Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Academic Journals

good articles

In order to start assessing articles about journals, we need to find articles that are already good or work collaboratively on a few that can be good. There are currently less than 700 uses of the Infobox Journal template.

DGG posted a decent list of what we would want on a journal article; see User talk:DGG#what journal articles should have as content for the discussion so far. John Vandenberg 02:17, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

That is a good summary. So good in fact that we should have a separate page for it here so we can discuss it on its own talk page. What would be a suitable name for that subpage? Carcharoth 16:44, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

I agree it should be a subpage of the project. I suggest it should be be called "Project editing conventions". In another project I got involved in a discussion about deleting pages of this kind because they were called things like "guidelines" and "manual of style". The compromise was that title and it has subpages itself. --Bduke 22:05, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

Most projects have "assessment criteria"; DGG's list a reasonable start at that. I have drafted a "talk page banner" (based on {{WPBooks}}) which accepts a "class=" param:

Feel free to alter it wildly or nominate it for deletion. John Vandenberg 08:27, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

Looks good, except for the link to the literature portal. I've been looking for a more appropriate portal, but no luck so far. If people here want to set up a portal, we could cover far more than just journals. I think the phrase "academic publishing" or "academic literature" best covers the topic areas here. Ranging from the starting point (for most of us) of academic journals, but also encompassing publishers of academic literature (including academic societies), and other academic literature such as monographs, and extending as far as academic conferences (Category:Academic conferences is interesting, and many of the articles in Category:Conferences could be diffused down here). I'm wondering if Portal:Academia might work? Compare with Portal:Education and Portal:University. On the other hand, a more focused portal such as Portal:Academic journals might work better, and would be a natural subset of Portal:Literature, which is currently very heavily biased towards fiction, with the only non-fiction sub-portal of any quality being Portal:Library and information science. Carcharoth 00:20, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

Wikisource

Journals articles is an area where our sister project Wikisource can excel, but currently is underdeveloped. There are many online projects to digitise and distribute books, poems, lyrics, sheet music, etc, etc .. but few have taken up the challenge of digitising old journals in a free to access manner. I have made a start at grouping the few existing journal articles into s:Category:Academic journals. If you know of any important journal articles that Wikipedia readers would benefit from reading in the original format, please either mention them here or upload them onto Wikisource and leave a note here. John Vandenberg 05:18, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

Just to be clear here, what is the difference between modern open access journals and old, presumably now public domain journals? Some of the JSTOR stuff goes back to 1665 in the case of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, and I often use the Astrophysics Data System to read pages from old journals. Those are digitised in the sense that they are searchable in a database, but not in the sense of being on a freely-editable system like Wikisource. You said you had looked into Wikisource, so maybe you can advise on what exactly the aim is here with regards to digitising of old content? Carcharoth 16:43, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

Any journal that supports open access will generally be freely accessible from the journals website. As a result, our readers can be led to the website in order to read sample journal articles in order to gain a better understand of how the journal operates. OTOH, for older PD journals we need some way to show readers what the journal actually looked like; images on commons and texts on wikisource are two ways of doing that. ADS, JSTOR and the like usually stop at providing images (or PDFs as images) and/or are not free to access. IMO it would be in our readers best interests to convert important journal articles to text which are easier to download, read & print. John Vandenberg 23:06, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

That sounds good. While looking around, I found Category:Magazine articles. Seems like overkill to me (though Frank Sinatra Has a Cold is the exception that proves the rule), but back in the world of journals, are there any journal articles that warrant their own articles? Carcharoth 23:40, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

I hadn't considered journal articles important enough that they could warrant a Wikipedia article, but im sure it can done. The best candidates for that would be articles that propose problems that are slowly answered by other scientists over time. There might be some important journal articles to be found on the Wikisource author pages here Category:Scientists - the best I have found so far is s:A Heuristic Model of the Creation and Transformation of Light originally published in Annalen der Physik. John Vandenberg 00:35, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

Have you seen Annus Mirabilis Papers? :-) Carcharoth 00:52, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

Not until now; thank you, and it gets better! The second of the Annus Mirabilis Papers also has an article: Über die von der molekularkinetischen Theorie der Wärme geforderte Bewegung von in ruhenden Flüssigkeiten suspendierten Teilchen so we have at least one wikipedia article about a journal article.

