creating several kinds of problems. There must be a better way to name the category that can be made clear in specified wp:Categorization#criteria. LeadSongDog come howl! 13:31, 8 April 2013 (UTC)
I have no objection to a different adjective, to substitute for "predatory". I'm not all that worried about the fact that using it requires a judgment -- that's true of many categories, and the point then becomes to use it per editor consensus. In that sense there's nothing out of the ordinary here. Categories are meant to be navigational aides, and I think there's value in enabling readers to find other instances when they've come across one of the articles that's in this category. Nomoskedasticity (talk) 21:07, 8 April 2013 (UTC)

Now up for discussion (essentially, proposed for deletion via merge to the parent category) at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2013 April 8. —David Eppstein (talk) 04:23, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

  • I don't think so. A vanity press is usually quite honest and upfront about what they do: you send them your manuscript, pay them, and they publish it, good or bad. They deliver what they promise. These journals claim to perform peer-review and to be serious academic journals, but they don't and they aren't. They don't deliver what they promise. I think that's an important difference. --Randykitty (talk) 06:56, 14 April 2013 (UTC)

Article of possible interest

See this article, at the Chronicle of Higher Education. Kind regards, DA Sonnenfeld (talk) 13:57, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

AfC submission

Please have a look at this submission when possible. Regards, FoCuSandLeArN (talk) 15:01, 22 May 2013 (UTC)

Who indexes Fibreculture?

Who indexes the journal Fibreculture? WhisperToMe (talk) 16:51, 26 May 2013 (UTC)

Interesting case. If I read this correctly, they self-archive and they are indexed in DOAJ, but I see no sign of independent indexing. Of course, few indexes are truly independent anymore, relying instead on publisher's abstracts, so I'm not sure there's much to be made of that. LeadSongDog come howl! 15:19, 27 May 2013 (UTC)
Thanks! It would be nice if EBScO, Gale, etc carried that journal. What is the DOI number? WhisperToMe (talk) 03:01, 28 May 2013 (UTC)
Their "about" page gives ISSN 1449-1443. I don't see any sign that there are article DOIs being generated, though. Possibly they don't want to pay Crossref fees. They seem to simply provide article urls and permalinks instead. Each issue gets its own server name, as the issue number spelled out in lower-case English. In some ways it seems more appropriate given their subject matter and readership:

You might find their guidelines an interesting read. It seems to reflect a rather upstart editorial philosophy, but I find it oddly compelling. LeadSongDog come howl! 15:46, 28 May 2013 (UTC)

ORCID identifiers

ORCID, the Open Research Contributor ID is an identifier for contributors to academic journals, and other such publications, including Wikipedia. It's the equivalent for such people of an ISBN for a book. I would encourage all editors, but especially those who also contribute to academic journals, to register for an ORCID. If you know any such authors who are the subject of a Wikipedia article, please ask them to do so, too. ORCIDs can be added to articles, or user pages, using the {{Authority control}} template. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 15:32, 31 May 2013 (UTC)

Common versus ISO abbreviation

The Colorado Lawyer indeed has an ISO 4 abbreviation of "Colo. Lawyer", but the common abbreviation is "Colo. Law.", and I do not see a discussion on non-ISO abbreviations or the preferred way of mentioning them. Should it be given in the first sentence parentheses as "The Colorado Lawyer (Colo. Law.) ..."? Int21h (talk) 20:02, 2 June 2013 (UTC)

  • Is Colo. Law. perhaps the Bluebook abbreviation? --Randykitty (talk) 20:49, 2 June 2013 (UTC)
    • I think that if there is a more specialized standard for abbreviation within some discipline that differs from ISO then the article should mention both; see Annals of Mathematics for an example. But for that example there's a standardized basis for the non-ISO abbreviation (it's what the journal calls itself and what is used in a big subject-specific review database). Is something like that true for Colo. Law., or when you say "common abbreviation" do you mean merely that some lawyers use the abbreviation? Because if there is a disagreement on how to abbreviate a name, it should be properly sourced. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:42, 2 June 2013 (UTC)
      • For example the Colorado Revised Statutes (C.R.S.; see Law of Colorado) itself refers to the publication as "Colo. Law." in its introductory pages. The CRS is the official Colorado codification of state law; I think that is enough to use it as a reliable source. There are several other publications that I have been coming across from the Colorado government that refer to it as such as well. (None important enough to cite, or even to write down. You can Google "Colorado Revised Statutes" and "Colo. Law." together for plenty more, including many big name law review journals.) In fact, I have not come across the "Colo. Lawyer" abbreviation at all, apart from confirming it as the ISO 4 abbreviation from that Wikipedia article's linked website (which I should note is probably WP:OR.) Int21h (talk) 22:03, 2 June 2013 (UTC)
    • No, I do not think it is a Bluebook abbreviation. I just think it is what the journal abbreviates itself as, and as such has become the most common abbreviation. The journal is not listed in the Bluebook references I found (online.) Int21h (talk) 22:15, 2 June 2013 (UTC)
  • Similar discussions pertain for New Engl. J. Med. vs. NEJM and many others. Previously raised at Template_talk:Infobox_journal#ISO_or_NLM_abbreviation_of_journal_title.3F. LeadSongDog come howl! 02:28, 3 June 2013 (UTC)

Moving Article

I'm planning on contributing to some missing computer science journals and conferences, but I already made a mistake with my first attempt: The TACAS article I created needs to be moved, as they have added a the to the title after 6 years and I guess that the article should be named with the current name. If I understand it correctly, one needs a certain amount of edits to be allowed to move articles. Can someone here please do it? --Naujokat (talk) 08:27, 5 June 2013 (UTC)

  • Done. Given that TACAS is always a component of ETAPS and that both articles are just mere stubs, you might contemplate merging them into one more substantial article. --Randykitty (talk) 10:16, 5 June 2013 (UTC)
    • Thanks for the rename. I agree on the "more substancial" part. I'll be working on it. Apart from that I think the six conferences of ETAPS are regarded as individual conferences; at least that's my subjective perception. Some of them also existed several years before the founding of ETAPS. I don't think they should be merged. But that's only my opinion and I'm new here. --Naujokat (talk) 07:33, 6 June 2013 (UTC)
  • I don't think that it is very important that they existed independently before ETAPS was created. We sometimes do this for journals that merge, too, just create one more substantial article, redirecting there from the old titles, and give the history of both. As these conferences are held under one umbrella, I could very well envisage one article on ETAPS with separate sections for each one of the conferences. That would make for a nice meaty article, instead of meager 7 stubs. --Randykitty (talk) 08:02, 6 June 2013 (UTC)

Porting Cite doi to Wikidata

Hi, as far as I know, citations are about to be ready to use with Wikidata, and {{cite doi}} seems a very good candidate to be ported to use wikidata and try to import datas into wikidata. Any thoughts about that? TomT0m (talk) 14:20, 5 June 2013 (UTC)

