This page is currently inactive and is retained for
historical reference. Either the page is no longer relevant or consensus on its purpose has become unclear. To revive discussion, seek broader input via a forum such as the
village pump.
This page is a work-bench for missing journals. Please add entries here rather than editing
missing journals.
Open Access
Discussions in various places have led towards articles for
open access journals being created first, initially from the
DOAJ repository.
A first pass at automatically creating a list of missing open access journals is available, however the page takes 2 or 3 minutes to load:
Wikipedia:List of missing journals/DOAJ.
Recently created
Afds
The following journals are being nominated for deletion:
A worldcat search for the first ISSN
[4] opens up a screen with seven alternatives that appear to have separate OCLC numbers. The librarians clearly have their work cut out for them. There is at least a real paper edition and an electronic edition. Plus some kind of reprint edition based in New York. The Harvard catalog shows that the journal was first published in 1921 and changed its title in 1978. Publication was suspended from 1946 to 1954. The subtitle varied. More research needed. I doubt we can be more thorough than the Harvard catalog
[5]EdJohnston17:27, 27 November 2006 (UTC)reply
Ed, as you can see I've re-arrange things a little. I wasnt expecting this section to include research findings, but it makes sense to add details whilst the entry is still in "Unsort", so discussion can determine what should happen with the journal.
Your analysis of this journal is enlightening; it demonstrates that entries may need to hang around in Unsorted for a while, and that ISSN/OCLCs are not sufficient to identify a journal.
I have proposed, on the
talk page, a few new templates that we should consider in order to record a journals details whilst they are being investigated, so that they can assist us jump to the offsite records easily.
I have found 127,000 google results for this journal, and 6,350 on
google scholar (which we should include in the
Template:Missing journal). As it has been around for quite a while resulting in an interesting history, and appears to be cited outside of WP, I think it would be a good idea to keep working on this one, in order that we can determine how much of the work should be done here before a stub is created. In the very least, I think it is important that the stub list all of the OCLCs and ISSNs in a usable manner. IMO, to not do so is essentially misleading the reader. Also, one issue you have brought home is that existing databases already record the nuts and bolts of the journal publication details (publisher, format, etc) -- if we are to do this well, the WP entry for the journal needs to be an orthoganal resource to DOI and OCLC entries -- by joining multiple "publications" of a journal that are primarily linked by ethos rather than publisher, then the WP article adds value rather than duplicating existing information.
John Vandenberg23:13, 27 November 2006 (UTC)reply
I've created a new article
Sciences Nat for a publisher of some very specific books (which I had lots of fun trying (unsuccessfully) to find ISBNs for; see
Special:Whatlinkshere/Sciences Nat). The research that I have done this evening leads me to think that it was as much a society as a publisher, and may have actually actually published the journal itself, rather than merely contributing to is (which is all that I am bold enough to state on the article at this stage).
John Vandenberg13:03, 22 January 2007 (UTC)reply
The article for this journals Editor-in-Chief, "Piotr Blass" has been repeatedly put up for Afd; the third is currently underway (
Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Piotr Blass (third nomination)). I'm not keen on the article/person/whatever, but I was rather interested in this journal because it is a very minor journal, and many of the papers are by the journal staff, etc. etc. This made me wonder, is it notable? Until today, I haven't really considered how the notability criteria would apply to journals, as they are usually well cited. In this case, the journal was mostly online, so
WP:WEB could apply but the way that guideline reads makes it hard to use for this purpose.
John Vandenberg05:00, 27 January 2007 (UTC)reply
MathSciNet (run by the American Mathematical Society) shows a grand total of 18 citations from their indexed journals to the Ulam Quarterly. This compares to 6,100 citations to the Journal of the American Statistical Association, as an example. I figure this implies that the Ulam Quarterly is not notable. Do you know what the notability criterion is for journals? I would more likely consider this as a scientific journal and try to quantify its impact, rather than apply WP:WEB.
EdJohnston04:27, 28 January 2007 (UTC)reply
Im quite sure that Ulam Quarterly is not notable from a perspective of being scientific, but I dont think there is an accepted specific notability criteria for journals (or sources of content of any sort for that matter). My reason for looking into this further is that it is a "source" that was distributed independently; i.e. even if the content was not notable, maybe because it was distributed widely (see
[6],
[7] and
[8]) means that it warrants a page on Wikipedia to objectively cover the source and content it carried. It looks like
WP:SCI may be taking it under its wing; just now I see there is a discussion going on at
Wikipedia talk:Notability (science)#Scientific journals.