The PDF of the english translation has big bold "copyright" all over the first page, and the second page has this:

This new Dover edition,  first 
published in 1956, is an unabridged 
and unaltered republication of the 
first: published in 1926. 
translation 
It is published through special 
arrangement with Methuen and Co., 
Ltd.,  and the estate of 
Albert Einstein. 
Manufactured 
in the United States 
of America. 

The German Wikisource has deleted the page for Albert Einstein even though many of his works would satisfy the U.S. pre-1923 rule[1], but the English Wikisource allows collaborative PD translations of works originally in other languages. For a 20 page journal article like this consisting mostly of formulae it would be relatively easy to translate. John Vandenberg 04:50, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

• Update: would you believe we already have Category:Journal articles? Have a look at the articles in there and see what you think. I particularly like On the Number of Primes Less Than a Given Magnitude, The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two, and Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity. Carcharoth 02:15, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

Categories

I'd like to start a subpage to discuss the best way to categorise journals. The front page of the project currently links to Category:Journals and Category:Magazines. I think the magazines category is only intended to remind people of the more important magazines, but it could be confusing for people who are wondering why that is mentioned in a project about academic journals. It does, however, give pointers as to how the category system could develop.

• One problem is Category:Academic journals. This is a distinction that can be difficult to draw, thought there is an article academic journal, which can be compared to journal. What is the best way to handle this? Merge Category:Journals and Category:Academic journals? Or retain the distinction? The problem is that there are many publications calling themselves journals that are really magazines, and are not academic at all. Similar considerations apply to scientific journal and Category:Scientific journals. One consideration is that people writing an article on a journal are more likely to put it in Category:Journals than in Category:Academic journals, thus Category:Journals should be a soft-redirect if there is any merge. There is also Category:Serials, periodicals and journals, which should be checked for journal articles in case people categorise them there.
• Currently, Category:Journals contains lots of journals. Should the ideal be for all these journals to eventually be filed away in some combination of subcategories? The current subcategories are:
  • Category:Journals by language - would this only be for non-English journals?
  • Category:Journals by publisher - needs an "academic societies" subsection.
  • Category:Journals by subject area - the naming conventions need standardising. eg. Category:Botany journals versus Category:Botanical journals. But all journals should be categorised by a subject area.
• The only other possibilities for a useful subcategory I can think of is a historical one:
  • Journals by year of establishment, or some sort of category system to allow modern journals to be distinguished from older ones. Possibly start grouping by century, and splitting into finer subcategories when the categories get too large. eg. Subcategories could be Category:Journals established in the 18th century, Category:Journals established in the 19th century, and so on. Unless there is a more logical way to divide up journals historically?

• There are some other categories of interest as well:
  • Category:Open access journals and its subcategories. Seems fairly self-explanatory.
  • Category:Lists of journals gathers lists of journals.
  • Category:Defunct journals - this could get rather large. What is of interest here is the year they ceased publishing, and how long they published for. Then you have the journals that changed names, merged, or were revived after a period of not being published. How should those be handled?
  • Category:Annual magazine issues - the equivalent for journals could be yearbooks. For example, the Nobel Foundation produce an annual publication of Nobel Lectures and biographies and pictures (Les Prix Nobel). I'm sure there are many academic societies that do the same, and the some of these publications could have articles and an associated 'yearbook' category.

• Related categories that don't contain articles on journals. These should be either just linked at the top of Category:Journals, or a new super-category created to cover them and journals. Probably best to just use the existing Category:Academic publishing for now, or create Category:Journal publishing.
  • Category:Journal editors - should be for notable journal editors. What makes a journal editor notable?
  • Category:Journal publishers or Category:Journal publishing companies? Not yet created. We have something already at Category:Academic publishing, but the private publishing companies aren't really covered. For university publishers, we have Category:University book publishers, which I think should be renamed Category:University presses, as that would avoid the "book only" connotation.