  • I used to like that template a lot (like {{cite pmid}}), until somebody remarked that these templates are easy targets for vandalism, as generally nobody watches them. The same would go for Wikidata, perhaps. If I have a DOI, I enter {{cite journal |doi=XXXXXX}} in the article and then let citationbot fill in the rest (checking afterwards whether the bot did it correct, of course). Apart from that, I don't see much difference in day-to-day use with moving this to Wikidata and it would have the advantage that citations would instantly be transferable to wikis in other languages (provided they have an equivalent template). --Randykitty (talk) 14:34, 5 June 2013 (UTC)
  • Some time ago there was a discussion about that in Wikidata and the outcome was that items that are created to be used as sources should have the motivation to be used to source statements. The problematic is that in Wikipedia there is no such distinction, so maybe the first step should be to differentiate between those sources that could support an statement in Wikidata and those that couldn't. Regarding to Randykitty's comment, there is an advantage of using Wikidata over templates, and it is that the changes do show up in your watchlist. --Micru (talk) 15:32, 5 June 2013 (UTC)
    I missed that, could you point that out ? I don't understand how the usecases are that different (is it something as reified reference with an item versus not ?) TomT0m (talk) 16:17, 5 June 2013 (UTC)
    IIRC the option chosen was to create source/reference items for the claims in Wikidata that need them, the other ones were dismissed and archived. Somewhere else it was also commented (maybe in the IRC office hour?) that references in Wikidata are supposed to support claims in Wikidata and those references would appear in Wikipedia if the claim is used here, that is aligned with the mission of the project which is to provide support for sourced data, not for references/sources. That means that you always need a claim to attach a reference/source to, so "unattached" sources/references used in Wikipedia (those that don't offer a clear link between the claim and its reference/source) wouldn't qualify.--Micru (talk) 20:53, 5 June 2013 (UTC)
    This is nonsense, if you has stated clearly that this implied that it excluded using wikidata to source wikipedia non structured claims, the answers would have been totally different. Imho this do not even need an RfC :), we are putting too much barriers, clearly. TomT0m (talk) 21:28, 5 June 2013 (UTC)
    I might be wrong, but AFIK, Wikidata never aimed to store ALL wikipedia's references, that is not the focus of the project. It aims to store claims and those sources/references that supports them. Of course if the Wikidata claim is used in Wikipedia then the source/reference will appear in Wikipedia too. That could change in the future, but for the time being I would focus on sourcing Wikidata's claims, there is a lot of work to do :)--Micru (talk) 22:07, 5 June 2013 (UTC)
    This is precisely a thing on which the two project converge : the need to source. Sources (book and articles will be more often than never identical, same book as an example, in both cases. Wikidata aims to store informations that can be used by pedias, this is exactly an example of that ! in my opinion this is a part of the main goals. Plus if it is done right this will benefit the two project : a reference book that is used in WIkipedia would have an item and its information already entered, so it will help Wikidatians. The converse is true if it is made easy to find reference items in wikipedias. This will help building a cooperation beetween the two communities, plus it is pure knowledge by iteself, a book used as a reference in WIkipedia or Wikidata is likely to be a good book, we can store linked data about what it is about for example. Plus it could help cleaning the mess of references in pedias, I really see only good things there. TomT0m (talk) 23:20, 5 June 2013 (UTC)
  • I've long objected to using cite isbn, cite doi or cite pmid, as TomTOm mentions above, for several reasons. The reasoning was at least partly spelled out at Template talk:cite doi/Archive 1 and a bit at Template talk:cite pmid. If properly implemented on Wikidata the problems might be mooted. In essence they boil down to:
  1. Template space implementation means the citation must appear the same in all articles that transclude that template. This abrogates the article editors' control over appearance of citations.
  2. Template subpages created are seldom if ever watched by humans. Vandals can thus undermine wp:V without being promptly detected. Routine semiprotection would go some way in addressing this, but it really needs something more reliable.
  3. User:citation bot has been rather failure prone, and is supported only intermittently by a sole operator who, though he has done great work for the project, seems now to be otherwise engaged much of the time. Others could conceivably help out, but that doesn't seem to have happened despite the code being public (hosted on google code) and open source.
  4. These templates are English-language centric. That's fine for the English-language WP, but it hinders translations, particularly of titles, of journal names, and of quotes. A better version would use a standards-based representation for each field
  5. The templates are prone to the stylistic winds of change. The advent of CS1 based formatting (and now the Lua implentations of that) has changed details of punctuation, number of authors displayed, etc. No clear consensus is present on how or when to revisit existing template subpages to bring them into conformance with current practices.
  6. Using templates this way muddies the partion between the document cited and the portion of the document being referenced. Articles that extensively reference an extensive source need clean tools for citing specific pages or paragraphs in those sources. We'd be better to put |pages=, |at=, and |quote= as parameters in the transcluding article and get them out of the template subpage. The transition to this will be more painful the more articles cite a single template.
I think with Wikidata is possible to address all those issues to a certain degree EXCEPT:
  • How to transform a text citation into a machine readable citation. For instance, an import bot doesn't know how to convert "(L.) L." into a link to Q1043, Carl Linnæus, some human intervention might be needed.
  • How to link the claim to the citation. If both the citation and the reference are in the infobox it might be possible, but even then it is problematic. For instance if I want to import the inclination of the moon by a bot into wikidata, on the infobox I see "5.145° to the ecliptic[2]", the data is there, the reference is there, but there is no link between them... might be a clever bot can infer the link? That is an easy case, but some others might need something extra, like to use more detailed templates or some tool to link references and data.
--Micru (talk) 20:53, 5 June 2013 (UTC)
I understand LeadSongDog's concerns to a certain extent but in this case I feel that perfect is the enemy of good. It's already hard to convince bot operators and bot enthusiasts on Wikidata that sourcing data is important (or that it's even an issue at all) so it will be almost impossible to have them wait until we have perfect sourcing solutions when importing data from Wikipedia. Pichpich (talk) 21:46, 5 June 2013 (UTC)

Hi! I have opened a request for comments on this topic in Wikidata.--Micru (talk) 23:42, 25 June 2013 (UTC)

A pair (assuming good faith...) of editors are trying to remove sourced information critical of the journal. Some more eyes would be welcome to see whether this info should indeed remain in the article or if these editors are perhaps right that it should go. Thanks. --Randykitty (talk) 05:48, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

Journal Minerva (ISSN 1393-614X) reliable?

I found http://www.minerva.mic.ul.ie/vol9/Feminism.html which may be an interesting article.

Is the journal reliable? Minerva - An Internet Journal of Philosophy is ISSN 1393-614X.

Thanks WhisperToMe (talk) 02:53, 27 June 2013 (UTC)

Monographiae Biologicae

I recently added some material from Monographiae Biologicae http://www.springer.com/series/6304 as a reference to an article, and it occurred to me that perhaps there should be an article on Monographiae Biologicae itself. This is a monographic series rather than an academic journal. This is a Google Scholar search. This search shows 163 hits for Monographiae Biologicae in Wikipedia. I have not created an article on Monographiae Biologicae because I do not know whether these results are enough to demonstrate notability, but I would encourage anyone who thinks that notability has been shown to create the article. Eastmain (talkcontribs) 02:55, 1 July 2013 (UTC)

Well, I think Springer publishes high caliber material, so an article on this series of monographs might work. ---- Steve Quinn (talk) 04:26, 1 July 2013 (UTC)
As an example, there's an article on another of their series here. —David Eppstein (talk) 04:58, 1 July 2013 (UTC)
Thanks David. I just did a quick article on the Monographiae Biologicae series, as requested. Interestingly, it has an issn and is indexed by selective services (see article). ---- Steve Quinn (talk) 06:13, 1 July 2013 (UTC)
Many scientific libraries, especially medical libraries, tend to treat anything possible issued in sequential parts as a series, and publishers accommodate it by giving an ISSN number, in addition to isbn numbers for the original volume. When I started at Princeton, we had enough money to buy two sets of the major series, keeping one under the series title and separating one by subject of each volume. That jasn;t been the practice for a good while, of course. DGG ( talk ) 07:54, 1 July 2013 (UTC)

Is The Journal of Community Informatics notable?