John Vandenberg05:16, 28 January 2007 (UTC)reply
This continues the question you and I once discussed of whether WP articles on journals are important. Since I tend to believe that articles are important if influential (usually correlated with being widely cited) then it doesn't matter where they appear. One case where an article on a journal might be informative to WP readers is where the journal is marginal or flaky. Then the readers could be put on notice that something isn't a 'real journal'. This has been suggested about the
Journal of Scientific Exploration, mentioned at
[9]. I am pleased to see JSE included in a category called
Category:Fringe science journals, though I imagine some people would criticize the existence of such a category.
EdJohnston06:28, 28 January 2007 (UTC)reply
This 'journal' certainly appears to be marginal (low citations) and flaky. Is there a term used to describe journals that are created primarily as a way for the editors to publish their own work? If so, we could look for others like it and create a category for them.
John Vandenberg13:47, 12 February 2007 (UTC)reply
There are many titles in the general category of professional magazines that are less than formal journals, but still noteworthy in particular ways. There is a very inadequate page on them:
Science magazine. I have intended to expand the article for some time and i will do so shortly. There is a very incomplete list there, and at some point it should be much expanded. There is, of course, no clear distinction: the best known title in this category is
Chemical and Engineering News, and it is as authoritative as any peer-reviewed journal. DGG06:07, 11 February 2007 (UTC)reply
Occurrences of these journals are hard to pin down because they use common phrases. These will be used to fine tune the template in order to assist eliminate the phrase in normal usage.
The following journal names are used on Wikipedia yet do not match a single journal. Either it is really a journal it its own right, or more likely each instance needs to be clarified to refer to a journal with a similar name.
Comptes rendus is a series of titles containing the proceedings of the
Academie Francais. This has been published at various times in 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 different subject sections, for about 200 years. Most of the sections have changed their titles and subject coverage, usually 2 or 3 times. All of them have also changed their titles from one form of the French title to another several times, and then also changed them to English. For finding particular articles, or tracing the history of the titles, the assistance of an expert librarian is recommended. — Preceding
unsigned comment added by
DGG (
talk •
contribs) 21:37, 17 December 2006
I have renamed this as
Comptes rendus de l'Académie des sciences, without the initial article, to match the French title--the usual rule is not to use the article unless the journal uses it very consistently and conspicuously. I think I've cleaned up any double redirects. I'll get back to work on the others eventuallyDGG (
talk)
06:31, 29 August 2007 (UTC)reply
Comptes rendus des séances de la Société des Sciences et des Lettres de Varsovie is used on
Prefix notation.
Comment: Most of the google results are to bibliography sites; as a result I am surprised that this journal has 16 WP results using the
Template:Missing article gwp link. If I remove all articles that contain "List of "
[11], the results drops down to 5 unique pages. However that could have removed a few cases where the name was used as a citation.
"A reference is made to the pre-World War II journal Mathesis Polska (Latin for "Polish Mathematics"). This journal is not easy to locate. It was finally located in the mathematics library of the University of Illinois, which seems to be the only library in the United States having the complete journal."
[12]
NOTE (by EdJohnston): This journal ceased publication in 1938, before the era of ISSNs. It can be found on worldcat only under its OCLC number.
Broken journal names
The list of
missing journals may have entries that are not journal names, or are not notable. Please discuss them here in sub-sections.
I've the feeling that Worldcat is being coy. Actually Amazon.com still does this. They used to just hand over the record for a book when you searched with an invalid ISBN, if it was published that way. These days they tell you that they can't find anything, but if you go and search for the book the old-fashioned way it shows up, with no ISBN listed. The policy of
http://booksinprint.com and
http://abebooks.com is more clear-cut, because they refuse to search for an invalid ISBN, and they tell you right up front that it's invalid. I think it's more useful to the customer for the seller to report promptly that the id number being used is invalid. Otherwise the customer may go on searching and searching, just believing that it happens to be out of stock at each place.
Since Wikipedia is a major informational resource, I think that we ourselves would not be doing good service if we keep around invalid ISSNs in our articles. Worldcat, if it keeps the bad ones around, ought to flag them as such, which is hard to do when you never even tell the searcher that their number is invalid. LOC tries to keep around invalid ISBNs, suitably flagged, but the records of this are so fragmentary it's not very useful.
EdJohnston03:32, 1 December 2006 (UTC)reply
I've replaced the invalid ISSN 0763-7247 with the
OCLC54453360.
As an aside on the invalid ISSNs that are being recorded -- the loc.gov tagged record for "Gushagi" shows
022 $y0763-7247
while "Zeitschrift für Kristallographie" shows
022 $a0044-2968
and "Journal of the Royal Statistical Society" shows
This page is currently inactive and is retained for
historical reference. Either the page is no longer relevant or consensus on its purpose has become unclear. To revive discussion, seek broader input via a forum such as the
village pump.