What do people think? Carcharoth 18:08, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

Great summary. We have to think about this carefully. I also note that there are journals published by learned societies and their journals are in the category for the society as well as in the categories you mention. Examples are Category:Royal Society of Chemistry and Category:American Chemical Society. I do not think we need an "academic societies" subsection. Academic societies are publishers, often in quite a big way. However, we perhaps need to put the society categories into a journal category as well as the societies or organization categories. --Bduke 21:58, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

I forgot to mention Category:Scientific journal stubs. There doesn't seem to be a general journals stub, and people have been putting the scientific journals stub on humanities journals as well. I've also been having a long, close look at the journals under Category:Journals by subject area, and there are some that aren't really what most people would call journals. A lot of magazines publishing new poetry and fiction have ended up in Category:Literary journals, for instance, along with the literary criticism ones. Some do both, but the journals publishing only fiction need to be weeded out and put in their own category, or a simpler task is probably to find the literary criticism or literary history journals (eg. Studies in English Literature), and keep those together. I've also created Wikipedia:WikiProject Academic Journals/Categories as a place to discuss all this, as this page, as the main talk page for the project, needs to cover more general issues. Carcharoth 23:27, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

I'm going to make just some quick comments on some aspects: First, the magazines category is intended for professional magazine, such as Chemical and engineering news, that are typically not-peer reviewed but important. (There an interesting and convenient distinction made in Russian--they call the two groups thin and thick. There is a problem here of which to include. Many of these are included in web of Science, and in PubMed, and most lists of "peer-reviewed" magazines intended for non-professional use include many of them on the basis of having equivalent editorial control. I think the ones in ISI at least should be included, as should the principle publication of a society. Beyond there, especially in the applied subjects, there are problems. But since all of these take ads, there are verified circulation figures to go by. There's a third group, newsletters. Some few are important.

New stubs are easy to arrange. But first check what's there otherwise.::then, Societies. Most of them publish only one or two journals. The articles on the societies themselves are even more sparse than the journal articles, by and large. There is a strong feeling among non specialists that minor society organization publications in general for all sorts of things should be included in articles about the organization--and this may be the only way to keep from losing separate articles on them both.

Annuals are another problem area. The current library practice is to treat them as journals, tho in the past it has varied. The library term is "annuals and yearbooks".

Journals to most people do not necessarily mean academic journals--the distinction is important , and I would therefore strongly advise against a "journals" category at all. The literary magazine group is a problem, and I am not sure we should be making the decisions for them without other involvement also.

Finally, don;t be in a rush. when I fist came here I wanted to organize this in a logical way, and about half of what I did had to be done over because it didnt fit the material. There's a weakness in trying to do classification schemes according to logic. whatever we decide, I'd want to wait a while before actually implementing.

Journals by year of establishment is overkill. Since the year should be indexed, a search will find them. Pre 1800,, pre 1900, maybe.

I'm not happy with "Defunct journals" Most journals that have been established more than a few years have changed title somewhere, often many times. These are not always simple successive titles, but merges, and splits, and almost any possible pattern--(the details of handing all this are too tricky to cover here and I advocate simplifying them in articles--the LC catalog record can be relied on for the details) . Technically, every time one changes title, the old title ends. You presumably mean ones that have really stopped without successors--but a great many of them do have nominal successors, even if they get lost inside the new merged title--I'd be careful with the definitions here. DGG (talk) 08:29, 4 September 2007 (UTC)

I agree that Defunct journals makes little sense. A category for current journals would make more sense, but would be difficult to maintain. It is a bit like one of the categories I found in Category:Conferences, namely Category:International conferences. I suspect that that category was intended to include supranational conferences, but has now got out of hand. I intend to handle the by year possibilities by first drawing up a list of all journals by year of establishment (in many cases this will require research to establish the year). Then the overall spread can be assessed, providing there are not too many gaps in coverage. It is more the older ones that I want to find. Carcharoth 09:36, 4 September 2007 (UTC)

On re-reading, I noticed "the magazines category is intended for professional magazines" - at the moment, it is populated with magazines you find on sale in a local newsagent. Category:Newsletters exist, but are you thinking of something like Category:Trade magazines or Category:Trade journals? Carcharoth 10:18, 4 September 2007 (UTC)

Other stuff

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

The template seems to be used on only one nursing journal article. Others listed in List of nursing journals seem to use the general template for journals, although the list is mostly redlinks. I suggest we put the nursing template up for deletion as redundant. --Bduke 23:56, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