I am thinking about stubbing The Journal of Community Informatics ([14]) - if it is notable. I am not sure if it is, comments appreciated. Is it indexed in any major databases? I am always terrible at figuring that out... --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 14:18, 29 June 2013 (UTC)

  • They're not included in any Thomson-Reuters database (see their Journal Master List. I don't know about other databases, but the fact that they don't mention any indexing on their website is ominous: usually journals want as many people as possible to know when they are included in any databases, because that encourages authors to submit their better work to them. Perhaps DGG or one of our computer science editors can find more. It's been around for 9 years, so there could be something somewhere. --Randykitty (talk) 14:28, 29 June 2013 (UTC)

I dont see them in any relevant database., but I'm checking further. Using Google Scholar, I see that most of their articles have been cited only once or twice. I found one article with 18 citations,, but it's an outlier, otherwise the most cited ones are 6s and 7s, . The articles themselves seem local studies of common phenomena, done by mostly direct observation and description, and sometimes not particularly sophisticated small scale surveys, The content is more sociological than technological. I didn't spot anything I wanted to use in an article. So all in all, I don;t think it would meet our usual requirements for notability DGG ( talk ) 08:25, 1 July 2013 (UTC)

Second/third opinion needed

Please see this discussion. Thanks. --Randykitty (talk) 22:44, 29 June 2013 (UTC)

I think Randykitty's link target was meant to be Talk:Minds and Machines --Mark viking (talk) 05:44, 1 July 2013 (UTC)

International Journal of Digital Multimedia Broadcasting

Another editor has created International Journal of Digital Multimedia Broadcasting, which has been tagged for speedy deletion on the grounds of notability. Perhaps it is notable, but I'm not sure. See http://www.worldcat.org/search?fq=x0:jrnl&q=n2:1687-7578 and http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijdmb/ Eastmain (talkcontribs) 06:01, 1 July 2013 (UTC)

"Fruit Fly News" newsletter

has been nominated for deletion -- 65.94.79.6 (talk) 03:39, 19 June 2013 (UTC)

It seems that it was copyrighted content. Wikipedia cannot host content in legal violation of copyright. Blue Rasberry (talk) 14:18, 1 July 2013 (UTC)

ChemWeb

I almost placed this page in the main space, but I became unsure of its notability. I am seeking opinions on notability before I place this article in the main space. It is currently on one of my sandbox pages here. --- Steve Quinn (talk) 05:47, 3 July 2013 (UTC)

  • I don't think we have separate notability criteria for databases. Perhaps you could ask at the Chemistry Wikiproject what they think of it. And, as always, User:DGG may have some helpful ideas about this. The article looks good, but you're right, there's no independent sources. Hope this helps a bit. --Randykitty (talk) 19:42, 3 July 2013 (UTC)
  • Thanks Randy.
They're essentially a newsletter aggregator. I think they're reasonably well known. I'm not sure the article is altogether accurate about what's available; the best way of finding out seems to be to join, so I did, and as soon as I get some experience I'll edit & move to mainspace. DGG ( talk ) 01:49, 4 July 2013 (UTC)
Wow! Thanks DGG. Yeah, I was trying hard to find more content to put in the article, based on the web site, and other sources. I think I covered the web site well enough. Also, I didn't find other sources that specifically described ChemWeb. Maybe you know some University sites that might have descriptions of ChemWeb. ---- Steve Quinn (talk) 06:02, 6 July 2013 (UTC)
If this is a newsletter aggregator then it is not an indexing service. ----Steve Quinn (talk) 06:07, 6 July 2013 (UTC)
I just ask for comments from WikiProject Chemistry members and asked them to comment here. ---- Steve Quinn (talk) 23:49, 7 July 2013 (UTC)

Cambridge Digital Library

I just added a WP Journals template to the talk page of Cambridge Digital Library. It is a new article created by User:Dietcoke3.14 ---- Steve Quinn (talk) 02:55, 12 July 2013 (UTC)


Rating WP Journal articles

User:Randykitty and I (User:Steve Quinn) have been exploring the issue of rating articles for WP Journals. It seems to me that we have come up with some interesting perspectives on this matter. Below is a discussion copied from his talk page. The discussion is posted here so that we may have a larger discussion with more participation: -- Steve Quinn (talk) 20:01, 14 July 2013‎

Academic journal banners

Hello. According to the Stub templates and categories section of the Writing Guide (WP:JWG): "... if the article contains an infobox and indexing information, it should be rated "Start class" on its talk page... . So, I am advising that academic journal articles can normally be placed in the start category. Let me know if you agree. So, for example, this edit should probably changed to class=start. I will be glad to do it, I just wanted to use this as an example. Regards. And, by the way, enjoy your coffee! ---- Steve Quinn (talk) 03:19, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

  • If I were to be stranded on an uninhabited island, I guess coffee would be the thing I missed most... :-) I recently changed my rating behavior following this discussion. But perhaps we should have a larger discussion about it in WP Journals, because you're right, the JWG (and also the examples in the rating guide, I now realize, say differently. --Randykitty (talk) 05:40, 10 July 2013 (UTC)
  • I agree about the coffee. I suppose a larger discussion at WP Journals would be helpful. I see what happened here [15], [16], [17]. I am thinking that articles that are rated Stub will not move into "Start class" because there isn't much more information available for the large majority of academic journal articles. I suppose a larger discussion will lend credence to whatever method we agree upon as a group. We can then link to the discussion as back up when needed. ---- Steve Quinn (talk) 05:58, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
  • You're right about articles not moving forward if we follow this "DYK rule". That is, I think, a strong argument to do things slightly different at WP Journals. I don't really care too much and am willing to be convinced either way, but we should have consistency over the project. Another argument I once saw (but unfortunately don't remember where) is that an article is not a stub any more if it is beyond the point where it could be speedily deleted (journal articles can only be CSDed for spam or copyvio, but just assume it is about a person). For journals, that means if there's a claim to notability supported by some independent source (such as inclusion in a selective major database), it would pass this bar. We've been actually a bit more conservative than that, instead insisting also on the presence of an infobox. Anyway, perhaps you can start this discussion at the project talk page, perhaps copying this discussion. --Randykitty (talk) 07:57, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
  • Well, the way I am reading the chart on the Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Assessment page is -- all academic journal articles with the complete information that is usually contained in the articles, appears to deserve a "B" rating. For example, when we write:
Journal such and such, is a (monthly) peer reviewed (scientific journal) published by (Steve & Randy Scholarly Works). The editor in chief is Joe Shmoe (High Fallutin' University.) The journal covers (editing) (discussion) and all other topics related to Wikipedia. And so on, whatever content is available. Combine this with an infobox and impact factor and maybe include an "Abstracting and indexing" section -- and according to that criteria, we probably rate a "B" -- because the information is complete.
Of course, some journals will have more available. For example, some have an accessible history. But still, even without a history section, if the information is complete, then the articles probably rates a "B". Well, what do you think? Pretty radical, huh? (By the way, thanks for your interest). ---- Steve Quinn (talk) 05:04, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