This page is a work-bench for missing journals. Please add entries here rather than editing
missing journals.
Open Access
Discussions in various places have led towards articles for
open access journals being created first, initially from the
DOAJ repository.
A first pass at automatically creating a list of missing open access journals is available, however the page takes 2 or 3 minutes to load:
Wikipedia:List of missing journals/DOAJ.
Recently created
Afds
The following journals are being nominated for deletion:
A worldcat search for the first ISSN
[4] opens up a screen with seven alternatives that appear to have separate OCLC numbers. The librarians clearly have their work cut out for them. There is at least a real paper edition and an electronic edition. Plus some kind of reprint edition based in New York. The Harvard catalog shows that the journal was first published in 1921 and changed its title in 1978. Publication was suspended from 1946 to 1954. The subtitle varied. More research needed. I doubt we can be more thorough than the Harvard catalog
[5]EdJohnston17:27, 27 November 2006 (UTC)reply
Ed, as you can see I've re-arrange things a little. I wasnt expecting this section to include research findings, but it makes sense to add details whilst the entry is still in "Unsort", so discussion can determine what should happen with the journal.
Your analysis of this journal is enlightening; it demonstrates that entries may need to hang around in Unsorted for a while, and that ISSN/OCLCs are not sufficient to identify a journal.
I have proposed, on the
talk page, a few new templates that we should consider in order to record a journals details whilst they are being investigated, so that they can assist us jump to the offsite records easily.
I have found 127,000 google results for this journal, and 6,350 on
google scholar (which we should include in the
Template:Missing journal). As it has been around for quite a while resulting in an interesting history, and appears to be cited outside of WP, I think it would be a good idea to keep working on this one, in order that we can determine how much of the work should be done here before a stub is created. In the very least, I think it is important that the stub list all of the OCLCs and ISSNs in a usable manner. IMO, to not do so is essentially misleading the reader. Also, one issue you have brought home is that existing databases already record the nuts and bolts of the journal publication details (publisher, format, etc) -- if we are to do this well, the WP entry for the journal needs to be an orthoganal resource to DOI and OCLC entries -- by joining multiple "publications" of a journal that are primarily linked by ethos rather than publisher, then the WP article adds value rather than duplicating existing information.
John Vandenberg23:13, 27 November 2006 (UTC)reply
I've created a new article
Sciences Nat for a publisher of some very specific books (which I had lots of fun trying (unsuccessfully) to find ISBNs for; see
Special:Whatlinkshere/Sciences Nat). The research that I have done this evening leads me to think that it was as much a society as a publisher, and may have actually actually published the journal itself, rather than merely contributing to is (which is all that I am bold enough to state on the article at this stage).
John Vandenberg13:03, 22 January 2007 (UTC)reply
The article for this journals Editor-in-Chief, "Piotr Blass" has been repeatedly put up for Afd; the third is currently underway (
Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Piotr Blass (third nomination)). I'm not keen on the article/person/whatever, but I was rather interested in this journal because it is a very minor journal, and many of the papers are by the journal staff, etc. etc. This made me wonder, is it notable? Until today, I haven't really considered how the notability criteria would apply to journals, as they are usually well cited. In this case, the journal was mostly online, so
WP:WEB could apply but the way that guideline reads makes it hard to use for this purpose.
John Vandenberg05:00, 27 January 2007 (UTC)reply
MathSciNet (run by the American Mathematical Society) shows a grand total of 18 citations from their indexed journals to the Ulam Quarterly. This compares to 6,100 citations to the Journal of the American Statistical Association, as an example. I figure this implies that the Ulam Quarterly is not notable. Do you know what the notability criterion is for journals? I would more likely consider this as a scientific journal and try to quantify its impact, rather than apply WP:WEB.
EdJohnston04:27, 28 January 2007 (UTC)reply
Im quite sure that Ulam Quarterly is not notable from a perspective of being scientific, but I dont think there is an accepted specific notability criteria for journals (or sources of content of any sort for that matter). My reason for looking into this further is that it is a "source" that was distributed independently; i.e. even if the content was not notable, maybe because it was distributed widely (see
[6],
[7] and
[8]) means that it warrants a page on Wikipedia to objectively cover the source and content it carried. It looks like
WP:SCI may be taking it under its wing; just now I see there is a discussion going on at
Wikipedia talk:Notability (science)#Scientific journals.