I agree. Who wants to do the honours? Carcharoth 00:11, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

Done. John Vandenberg 06:01, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

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

Found the discussion here, from about two years ago. I think a separate stub for non-scientific journals is definitely needed. Anyone here know enough about stubs? I'm going to drop a note to the people involved in that old discussion. Carcharoth 00:45, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

Looks to me as if a separate journal-stub would be very sensible, and indeed envisaged in that very discussion. Perhaps "upmerged" (i.e. feeding into a more general stub category) pro temps if there's still concerns about this being rather small for a full-fledged stub type. (60 or more articles is "traditional".) You might want to list this at WP:WSS/P given the prior deletion, just to avoid any confusion. Alai 00:58, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

Indeed so. When the stub type was changed, almost all the journals with stub articles were scientific - the few arts/humanities journals there were very probably got moved to magazine-stub, which isn't really appropriate. By normal stub sorting practice, x-journal-stub would imply that a parent journal-stub would exist, so it's surprising that we haven't got one, considering we have sci-journal-stub. A proposal at WP:WSS/P would very probably get quickly approved with no fuss, if there are indeed as many as you suggest (the usual guideline - as Alai points out - is 60 stubs, but that's reduced somewhat if it's the main stub type of a wikiproject, which it would be in this case). Grutness...wha? 01:22, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

D'oh, WPJ, I managed not to notice that. That, plus the existing subcat-to-be, essentially reduces the requisite number to the proverbial reasonable smattering. Alai 03:02, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

As someone who has recently shoveled out the Category:Magazine stubs (and found many a journal), I guarantee you at least 30+ if not 60. Cheers, Her Pegship (tis herself) 04:16, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

Previous discussions

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

Lists of pages and recent changes links

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

• Template:Infobox Journal/transclusions snapshot (606 entries) - recent changes
• Template:Sci-journal-stub/transclusions snapshot (642 entries) - recent changes
• Wikipedia:WikiProject Academic Journals/Pages (2123 entries) - recent changes

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

scientific societies

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

Stubs: {{sci-org-stub}}

Categories: Category:Scientific societies and Category:Learned societies

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

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

Wikipedia:WikiProject Organizations has some coverage of learned societies. --Bduke 08:03, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

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

Looks good. I would like to automate tagging any redirects in this way. Any idea's how to compile a list of all redirect titles that a likely to be "journals"? The best approaches I can think of are:

• look for any redirects to society pages and manually cull that list down.
• google search for journals on wikipedia and filter that down to only contain redirects

John Vandenberg 02:10, 4 September 2007 (UTC)

CfD nomination

I've nominated Category:Botanical journals for renaming to Category:Botany journals. See Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2007 September 3#Category:Botanical journals. I'm unsure what to do with Category:Botanical literature and Category:Biological literature. Carcharoth 11:44, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

Same principle, I reckon. Category:Botanical literature to Category:Botany literature and Category:Biological literature to Category:Biology literature. --Bduke 12:09, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

I've notified WP:PLANTS of this thread. John Vandenberg 12:33, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. Carcharoth 12:56, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

Possibly. The examples of academic journal, scientific journal and medical journal are exceptions to this rule. I'm not so sure that biological isn't another exception. Category:Medicine journals feels all wrong. Category:Science literature feels less wrong, and Category:Scientific literature feels better. Anyway, those examples, and some more, are:

• Category:Botanical literature to Category:Botany literature
• Category:Biological literature to Category:Biology literature
• Category:Ethnographic literature to Category: Ethnography literature
• Category:Entomological literature to Category:Entomology literature
• Category:Herpetological literature to Category:Herpetology literature
• Category:Mycological literature to Category:Mycology literature
• Category:Ornithological literature to Category:Ornithology literature

Would there be any objections to putting these up for renaming at CfD? Some of the smaller ones might get deleted at CfD, as some of the regulars there don't like to see small categories, so in those cases, creating the new categories and moving them manually can be an alternative option. Carcharoth 12:56, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

All of these could well be redirects, but you have not made any case for name changes. For "Botanical journals" Scholar ghits are c20:1 against you, as I point out at the CfD (which by the way, has only just begun). Your remarks above misunderstand categorisation rules. As part of a wider scheme, size should not be an issue for these categories, and that is not why other nominations by you have run into trouble. Johnbod 14:23, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