You're right. If we take that literally, WP Journals will be the project with the most highly-classed articles of all! :-) Having said that, I think there is also merit to Piotrus' "DYK standard". Perhaps it's best to start a discussion at WP Journals (and invite Piotrus there). Before making radical changes, we'd better get a consensus on this... --Randykitty (talk) 18:38, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

I have no problem with initiating a discussion at WP:JOURNALS, and no problem with inviting DYK members to the discussion. However, DYK is a Wikipedia project with its own criteria pertaining to DYK submissions. They have standards that make DYK work. However, this does not mean that editing on Wikipedia follows from DYK requirements. There are already policies and guidelines on Wikipedia, and WP Journals already has its own set of criteria at WP:JWG. ---- Steve Quinn (talk) 19:36, 14 July 2013 (UTC)
I'm sorry to say, that I think DYK rules do not apply to WP Journals articles, simply because these are not DYK submissions. ---- Steve Quinn (talk) 19:44, 14 July 2013 (UTC)
  • Oops, sorry for not being clearer, I didn't mean to invite all members of WP DYK, but just Piotrus, because he's kind of at the origin of this whole discussion. --Randykitty (talk) 19:53, 14 July 2013 (UTC)
No, no, I understood that you meant Piotrus. I was just generalizing -- so the misunderstanding is my fault. ---- Steve Quinn (talk) 20:00, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

Continue discussion

I would also like to point out that DYK criteria does not seem have more validity than the "Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Assessment" page, at least to me. ---- Steve Quinn (talk) 19:52, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

Marking articles with an open access icon

Hello. I thought this board might be interested in the proposal I made at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Medicine#Marking_articles_with_open_access_icon. Blue Rasberry (talk) 16:34, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Is the electronic journal of contemporary japanese studies reliable?

I found an article in the electronic journal of contemporary japanese studies...

Is it a "reliable" journal that is indexed? I have no access to Ulrich's Web.

Thanks, WhisperToMe (talk) 17:16, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

It's diamond open access (i.e. free to both authors and readers) and over ten years old; those are both good signs. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:12, 18 July 2013 (UTC)
Cool! I'd like to hear more feedback, but I did put the article in the Further reading section WhisperToMe (talk) 18:37, 18 July 2013 (UTC)
I agree wigth David. It's definitely not a "predatory" OA journal. It doesn't look like it would make {{WP:NJournals|our notability criteria]], but I wouldn't hesitate much in using it as as a RS. --Randykitty (talk) 22:32, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Image rationales

Moved to Wikipedia:WikiProject Academic Journals/Images

Carcharoth (talk) 14:03, 27 January 2008 (UTC)

A wiki for OR about journals

Is there a wiki where people can post information about length of reviews or (as suggested at [18]) about their quality and friendliness? If not, would you think Wikia or Wikiversity would be better to start one - and would it be possible to start it using a master list from our WikiProject, if we have one? --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 10:20, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

Wikiversity is not an appropriate forum for this. Wikia could be, as it is a forum for anything. If I were going to recommend a forum for this kind of thing I might suggest Wikinews. One could have a templated email interview which is sent to the editors of journals, and then to supplement that perhaps other templated email interviews to scientists who either publish in or read that journal. All of the templates could contain some question about current events in the field. The result could be timely, journalist-reviewed news about the current state of a field and journal along with base information about the journal from the editor and opinions about the journal from people who would know. This could be paired with scientist interviews, which I know that some people have an interest in organizing on a large scale and in a standardized way. Even for prominent scientists who get lots of recognition among their peers, sometimes the only media attention they get is their obituary. Blue Rasberry (talk) 14:34, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

Biy-b.jpg

image:Biy-b.jpg has been nominated for deletion -- 76.65.128.222 (talk) 04:49, 14 August 2013 (UTC)

Come and join The Wikipedia Library

The Wikipedia Library is an open research hub, a place for organizing our amazing community of research and reference experts to collaborate and help improve the encyclopedia.

We are working together towards 5 big goals:

Connect editors with their local library and freely accessible resources
Partner to provide free access to paywalled publications, databases, universities, and libraries
Build relationships among our community of editors, libraries, and librarians
Facilitate research for Wikipedians, helping editors to find and use sources
Promote broader open access in publishing and research

Sign up to receive announcements and news about resource donations and partnerships: Sign up
Come and create your profile, and see how we can leverage your talent, expertise, and dedication: Join in

-Hope to see you there, Ocaasi t | c 14:59, 23 August 2013 (UTC)

Russian Journal of Physical Chemistry B

Russian Journal of Physical Chemistry B is incorrectly redirected to Biokhimiya. It is a translation of ru:Химическая физика (журнал) (chemical physics in Russian). It's web site is http://www.springer.com/chemistry/physical+chemistry/journal/11826. --Fedor Babkin (talk) 13:50, 2 September 2013 (UTC)

Philotheos

Yesterday, after a prod on it expired, I deleted Philotheos: International Journal for Philosophy and Theology, but today after receiving a reasonable request to undelete it I did so. Project participants may wish to check whether this one passes WP:NJournals and if not take it to AfD. —David Eppstein (talk) 16:34, 4 September 2013 (UTC)

I would like to hear what people here think about this new category. As far as I know, this is the first time we have a category for articles related to one single journal. Please note that for some articles, it is absolutely unclear why they are in this category, as the journal is not even mentioned in them (Hamblin and Midgley bios). Thanks. --Randykitty (talk) 17:53, 5 September 2013 (UTC)

The Wikipedia Library, connecting with WikiProjects

Hey folks! I wonder if we could connect the library portal to this wikiproject by placing the Library navigation box somewhere in these WikiProject pages.

Let me know what you think. Best, Ocaasi t | c 12:58, 8 September 2013 (UTC)

Bolding subtitles

There is a discussion going on at Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style/Lead_section#Bolding_subtitles, whether journal subtitles should be bolded in the lead or not. More opinions are welcome. --Randykitty (talk) 14:04, 20 September 2013 (UTC)

Journal of Cell and Molecular Research

Could another editor please look at Journal of Cell and Molecular Research? I am not sure whether it is notable. Eastmain (talkcontribs) 19:48, 22 September 2013 (UTC)

I am less sure. I really want to see more non-English journals listed in Wikipedia but all of them still need to meet Wikipedia:Notability (academic journals) and there is no supporting evidence given that this one does. Blue Rasberry (talk) 13:57, 23 September 2013 (UTC)

Annals of Clinical Biochemistry

Could another editor please take a look at Wikipedia_talk:Articles for creation/Annals of Clinical Biochemistry (journal)? I think it might be notable, but the submission has been rejected for lacking references. Eastmain (talkcontribs) 15:59, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

Wikipedia_talk:Articles for creation/Articles for creation/Bulletin of Organic Chemistry (2)

