Wikipedia talk:Notability (academic journals)

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Trying again...

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If we just removed 1b would this be able to make it to guideline status? Or maybe we can find something a bit more restrictive to use here? I'd like to have a leg to stand on for things like [1]. I don't think just being indexed by some site is ever going to gain acceptance as the bar for inclusion. But maybe a particular impact factor (as measured by a particular site)? Maybe something about publishing highly-cited work? Not sure. I think the GNG is too restrictive, but what we have here is too permissive. And with the GNG being so difficult for most journals to meet... Hobit (talk) 04:34, 20 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

You've probably seen  CheckUser is not magic pixie dust at some point, but if anyone finds some of that magic pixie dust, then I'd like to make writing academic journal articles about the journals in your field become fashionable. (I assume that pixie dust isn't strong enough to do something really big, like magically reversing all pollution.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:36, 20 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
My field doesn't have journals that are considered relevant. We're conference people :-). But the problem is that the journals just don't meet any inclusion guidelines and so folks won't write them just to watch them get deleted. Thus my belief that getting this fixed is important. Hobit (talk) 13:21, 20 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think you missed WhatamIdoing's point, that instead of working on the front end (what people see on Wikipedia) it would be helpful to work on the back end (creating and publishing reviews that could be used as sources). I have occasionally seen published reviews of journals but it's rare. —David Eppstein (talk) 16:52, 20 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Ah, yep I did miss this. I was thinking that starting a journal that reviewed journals would be fun. Will I really have time to do this? No. Would it be fairly easy? Yep. I've been visualizing writing such an article (though again, for my area conferences would be more important) and I think it's possible to actually write meaningful stuff that would have use outside of Wikipedia. Hobit (talk) 18:53, 20 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, exactly. Any academic field could provide us with some properly published, independent, reliable secondary sources. A nice little "Review of Cardiology Journals", even if it only gave us two sentences about each individual journal and a couple of quick compare-and-contrast points, would be extremely helpful to editors. An article talking about how your field is focused on conferences, with a quick description of the most important conferences, would be equally helpful. It wouldn't even have to be a peer-reviewed source (although Collection development#Journals suggests that might be possible, and subject-area journals might well be interested in describing their field); a column for The Chronicle of Higher Education or a trade rag (e.g., for an engineering subfield) would be enough.
In terms of existing resources, for medicine, I know that Doody's Core Titles in the Health Sciences is an important resource that might be useful to us. Although it's paywalled ($175/year for the version that contains the actual reviews), I think it still counts as Wikipedia:Published. Maybe User:Samwalton9 (WMF) could get a subscription for Wikipedia:The Wikipedia Library, or something similar for other fields. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:01, 20 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Why do they have to be stand-alone articles? Is there a list of journals anywhere you could use to write an NLIST article? SportingFlyer T·C 17:02, 20 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Naming other indexes as sufficient or not would be helpful

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So we could quickly (CTRL+F) see if being indexed in EBSCO or Medline or Copernicus or such is sufficient or not. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 01:35, 22 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Sanity check: Citing a journal versus citing a paper in a journal?

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Killed the RFC, premature. Let's just have a normal discussion. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 22:10, 11 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Criterion #2 states that notability is satisfied if The journal is frequently cited by other reliable sources. Does this mean that papers in the journal tend to be cited frequently? Or does it mean that the journal itself must be cited frequently? In other words, is it talking about citations that say "According to Smith (1979)..." or ones that say "According to The Journal of Underwater Basket Weaving..."?

Just to be clear, I am asking for comment about what the current text means. I understand that there is disagreement about what it should say, but that would be a different RfC. Botterweg (talk) 22:56, 9 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Does it even matter? So far this has only the status of an essay, not a notability guideline. Anyway, your second alternative makes little sense, because it is very rare to cite a journal as a whole, except maybe figuratively as a form of metonymy. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:05, 9 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for chiming in! When you say that citing a journal itself is "very rare", is it plausible that the cases where C2 applies are very rare in exactly that manner? Botterweg (talk) 23:31, 9 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It means that I don't know of any such cases and can't think why someone would do it but I don't want to say definitively that it doesn't happen because lots of unlikely things happen.
You can definitely find published material describing a journal, and saying that it supports a certain community of researchers, but I wouldn't call that "citing" the journal in the sense considered here, including the whole journal as an item in a bibliography. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:57, 9 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I will second David's comments/opinion. It is certainly rare to cite a journal in an academic article. They are cited in journal lists for different fields, for instance this. However, I would not want to use such lists to judge much on WP. In any case those are just collations of your first option "According to Smith". Ldm1954 (talk) 15:23, 11 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
If you read the Remarks section for Criterion #2, it looks like either case is sufficient. Isn't it a bit premature to have started an RfC about this (see Before starting the process)? FactOrOpinion (talk) 00:07, 10 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
An admin suggested I raise this as an RfC but it doesn't make a difference to me as long as there's sufficient discussion. Botterweg (talk) 00:08, 15 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
"The journal is frequently cited by other reliable sources" means exactly that. This is normally shown through impact factors, CiteScores, h-indexes, etc... but it could be through PageRank and other things. For example, GoogleScholar's top 100 cited journals, according to h5-index is [2].
It could also be that research from a certain journal often make its way in popular press, like if a magazine like Popular Science often pulled stories from Journal of Foobar, then that would confer notability to Journal of Foobar. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 22:20, 11 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for this reply. Would it be fair to say that things like impact factor and citescore are statistics about the frequency of "According to Smith (1999)..."-type citations rather than "According to the Journal of Foobar"-type citations? Botterweg (talk) 00:08, 15 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
.....yes. JoelleJay (talk) 01:10, 15 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Building and Environment