Which other nominations are you referring to? Is it possible that you are the one misunderstanding categorisation naming conventions? Back at the CfD, I've pointed out that "journal of botany" is the real Scholar ghits winner - where does that leave your argument? My understanding is that category names are decided by discussion, not ghits. Have a look at all the other subcategories of Category:Journals by subject area. Using the discipline name, rather than the adjectival form (with some exceptions) seems logical. Requiring a careful search and consultation and Google hits evaluation for each category name is, in my opinion, excessive. Carcharoth 15:02, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

Since no-one is proposing to rename it to "Journals of Botany", I can't see it affects the arguments either way. Johnbod 19:15, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

It demonstrates that relying on ghits to support an argument is often a flawed methodology. See WP:GOOGLE. Since you failed to respond to the rest of my comment, can I assume you agree what I said? Carcharoth 20:24, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

No, but I won't be continuing this here. Johnbod 21:03, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

OK, fair enough. Thanks for your input. Carcharoth 21:09, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

In response to the "by the way, has only just begun" comment - I have every intention of waiting until the first CfD has finished before nominating the others for renaming. There is no deadline for Wikipedia, but it is possible to be efficient with time and have a general discussion here, informed by the ongoing CfD discussion over there. Carcharoth 15:07, 3 September 2007 (UTC)ar

I think we can avoid Xfd altogether here for these renames. At present these categories have probably been the maintenance responsibility of a subject-matter wikiproject; lets give those wikiprojects an opportunity to respond here with an expert opinion before we take anything to xfd. John Vandenberg 00:01, 4 September 2007 (UTC)

Given the response to what I thought was a simple rename (and hopefully still will be), I think you are right. I'm going to be participating more at CfD myself in future, as I didn't realise it had changed so much since I was last there. Maybe it hasn't, but I'll find that out! :-) Carcharoth 00:49, 4 September 2007 (UTC)

some cleanup work..

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

• Journal of African American History - needs to be wikified
• Molecular Plant Pathology - I've replaced an invalid ISSN with an OCLC; can we track down the real ISSN?

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

ISSNs required

Category:ISSN needed is now full of articles that do not have an ISSN provided in their {{Infobox Journal}}. John Vandenberg 02:58, 4 September 2007 (UTC)

The Worldcat link seems to work better than the others. Do we want to provide Worldcat links in the infobox? The Worldcat entries seem to be a good way to verify the information. Carcharoth 13:16, 4 September 2007 (UTC)

OK, I realised the ones I was filling in didn't have blank OCLC fields, though the template supports this. I've added them now. Can anyone help with American Journal of Bioethics? The ISSN and OCLC links all say it started in 2001, but the article says 1993. Is this referring to an earlier title that become the present one? Carcharoth 13:24, 4 September 2007 (UTC)

bug 3663

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

Microformats and other glue

• ISSN issn microformat
• DOI doi microformat, see the talk for {{doi}} and wikiglue doi:
• citation

Firefox extensions

• URN Support handles ISSN: URNs as specified in RFC 3044
• Mozilla Handle/DOI Protocol Handler

unanswered humanities help desk question

In case anyone is keen to hit the stacks, here is an unanswered journal related question that I asked: Wikipedia:Reference_desk/Archives/Humanities/2007_August_4#Southern_Literary_Journal_and_Monthly_Magazine. There are two others that google can find: [2]. John Vandenberg 11:19, 5 September 2007 (UTC)

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

Specifically, the threads are:

• Wikipedia:Reference_desk/Archives/Humanities/2007_July_30#Size_of_the_academic_papers (July 2007)
• Wikipedia:Reference_desk/Archives/Humanities/2007_August_4#Southern_Literary_Journal_and_Monthly_Magazine (August 2007)

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

Academic society at AfD

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

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

The article on the society is I think being adequately defended. But on the broader question ,we can try to set up a deletion notification as for other projects. However, keep in mind that this is not a question of always defending the articles, but rather of seeing they have sufficient informed discussion, pro or con. Please see Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting; we now need to figure out how to do it. I suggest we include not just academic journals but societies as well, as the articles are often connected or combined, and that we treat "academic' very broadly. EA, do you volunteer to check Afd? Can you run one of the tools listed there?--it is much more difficult otherwise. I will offer to keep an eye on PROD--at present there are not more than one or two a week there. DGG (talk)

I take your point about 'defending'; I meant that I believe this WikiProject needs to think carefully about what it considers to be notable, with reference to the views of the broader Wikipedia community & the general notability guidelines. I find it hard to see community consensus favouring adding every academic journal, no matter how low impact/shortlived/low circulation, and I'm not in favour of doing lots of writing that gets zapped at AfD.