I suspect that Bulletin of Organic Chemistry, an open-access journal, is not notable, but I don't have access to the resources to confirm this. I saw an Articles for creation submission at Wikipedia_talk:Articles for creation/Articles for creation/Bulletin of Organic Chemistry (2) It was declined several months ago and was tagged for deletion. The reviewer said the submission appeared to be a duplicate, but I can't find an original submission without a (2) on the end of the title or evidence that an original submission once existed and was deleted. I haven't heard of the publisher, Global Chemistry Publications. Eastmain (talkcontribs) 10:20, 7 October 2013 (UTC)

Just looking at the website, they have not yet published their first issue, so this article would likely fail an AfD due to WP:CRYSTAL and WP:TOOSOON. Without any published articles, there will be no selective indexing and likely no news articles on which to base a WP article. --Mark viking (talk) 12:31, 7 October 2013 (UTC)

OA journal sting operation

Folks in this project may be interested in a sting operation by Science magazine submitting a bogus article to over 300 open access journals. More than half accepted the paper. Of course, Science has a conflict of interest here, but the experiment seems reasonable enough. In my opinion, it supports the assertion that DOAJ is not very selective. --Mark viking (talk) 16:07, 4 October 2013 (UTC)

The article is certainly interesting, but it might be more correct to characterize the DOAJ as not yet sufficiently selective to exclude all Beall's listed predators. Note however that while 82% of the tested Beall's list journals accepted the sting papers, only 45% of the tested DOAJ listed journals did so. Clearly their criteria need further tightening, as Bjørnshauge acknowledges in the article, but they do provide some protection against scam papers. For wp:R purposes, inability to meet DOAJ criteria should remain a red flag, but inclusion does not on its own provide much reassurance. Taken together (the subset of DOAJ journals not on Beall's list) seems somewhat more reliable. Even then, for extraordinary claims we still need to look very closely at the publishers. LeadSongDog come howl! 15:55, 7 October 2013 (UTC)

I am currently involved in a conflict with a rather single-minded editor on this article. Or perhaps it is me who is single-minded... In any case, some independent and fresh eyes here would be helpful. Thanks. --Randykitty (talk) 14:44, 15 October 2013 (UTC)

Unfortunately you stepped into a skirmish that is part of a long-running turf war between camps in different branches of industrial/occupational/health psychology. As far as I can tell, there are a number of tendentious editors on both sides, with your single-minded editor being the most obstinate at the moment; he's been blocked twice before. Parsing the whole talk page of argument will take some time, but I recommend not letting them goad you into incivility or an edit war. There is always time to get the article right after things have cooled down. --Mark viking (talk) 18:36, 15 October 2013 (UTC)
Wise words. Thanks for that and for your assistance! --Randykitty (talk) 18:46, 15 October 2013 (UTC)

Need help with a figure file

Hi, I just created Neural Plasticity (journal) and took an image of the cover from the journal homepage. However, when I uploaded it here (see article infobox), the (red printed) text on the image that is visible on their website does not display here. I have no clue why, any help will be greatly appreciated. Thanks! --Randykitty (talk) 14:27, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

Need help with a figure file

Hi, I just created Neural Plasticity (journal) and took an image of the cover from the journal homepage. However, when I uploaded it here (see article infobox), the (red printed) text on the image that is visible on their website does not display here. I have no clue why, any help will be greatly appreciated. Thanks! --Randykitty (talk) 14:27, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

Appropriate term ?

I have a problem with the title of the article Academic journal: 1) I don't see the difference with scientific journal. In scientific journal's article it is said that academic journal is broader than scientific journal. Ok, but what kind of journal is academic but not scientific ? 2) Book review is part of academic journal: here I have a problem with the book considered as a journal. At the end I think that Academic journal is in fact academic press. So I propose to rename the article. Snipre (talk) 17:24, 23 October 2013 (UTC)

Template for Creating Stubs for Academic Societies?

Is there a template for creating stubs about the academic societies linked to specific journals? I would like to create stubs for two notable academic societies. I welcome help and advice. Thanks! DStrassmann (talk) 19:34, 27 October 2013 (UTC)

AFAIK, there is no template. I would suggest browsing Category:Learned societies and find an example you like to base yourself on. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 13:03, 28 October 2013 (UTC)

AfC submission

We've been getting plenty of submissions such as this one lately. Are there any of you interested in having a look? Thanks! FoCuSandLeArN (talk) 19:01, 31 October 2013 (UTC)

I'm rather busy at the moment, but you can point people to WP:JWG to improve their submission. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 19:52, 31 October 2013 (UTC)
I left an {{afc comment}} on that submission point to JWG and WP:NJournals. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:09, 31 October 2013 (UTC)

Notability?

Communication, Culture & Critique - seems proddable. Thoughts? --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 02:56, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

I don't see anything about indexing on their website, but haven't made a search either. If the journal turns out to be non-notable, instead of deletion, it would be better to redirect to International Communication Association, the association sponsoring the journal. The journal already has a short paragraph there. --Mark viking (talk) 03:57, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

I'd appreciate thoughts on whether it is notable; I am rather bad at finding whether something is indexed or not (I know it's not indexed in SSCI). If it is notable, I could stub it - but I don't want to waste our time if it isn't. PS. For what it's worth, it's redlinked from Wikipedia:WikiProject Academic Journals/Danish journal list/10. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 06:03, 8 November 2013 (UTC)

I'm not sure about notable (I've not found any indexing yet), but it exists and GScholar shows its articles get citations. It is an external link at Community informatics--you could add a short summary to that article + redirect, instead of creating a vulnerable stub. --Mark viking (talk) 06:41, 8 November 2013 (UTC)

Academic journals?

Looking at the 'R's I see Rubber World, Rue Morgue, Romantic Times, the online Rozaneh[19]etc, all surely not academic? Then there is the academic sounding "The Russian Journal of Genetic Genealogy" - self-published by Lulu.com (the Russian Journal of Genetics is a Springer publication, maybe someone confused the two). Shouldn't we be cleaning this up to prevent people claiming they are citing academic journals when they aren't? Dougweller (talk) 18:08, 12 October 2013 (UTC)