John Vandenberg05:16, 28 January 2007 (UTC)reply
This continues the question you and I once discussed of whether WP articles on journals are important. Since I tend to believe that articles are important if influential (usually correlated with being widely cited) then it doesn't matter where they appear. One case where an article on a journal might be informative to WP readers is where the journal is marginal or flaky. Then the readers could be put on notice that something isn't a 'real journal'. This has been suggested about the
Journal of Scientific Exploration, mentioned at
[9]. I am pleased to see JSE included in a category called
Category:Fringe science journals, though I imagine some people would criticize the existence of such a category.
EdJohnston06:28, 28 January 2007 (UTC)reply
This 'journal' certainly appears to be marginal (low citations) and flaky. Is there a term used to describe journals that are created primarily as a way for the editors to publish their own work? If so, we could look for others like it and create a category for them.
John Vandenberg13:47, 12 February 2007 (UTC)reply
There are many titles in the general category of professional magazines that are less than formal journals, but still noteworthy in particular ways. There is a very inadequate page on them:
Science magazine. I have intended to expand the article for some time and i will do so shortly. There is a very incomplete list there, and at some point it should be much expanded. There is, of course, no clear distinction: the best known title in this category is
Chemical and Engineering News, and it is as authoritative as any peer-reviewed journal. DGG06:07, 11 February 2007 (UTC)reply
Occurrences of these journals are hard to pin down because they use common phrases. These will be used to fine tune the template in order to assist eliminate the phrase in normal usage.
The following journal names are used on Wikipedia yet do not match a single journal. Either it is really a journal it its own right, or more likely each instance needs to be clarified to refer to a journal with a similar name.
Comptes rendus is a series of titles containing the proceedings of the
Academie Francais. This has been published at various times in 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 different subject sections, for about 200 years. Most of the sections have changed their titles and subject coverage, usually 2 or 3 times. All of them have also changed their titles from one form of the French title to another several times, and then also changed them to English. For finding particular articles, or tracing the history of the titles, the assistance of an expert librarian is recommended. — Preceding
unsigned comment added by
DGG (
talk •
contribs) 21:37, 17 December 2006
I have renamed this as
Comptes rendus de l'Académie des sciences, without the initial article, to match the French title--the usual rule is not to use the article unless the journal uses it very consistently and conspicuously. I think I've cleaned up any double redirects. I'll get back to work on the others eventuallyDGG (
talk)
06:31, 29 August 2007 (UTC)reply
Comptes rendus des séances de la Société des Sciences et des Lettres de Varsovie is used on
Prefix notation.
Comment: Most of the google results are to bibliography sites; as a result I am surprised that this journal has 16 WP results using the
Template:Missing article gwp link. If I remove all articles that contain "List of "
[11], the results drops down to 5 unique pages. However that could have removed a few cases where the name was used as a citation.
"A reference is made to the pre-World War II journal Mathesis Polska (Latin for "Polish Mathematics"). This journal is not easy to locate. It was finally located in the mathematics library of the University of Illinois, which seems to be the only library in the United States having the complete journal."
[12]
NOTE (by EdJohnston): This journal ceased publication in 1938, before the era of ISSNs. It can be found on worldcat only under its OCLC number.
Broken journal names
The list of
missing journals may have entries that are not journal names, or are not notable. Please discuss them here in sub-sections.
I've the feeling that Worldcat is being coy. Actually Amazon.com still does this. They used to just hand over the record for a book when you searched with an invalid ISBN, if it was published that way. These days they tell you that they can't find anything, but if you go and search for the book the old-fashioned way it shows up, with no ISBN listed. The policy of
http://booksinprint.com and
http://abebooks.com is more clear-cut, because they refuse to search for an invalid ISBN, and they tell you right up front that it's invalid. I think it's more useful to the customer for the seller to report promptly that the id number being used is invalid. Otherwise the customer may go on searching and searching, just believing that it happens to be out of stock at each place.
Since Wikipedia is a major informational resource, I think that we ourselves would not be doing good service if we keep around invalid ISSNs in our articles. Worldcat, if it keeps the bad ones around, ought to flag them as such, which is hard to do when you never even tell the searcher that their number is invalid. LOC tries to keep around invalid ISBNs, suitably flagged, but the records of this are so fragmentary it's not very useful.
EdJohnston03:32, 1 December 2006 (UTC)reply
I've replaced the invalid ISSN 0763-7247 with the
OCLC54453360.
As an aside on the invalid ISSNs that are being recorded -- the loc.gov tagged record for "Gushagi" shows
022 $y0763-7247
while "Zeitschrift für Kristallographie" shows
022 $a0044-2968
and "Journal of the Royal Statistical Society" shows