I could check out AfD most days if that would be of use. I don't usually track the full page these days, but skimming for journals/academic conferences/societies wouldn't be nearly as difficult as checking for academics. Unfortunately, I've never managed to get any of the delsort tools to work for me. I run IE 6 and it seems to be becoming less and less compatible with editing Wikipedia. There may be some mileage in my switching to Firefox, but I'd need to discuss it with my sys admin. Espresso Addict 05:04, 14 September 2007 (UTC)

There are automatic procedures for generating notices. The most used one requires that all articles be tagged with a work group banner. Doing this would be a formidable undertaking, and I am not sure the results would pay. There are relatively few such deletions at present. It can probably be done with a bot using the categories, but this is an area I have no expertise in.

I call your attention however to User:AlexNewArtBot/AcademicSearchResult and the other pages there. There is also a log view--User:AlexNewArtBot/AcademicLog, with the successive days visible in the history--this view has the advantage of showing the terms matched by the grep expression. I do not regularly scan this one, but I sometimes scan the corresponding one for Education, in the log view. WW could probably try to set up a similar one for journals. It is possible to have this linked and transcluded onto one of the project pages. You'lll see from the main page there how other projects do it. DGG (talk) 04:54, 15 September 2007 (UTC)

I've manually checked 12-15 Sept without finding anything relevant beyond the society mentioned above, so I suspect creating a delsort category would be overkill. I'll keep on scanning for the moment, and create a project subpage when more articles turn up, unless anyone has a better solution.

A variant of the AlexNewArtBot would definitely be useful, although assuming it's only scanning new articles it wouldn't sort the problem of patrolling AfD. Espresso Addict 23:40, 15 September 2007 (UTC)

Collaboration of the week

When I set up the project page, I selected Journal of the Royal Statistical Society as the example CotW, because the investigation on WP:LOMJQ indicates that it is the red link with the highest number of uses. Does anyone have any objections to it being our first, and/or suggestions on what day of the week we have the CotW start? John Vandenberg 07:53, 15 September 2007 (UTC)

Journal of the Royal Statistical Society

Journal information from WP:LOMJQ:

• (
  • wp
  • g
  • b
  ) : Used 104 times on Wikipedia

• Identifier: ISSN 0035-9246
• Publisher: Royal Statistical Society

History:

• Journal of the Statistical Society of London (1838-1886) ISSN 0959-5341
• Journal of the Royal Statistical Society (1887-1947) ISSN 0952-8385
• Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series A (General) (1948-1987) ISSN 00359238
• Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A (Statistics in Society) (1997 - current): ISSN 0964-1998
• Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B (Statistical Methodology) (1997 - current): ISSN 1369-7412
• Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series C (1997 - current): ISSN 0035-9254
• Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series D (1997 - 2003): ISSN 0039-0526

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No problem with Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, though I don't think that number of uses on Wikipedia (which is presumably counting instances of wikilinked full titles, rather than unlinked abbreviations?) is necessarily the most informative metric. I'm not sure what I'd suggest, as raw impact factor would clearly bias towards review journals such as the Annual Reviews series.

However, I do wonder whether it's useful having a collaboration to start individual journal pages? I'd imagined such collaborations would be used for general pages (such as impact factor, though that looks in reasonable shape) or in an attempt to create a set of high-quality articles that might be suitable for submitting for Featured Articles review. In terms of new articles, it might be more useful to make a hitlist of the top 500 missing journals (by some metric or other) and encourage project members to create short articles on those journals in their subject areas, ie a drive format rather than a collaboration. Espresso Addict 15:24, 15 September 2007 (UTC)