  • Where is it said that these are academic journals? Rue Morgue is a dab page and Romantic Times is correctly categorized as a magazine and tagged for WP Magazines, not WPJournals. The Russian journal does seem to be a scientific journal, but its one of those myriad OA journals that seem to be popping up all over the place. Whether it's serious remains to be seen, in any case it is at this point not notable. --Randykitty (talk) 18:45, 12 October 2013 (UTC)
  • Guessing, I'd say he was looking at WP:JCW. It is within the WikiProject Academic Journals banner, so one might expect that these are a list of academic journals. But no, the list has just about everything resembling a magazine, including Hustler, to name the most execrable example I could find. --Mark viking (talk) 20:14, 12 October 2013 (UTC)
That's right. I see there's a talk page at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Academic Journals/Journals cited by Wikipedia and have now realised that the list is bot generated. I'm sorry, but this seems a bit nuts. Some are academic, and between those and the obvious fact that it is part of this project readers should expect them all to be academic. Many aren't even journals, eg the Philadelphia Real Estate Blog. So, what do we do about it? Dougweller (talk) 16:08, 13 October 2013 (UTC)
Going through that talk page, I see that this very same issue was discussed at length about 2 years ago, without people coming to a consensus. I think that the whole problem could simply be solved by renaming the page to "Periodicals cited by WP". That would avoid going through all kinds of gyrations to get "clean" lists of journals and magazines separately. --Randykitty (talk) 17:14, 13 October 2013 (UTC)
Not if it's under the name of this project. And they aren't all periodicals. And of course, what would be the point? We don't have a list of books cited by Wikipedia. I thought the point was to have a list of academic journals? Dougweller (talk) 05:04, 14 October 2013 (UTC)
I don't really know what the point of those pages is, I haven't been to them very often, I think. Like you say, my guess is that it was intended to have a list of journals cited by WP, to see which ones needed articles (or redirects, for redlinked abbreviations) created. I don't know whether anyone actually uses this page. If not, we might just as well delete it. I don't see an easy way to have a bot generate a list that only contains journals, but I have no experience with bots at all, so perhaps I'm wrong. For journals with existing articles, the bot could look at whether or not the article has a journal infobox or is tagged with a banner of this project on the talkpage, but that wouldn't solve the problem for redlinked cites. --Randykitty (talk) 10:06, 14 October 2013 (UTC)
I think deleting it makes sense. It's not just that these are not all academic journals - some of them are not reliable sources for anything at all, and including them here is doubly misleading. Dougweller (talk) 16:29, 14 October 2013 (UTC)
ABSOLUTELY NOT. These lists have been the main method we have in identifying where we have holes in our coverage. Renaming the page is equally pointless, since it's an internal list, and would be a huge waste of resources and time from the bot coders. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 17:10, 14 October 2013 (UTC)
Fix, don't delete. If articles on non-academic serials are listed, the cure is to correct the cats and put them on the correct lists.LeadSongDog come howl! 19:27, 14 October 2013 (UTC)
What 'cats' (I presume you mean categories but I still don't know what you mean). And what 'correct lists'? And how do we stop the bot from adding everything so that it isn't a never-ending job? I'd prefer to fix it - which of course would be an enormous job - but not if the bot is just going to carry on and restore them. Dougweller (talk) 20:50, 14 October 2013 (UTC)
The page lists items that are referenced via the {{cite journal}} template. If there is something on the list that is not a journal, than the underlying problem is that it is being cited as a journal in the source article(s). However, renaming the pages would be trivial to implement. It could occur at the next run if someone comes up with a reasonable name. -- JLaTondre (talk) 21:20, 14 October 2013 (UTC)
Because it is under this wikiproject we need to make it clear that it isn't a list of academic journals. I don't know what to call them in general -Academic and non-academic ???? referenced in Wikipedia with a decision needing to be also made about what ???? should say. Not periodicals - publications maybe but we'd have to say excluding books. And I see Blogspot is on the list. Dougweller (talk) 13:30, 15 October 2013 (UTC)
It is probably better to focus on how the list is composed than what the list contains. Any attempt to categorize the contents will be subject to the same objections. As an example, if a user mistakenly uses the cite journal template to cite a book, it will appear in the list. "Sources cited as journals" perhaps? -- JLaTondre (talk) 17:11, 15 October 2013 (UTC)
It really is irrelevant. For example of how silly it is to try to demarcate between types of publications, {{cite magazine}} redirects to {{cite journal}}. The point of the list is to identify which journals/magazines/whatever are cited most often on Wikipedia (and find likely redirects, disambiguation, etc...). The list is dominated by academic journals by quite a wide margin (roughly 20:1). Excluding them non-academic sources serves little purpose (and would actually be detrimental, since it only removes attention from articles that very often need it). Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 19:03, 15 October 2013 (UTC)
Not sure where you are going with this as we were talking about the name, not excluding content. -- JLaTondre (talk) 20:28, 15 October 2013 (UTC)
Agreed. Somehow we need to make sure that no one uses this list thinking that anything on it is an academic journal and thus a reliable source. It's actually useful in one sense as you can use it to check where a clearly unreliable source has been used. 'Sources cited as journals' would be ok if each page could have a disclaimer saying something about not all being academic journals. Dougweller (talk) 14:47, 16 October 2013 (UTC)

I've added a paragraph in the introduction cautioning folk that list entries are not necessarily reliable and that their presence is not an endorsement by us. Feel free to edit to taste. --Mark viking (talk) 15:42, 16 October 2013 (UTC)

  • There are too many types of periodicals to make exact definitions. When I first came here seven years ago I made a try, but there were too many counterexamples and exceptions. In some fields, there are well understood distinctions. but across all the subject areas covered in WP, it's almost impossible. (Similarly,. librarians gave up on this also-- at one time the cataloging rules tried to differentiate between different types, but for the last five years and more, they all go into the group of continuing publications. DGG ( talk ) 04:25, 12 November 2013 (UTC)

Reliability of Postcolonial Text

Is Postcolonial Text reliable?

I want to use in The Wedding Banquet:

WhisperToMe (talk) 07:27, 16 November 2013 (UTC)

Although the journal does not seem to meet WP:NJournals, it looks to me serious enough to be used as a reliable source. --Randykitty (talk) 07:38, 16 November 2013 (UTC)

Nova Publishers

The discussion at Talk:Nova Publishers seems relevant - it concerns whether to call Nova an academic publisher and some of the concern is about their journals. Dougweller (talk) 14:14, 18 November 2013 (UTC)

Rename project?

I've been thinking a bit, and it seems to me that the project outgrew its initial scope of academic journals. We also cover monograph series, conference proceedings, academic publishers, databases, and a few more. How would you all feel about renaming the project to WikiProject Academic Publishing? Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 18:14, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

When I think academic publishing, books are what first come to mind. Do we want to take on the field of general academic books as well? --Mark viking (talk) 19:10, 25 November 2013 (UTC)
Headbomb's proposal and your suggestion to include books sounds quite appropriate to me. We'll need to chat with the Books WikiProject, as there will be significant overlap, and we'll need to try to define roughly which set of books we're including. For me, I think the line in the sand is roughly traditional publications that are primarily contributed to by people whose primary profession is academia. i.e. excluding those newfangled academic outputs like software, websites, literary works, performances & exhibitions (which we call 'non-traditional research outputs' in Australia); excluding textbooks written by academics. John Vandenberg (chat) 06:48, 2 December 2013 (UTC)
I didn't think of books at first, and if possible, I'd be against including most books I think. Certainly most books from Category:Physics books for example. Books aimed to the layperson should be right out (A Brief History of Time) and as are other material written for non-academic (Einstein-Szilard letter). I'm also lukewarm, although not fully against, including landmark publications (e.g. On the Origin of Species and Principia Mathematica) and textbooks (Course of Theoretical Physics, The Feynman Lectures on Physics). But I can't really form a cogent argument for/against the inclusion of these (other than from a managerial perspective, as this significantly add to our already heavy workload), especially since I'd be for the inclusion of landmark papers, monographs and handbooks such as the 1964 PRL symmetry breaking papers, The Principles of Quantum Mechanics, and the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics.
This would enlarge our scope a bit, but I think this is where we've been heading for a while now. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 12:01, 2 December 2013 (UTC)
I like the exclusion criteria 'aimed to the layperson'.
I view this WikiProject as being about the scientific & dissemination processes in play before, during and after publishing of 'research'; the content being published is best left to other WikiProjects. From that perspective, our scope would include much of On the Origin of Species#Publication (and Publication of Darwin's theory), but not the majority of that article. I agree on textbooks as that is a such a large gap in Wikipedia content (and wish someone would start that WikiProject), but I am more inclined to include academic lectures that are published and notable and were the pinnacle of knowledge or research at the time (and The Feynman Lectures on Physics sort of feels 'in scope' to me) in part because the increase in scope will be quite small. I have seen papers as being in scope for the same reason; there are not many that are notable and typically other discipline-specific WikiProjects each only have a few of them (currently), so we can provide a broader perspective to these articles. Looking at the article CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics without having ever perused the real thing, I would have thought it is out of scope; are contributions invited? I must also say that the manageability of the scope depends on who is here doing the work, so I'm pretty f;exible if one of the more active members wants a class of works included if they are can put forward a reasonable definition of the class they are interested in. John Vandenberg (chat) 16:58, 2 December 2013 (UTC)