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Hello. I would be grateful for some advice on Building and Environment which I came across in new page patrol. It is the first time I have had to assess an article about an academic journal. The sources that are currently in the page do not seem to constitute WP:SIGCOV - they look like bibliographic database listings of the journal rather than anything more in depth - and the first is a primary source, which can't establish notability. Looking at WP:NJOURNAL, criterion 1 looks like it might apply, and specifically 1.c) For the purpose of C1, having an impact factor assigned by Journal Citation Reports usually qualifies, and I wanted to check that that seemed reasonable before I marked the article as reviewed. The claimed impact factor is 7.1 (I can't actually verify that because I don't have access to Scopus), but I don't know whether that's awesome, dreadful, or something in between! SunloungerFrog (talk) 10:21, 5 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Bad form to reply to one's own post: sorry. Having just skimmed through the Talk page archives, I guess the bibliographic database listings of the journal may not be analogous to Soccerway for football players as I had initially assumed, so what I wrote initially looks rather more dismissive than I now intend! So I am probably minded to mark the article as reviewed, unless anyone violently objects. I would like to ask a follow up question, though: when would a journal that has an IF assigned by JCR not qualify under C1? Cheers, SunloungerFrog (talk) 10:48, 5 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@SunloungerFrog, as this page is only an essay it should not be used to establish notability—you are correct to look for IRS SIGCOV. And bibliographic database listings definitely are analogous to Soccerway profiles (and even more directly to the Scopus profiles that exist for everyone who has ever published in an indexed journal; we certainly wouldn't consider those to count toward GNG). JoelleJay (talk) 20:43, 5 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Ah, many thanks for pointing out that this is an essay rather than a guideline, which I had missed. That's very helpful. I will review the article in that light. Cheers, SunloungerFrog (talk) 11:57, 6 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • SunloungerFrog, JoelleJay goes a bit fast here. It is true that NJournals is an essay and not policy. However, like many other essays, it is nevertheless often used in WP:AFD discussions. And like it or not, journals that are included in selective databases almost always get kept at AfD. (Heck, I regularly take journals that don't meet NJournals to AfD and quite often those are kept anyway, because there's a sizeable group of editors who feel that every academic journal should have an article.) There is namely a very important difference between automatically-generated database entries for "everyone who has ever published in an indexed journal" and entries for those indexed journals: the latter are not at all automatically included. Instead, for a journal to be included in databases like the Science Citation Index Expanded, ((Scopus]], or MEDLINE, to mention some of the most important databases, they have to pass a rather stringent evaluation by a commission of specialists who decide whether a journal is important enough and of sufficient quality to be included in their database. This is the reason why many editors take indexing in such a database as evidence that a journal is notable. I've reworked Building and Environment and am quite confident that with an impact factor of more than 7, it will survive any hypothetical AfD. Hope this provides some more perspective. --Randykitty (talk) 16:34, 10 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    They used to almost always get kept because much of the same editors !vote in every AfD, and other editors would be misled into thinking something called "NJOURNALS" was an actual guideline...
    The selectivity of a database does not correspond whatsoever to how much secondary independent coverage it has received, which is what a topic ultimately requires for NPOV. JoelleJay (talk) 17:07, 10 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
"database does not correspond whatsoever to how much secondary independent coverage it has received, which is what a topic ultimately requires for NPOV"
Which is again, not an opinion shared by everyone. To me, and several others, being indexed in a highly selective database is significant coverage for the purpose of notability. NPOV is orthogonal to notability, and is met by written neutrally about the topic. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 17:41, 10 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The amount and depth of coverage of a journal by an indexing database is the same as what any given author of an indexed paper receives in their profile on the same database: a handful of auto-calculated primary metrics. That's routine and not SIGCOV. And when the only or majority of prose material we can write on a topic comes directly from the topic itself, especially for decidedly commercial subjects, we can't achieve NPOV. JoelleJay (talk) 23:33, 10 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

impactful?

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Nutshell mentions this term as a key concept, but it is not mentioned in the body at all. This needs fixing. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 04:25, 30 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The entire page is about this. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 19:54, 30 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The point is, the body should use the same term as the nutshell, otherwise it looks chaotic/unprofessional. It's like an abstract of a paper that mentions what appears to be a key term, then the paper itself does not. If I was the reviewer, I'd obviously tell the author this needs revising (minor but crucial revision required :P). Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 01:34, 31 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]