Wikidata

Hi, I have create a "Periodicals" task force on Wikidata. I suspect a few of the lovely folk here will be interested and able help the new task force get started. In theory the Wikidata notability allows every serious journal to have a Wikidata entry, and Wikidata fact sourcing essentially demands that every journal on WP:JCW has an entry on Wikidata. User:John_Vandenberg/Ulam Quarterly may have finally found its wiki-home. John Vandenberg (chat) 10:43, 2 December 2013 (UTC)

You will want to be careful about relying on WP:JCW, as it is a bot generated list that has many non-journal entries. See the second intro paragraph on that page. --Mark viking (talk) 17:04, 2 December 2013 (UTC)

This journal is at AfD and the discussion could use the input of some more knowledgeable editors. Thanks. --Randykitty (talk) 17:03, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

How selective is indexing in the Astrophysics Data System?

The Elsevier OA journal Astronomy and Computing was established this year and is indexed in the Astrophysics Data System. How selective is this (i.e., is this sufficient to establish notability)? We often give new journals from major publishers the benefit of the doubt. (I don't agree with that: all major publishers start a dud from time to time that doesn't make it after a few years, but anyway this is the current practice). However, another Elsevier OA journal didn't do that well in the recent Science "sting", so perhaps w<e should look a bit more critically to this journal, too. For the moment, it's only claim for notability is the ADS indexing. The (declared COI) editor who created the article claims on the talk page that the journal will soon be indexed in Scopus, adding "unsurprisingly, since that's managed by the same entity". For the moment, it doesn't seem to be in Scopus yet. (And this remark should perhaps make us reconsider whether listing in Scopus really means that much, from what I see, Scopus is not very selective any more and I even recall some "predatory" OA journals being included - although I don't recall which ones, I have to admit). In any case, I'd appreciate the opinion of other editors here about whether this journal at this point is notable enough for inclusion or should be PRODded or taken to AfD. Thanks. --Randykitty (talk) 09:58, 7 December 2013 (UTC)

I don't know just how selective it is, but it is selective. For example, Journal of Cosmology was indexed in it for a while, but after the Hoover paper, they stopped indexing it. It includes a mix of refereed and non-refereed publications, so I wouldn't use it as an absolute metric for notability, in that some of those publications are one offs, conference proceedings, monographs, society bulletins, relevant technical reports, etc... and not everything in there is notable in the sense of WP:NJOURNALS, but as far as journal indexing goes, being in the ADS is an indication of quality and relevance to the astronomy community.
But as far as this particular journal goes, it's borderline. It's a legitimate journal, its being edited by legit scientists, and a dedicated journal for computational astrophysics has been a long time coming, and being indexed in ADSABS is a clear indication of that. Its establishment also garnered a fair share of attention and enthusiasm (e.g. [20]). But it's also a very young journal that didn't gather a lot of citations since its inception (a total of three). The citations stem from high quality journals (Nature, Astrophysical Journal, and MNRAS), but two are self citations. There's a bit of WP:TOOSOON at play here. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 14:17, 7 December 2013 (UTC)
Thanks, that's helpful. I think then that it's best not to take it to AfD right now, but wait a bit more to see how it develops. I'll leave the notability tag in place for now, too. --Randykitty (talk) 22:37, 7 December 2013 (UTC)

Editors here may be interested in a discussion ongoing at Wikipedia_talk:Identifying_reliable_sources_(medicine)#Another_try_at_proposal_for_addition_for_identifying_possible_poor_journals. — Preceding unsigned comment added by LeadSongDog (talkcontribs) 11:44, 13 December 2013

This AfD debate could use some input from knowledgeable editors. Thanks. --Randykitty (talk) 09:38, 16 December 2013 (UTC)

New template - R from ISO 4

See Template:R from ISO 4 ... suggested for use on redirects from Journal abbreviations following the ISO 4 abbreviation standard. --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 13:29, 29 December 2013 (UTC)

Invitation to User Study

Would you be interested in participating in a user study? We are a team at University of Washington studying methods for finding collaborators within a Wikipedia community. We are looking for volunteers to evaluate a new visualization tool. All you need to do is to prepare for your laptop/desktop, web camera, and speaker for video communication with Google Hangout. We will provide you with a Amazon gift card in appreciation of your time and participation. For more information about this study, please visit our wiki page (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Finding_a_Collaborator). If you would like to participate in our user study, please send me a message at Wkmaster (talk) 12:49, 10 January 2014 (UTC).

Notability of academic organizations

There's a discussion about this subject, relevant to this project, here. --Randykitty (talk) 21:06, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

I am about to prod it (cleanup of WP:POLAND notability backlog). Any objections? --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 22:15, 3 February 2014 (UTC)

I wouldn't know how to find selective indexing for this journal. There appears to be a review of it at Die Presse [21] but it is an opinion piece. I have no objections. --Mark viking (talk) 23:36, 3 February 2014 (UTC)

How does it check out? I don't think it's indexed in SSCI. I think it is notable, but I am not sure how to justify it; I'd appreciate comments and if anyone can add references to the article about where this journal is indexed. Another one would be Social Movement Studies. Ironically, both stubs were created by me, and as a scholar of social movements I can attest that those journals are notable in the field, but I'd appreciate help with index metrics, so we can prove their notability (I hope) to others. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 12:10, 4 February 2014 (UTC)

  • RSMCC is not in any Thomson-Reuters database. However, the journal's homepage claims that it is indexed by Scopus. If that is correct (I cannot open the Excel file on this computer as it is too large), then that would suffice to meet WP:NJournals. According to its website (no reason to doubt T&F), Social Movement Studies is indexed by "CSA Worldwide Political Science Abstracts; International Bibliography of the Social Sciences (IBSS); OCLC and Sociological Abstracts". OCLC is rather trivial, they index everything. I'm not sure whether any of the other indexes are sufficiently selective for NJournals, but I'm pinging DGG, who can certainly enlighten us in this respect. --Randykitty (talk) 15:16, 4 February 2014 (UTC)

MDPI

MDPI talks about two different organisations, but says they are related, without describing how they are linked. It looks like they should be split, but maybe I am missing something. John Vandenberg (chat) 16:12, 7 February 2014 (UTC)

Academic journal series

Over on Wikidata, there is a discussion about creating a term to describe:

  1. journal brand names like Trends (journals) and BMC journals (and probably others), and
  2. split journals like Chemische Berichte, Journal of the Chemical Society, Proceedings of the Royal Society, Comptes rendus de l'Académie des sciences, Acta Crystallographica, American Journal of Medical Genetics, International Journal of Modern Physics, Perkin Transactions, Environment and Planning (i.e. the current thing, which is the brand name retained, rather than the historical journal when it was a single journal)

These are imaginary concepts, largely existing on Wikipedia because often the individual parts are not individually notable. But what do we call them? Do we create two names, one for each of the above? We should also create categories on en.wp for these concepts. Category:Journals which were divided into parts (or similar) is easy. Trends in.. is almost an imprint. How do we split Category:BioMed Central academic journals into the BMC series from their other journals which were not part of the BMC series. The BMC series also runs a bit like an imprint, but not as clearly as the Trends series afaik (but I dont know it well). John Vandenberg (chat) 04:55, 8 February 2014 (UTC)

Now redirects to this talk page. Enjoy, --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 14:36, 14 February 2014 (UTC)

OMIC Publishing Group

There is a discussion related to OMICS Publishing Group and related articles at Talk:OMICS Publishing Group#Content Controversy. Please read this discussion and the other discussions over the past few days on that talk page and consider participating. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 21:18, 14 February 2014 (UTC)

Please see for notability: written that the group is into various businesses:
  • Educational Society- Holding around 6000 students from primary school level to degree level
  • Films and movies- turnover of INR 300 Crores / 65 Million USD Business as per the box office records
  • Conferences- only publishing group organizing scientific conferences; world-wide conferences and the largest conference organizer; organizing around 100 conferences per year
  • Health TV Channel- 1st Health Channel; monitored exclusively by OMICS Group; operating in English, Hindi and Telugu languages
  • Scientific Alliance- Collaboration with more than 150 non-profit scientific associations
  • Journals- operating 350 open access journals for the sake of disseminating knowledge for free
Since Journals is just a part of the business, a general page is of course required. The page is being redirected again and again to OMICS Publishing Group.
To prove the matter, please refer to reliable sources published on OMICS Group page
A case should be opened for discussion and consideration with above notability Lizia7 (talk) 13:37, 21 February 2014 (UTC)
WP:Sockpuppet investigations/Scholarscentral. Nomoskedasticity (talk) 11:53 am, Today (UTC+1)

As of January, the popular pages tool has moved from the Toolserver to Wikimedia Tool Labs. The code has changed significantly from the Toolserver version, but users should notice few differences. Please take a moment to look over your project's list for any anomalies, such as pages that you expect to see that are missing or pages that seem to have more views than expected. Note that unlike other tools, this tool aggregates all views from redirects, which means it will typically have higher numbers. (For January 2014 specifically, 35 hours of data is missing from the WMF data, which was approximated from other dates. For most articles, this should yield a more accurate number. However, a few articles, like ones featured on the Main Page, may be off).

Web tools, to replace the ones at tools:~alexz/pop, will become available over the next few weeks at toollabs:popularpages. All of the historical data (back to July 2009 for some projects) has been copied over. The tool to view historical data is currently partially available (assessment data and a few projects may not be available at the moment). The tool to add new projects to the bot's list is also available now (editing the configuration of current projects coming soon). Unlike the previous tool, all changes will be effective immediately. OAuth is used to authenticate users, allowing only regular users to make changes to prevent abuse. A visible history of configuration additions and changes is coming soon. Once tools become fully available, their toolserver versions will redirect to Labs.

If you have any questions, want to report any bugs, or there are any features you would like to see that aren't currently available on the Toolserver tools, see the updated FAQ or contact me on my talk page. Mr.Z-bot (talk) (for Mr.Z-man) 04:49, 23 February 2014 (UTC)

Total free access to Royal Society History of Science journals for 2 days on March 4th and 5th !!!

As Wikipedian in Residence at the Royal Society, the National Academy for the sciences of the UK, I am pleased to say that the two Royal Society History of Science journals will be fully accessible for free for 2 days on March 4th and 5th. This is in conjunction with the Women in Science Edit-a-thon on 4 March, slightly in advance of International Women's Day, on Saturday March 8th. The event is held by the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering, and is fully booked, but online participation is very welcome, and suggestions for articles relevant to the theme of "Women in Science" that need work, and topics that need coverage.

The journals will have full and free online access to all from 1am (GMT/UTC) on 4th March 2014 until 11pm (GMT/UTC) on 5th March 2014. Normally they are only free online for issues between 1 and 10 years old. They are:

The RS position is a "pilot" excercise, running between January and early July 2014. Please let me know on my talk page or the project page if you want to get involved or have suggestions. There will be further public events, as well as many for the RS's diverse audiences in the scientific community; these will be advertised first to the RS's emailing lists and Twitter feeds.

I am keen to get feedback on my personal Conflict of Interest statement for the position, and want to work out a general one for Royal Society staff in consultation with the community. Wiki at Royal Society John (talk) 12:17, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

Wiki at Royal Society John Is this free for anyone who goes there or is special permission required? Blue Rasberry (talk) 18:53, 28 February 2014 (UTC)
"full and free online access to all..." Wiki at Royal Society John (talk) 18:59, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

Fake academic papers generated by computers

I am not sure where this could be used, but this can be a helpful source WhisperToMe (talk) 05:00, 1 March 2014 (UTC)

Academic journal database in Wikidata

I announced last week that we had a fairly comprehensive collection of academic journals on Wikidata now. This process has uncovered quite a few errors in the ISSNs and duplicate articles on English Wikipedia. Thanks Randykitty for helping sort these out. The import of magazines and newspapers from English Wikipedia is nearing completion too now, where they have an ISSN or OCLC or LCCN. As a result of the import, there are some constraint violations for these identifiers, which can be seen at ISSN and LCCN. Properties for abbreviations have recently been created (ISO 4, Z39.5 & Bluebook), as has impact factor. I am happy to populate the abbreviations, but I am not comfortable populating impact factor due to uncertainty about the legality (see d:Property talk:P1169). More properties are being proposed at d:Wikidata:Property_proposal/Creative work. There are more properties, even in our infoboxes, which need to be specified in Wikidata. e.g. in our infobox, wikidata is missing properties for peer-review (e.g. what processes does it use), open access method, and link1..link5 will contain a wide assortment of useful links to other archives (such as Project Muse on American Jewish History & American Literature (journal)). It would also be great to have properties for submission citation style, editorial boards, article numbering scheme. Once those properties are created and populated, we will be able to automatically populate template:infobox journal from the data from Wikidata. This will mean that the infobox on law journals could use Bluebook abbreviations, while the infobox for other disciplines use their relevant abbreviation styles. John Vandenberg (chat) 23:36, 2 March 2014 (UTC)

Invitation to Participate in a User Study - Final Reminder

Would you be interested in participating in a user study of a new tool to support editor involvement in WikiProjects? We are a team at the University of Washington studying methods for finding collaborators within WikiProjects, and we are looking for volunteers to evaluate a new visual exploration tool for Wikipedia. Given your interest in this Wikiproject, we would welcome your participation in our study. To participate, you will be given access to our new visualization tool and will interact with us via Google Hangout so that we can solicit your thoughts about the tool. To use Google Hangout, you will need a laptop/desktop, a web camera, and a speaker for video communication during the study. We will provide you with an Amazon gift card in appreciation of your time and participation. For more information about this study, please visit our wiki page (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Finding_a_Collaborator). If you would like to participate in our user study, please send me a message at Wkmaster (talk) 16:39, 5 March 2014 (UTC).