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With the latest brouhaha, I fear that the days of WP:NJournals may be counted. We have tried in the past to get it to guideline status, but that ended in "no consensus", just like the current discussions. Look at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Kansas History, that article missed GNG by a mile, as well as NJournals, but still there were several "keep" !votes with arguments like "it's a peer-reviewed academic journal". Compare that to Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, which passes NJournals brilliantly, and see how many people still !vote delete because "NJournals is an essay and this misses GNG". I'm baffled that these two crowds don't intermingle, but also sceptical about the future of our journals project. Many (most?) of the "must meet GNG crowd" apparently see no problem with deleting our thousands of journal articles.

How to proceed? I think it is essential that some semblance of NJournals be accepted as a guideline, accepting that journal articles (like articles on academics) may meet notability requirements even if they don't meet GNG. Simply putting up the current NJournals will not work. I think we should go about this with baby steps. I propose to start with an RfC at the Village Pump with a question like (rough draft):

Most articles on academic journals do not meet WP:GNG. Should we delete all those articles (several thousand) or is it more desirable to formulate a SNG that defines under which conditions such articles should be kept, even if they miss GNG?

If the consensus would be that articles should meet GNG, no exception, we're done here and for the few journals that meet GNG (most likely because there's some scandal), we don't really need a separate project. However, should the consensus be that deleting the vast majority of journal articles is undesirable, we could then go through NJournals one line at a time, to avoid that people get too much into details (like one editor arguing that C1 is fine but not C3 or what exactly "selective indexing" means).

Interested to hear what editors here think. Thanks! --Randykitty (talk) 15:55, 26 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with your general prognosis. In addition to damaging the encyclopedia, deleting thousands of journal articles would entail deleting a great deal of verifiable information without considering alternatives, against our ATD policy.

We might start with what may be considered uncontroversial: selective indices are reliable sources that provide verifiable information about a journal. Selective indices are built by experts in the field of academic journals and their determination of whether a journal is included in their index is an expert opinion about the journal--inclusion confers some degree of notability in the real world. Less uncontroversial: non-predatory peer-reviewed journals have many experts who give freely of their time to review articles for a journal they deem worthy of their efforts. This is a kind of collective expert endorsement.

Trying to connect this with GNG: should we require multiple selective databases to include the journal? What criteria for a selective database entry for a journal would allow it to be considered in depth? Comparing to NPROF, what level of expert endorsement is needed to elevate a journal to a notable status? --((u|Mark viking)) {Talk} 18:52, 26 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

There is a significant conflict between the attitude of GNG that the only good source is an independent source, and the tendency of academics who write about the history of their journals to publish them as editorials in the same journals. This means that, in those cases when we do have the sort of in-depth and reliably published sources that would normally count towards GNG-notability, they are passed over and often avoided even as source material for the articles on those journals, because they are not independent. For this reason, I tend to think that judging significance by depth of coverage in independent sources works even less well for this subject than it does for many others.

Another issue is that journals are a topic for which it is very difficult to search for sourcing, because most search hits will be articles in the journal or references to them rather than publications about the journal. —David Eppstein (talk) 19:48, 26 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I was thinking about this last night re journals with a single word title which is the subject area; no amount of searching is ever going to come up with anything useful for those, whether or not it exists. Feeling really depressed about the state of Wikipedia at present. Espresso Addict (talk) 20:31, 26 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

An example of a major and famous journal like this for which one could easily argue that it does not appear to pass GNG: Cell. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:44, 26 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Looks like Cell Press is already a target, but surely there's some indept coverage for them somewhere; I cleaned up a completely pointless unreferenced tag on Immunity (journal) the other day from the same editor. Espresso Addict (talk) 20:58, 26 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I wouldn't phrase the question that way. "Should everything meet the GNG?" provokes a knee-jerk cry of "yes!" from a lot of people who, if pushed, would admit that the reality is more nuanced. The closing statement of the last RfC (which I'm assuming is accurate even though the closer is very inexperienced) said that the main problem was the reliance on selective indexes in criterion 1. Why not try to workshop that particular issue, then try again with an RfC in a year or so? – Joe (talk) 08:09, 8 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe try to garner support at the broader Wikipedia:Notability (media), since it's a shared problem with them. fgnievinski (talk) 03:36, 21 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Is there any useful information to be gleaned from the stark difference between Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/IEEE Transactions on Green Communications and Networking (unanimously kept) and Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications (no consensus on reopening)? Green Communications and Networking is a peer-reviewed journal, has IF of 4.8 and was founded in 2017. Computer Graphics and Applications is characterised as a magazine, doesn't mention peer review, has an IF of 1.8 and was founded in 1981. My back-of-the-envelope is that perhaps we should try to differentiate between non-peer-reviewed publications and peer-reviewed journals. Espresso Addict (talk) 23:44, 15 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Peer review doesn't matter. The only thing that really influence those is if GNG extremists show up, that care more about enforcing their interpretation of GNG, than about making Wikipedia reflect the sum total of human knowledge. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 00:20, 16 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I agree that the differences here come down to how the AfD was publicized and who participated. IEEE CGA is (to my mind) clearly the more well known of the two publications. Impact factors are meaningless when compared across different disciplines. —David Eppstein (talk) 00:53, 16 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

There's a few at AFD right now with low participation, please chip in. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 02:58, 23 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Is there a reliable place to use as citations for ISO 4 abbreviations of academic journals?

MilkyDefer 03:58, 29 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The LTWA is the authoritative source on this. In practice, TokenZero's site is way quicker.

As for citations, Academic accelerator is a spam site and should be probably be blacklisted if it's not already the case. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 04:05, 29 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

JSTOR provides access to over 2000 journals. But how selective are they? Selective enough to meet the requirements of NJournals? Wish I could ask DGG...

Any opinions? --Randykitty (talk) 15:47, 19 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

JSTOR provides the contents of those journals but they don't provide the sorts of evaluative content that one would expect of indexing services (such as the quartile ranks of SCImago Journal Rank) so it would be harder to argue that they provide the independent depth of sourcing on which GNG-based journal notability is ultimately derived. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:24, 19 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

As far as I can tell, all JSTOR journals are high quality. Very high quality. So it does seem a highly selective service. However, I have no idea how JSTOR is run, and how journals end up on it. I've never seen any Elsevier or Springer journals on JSTOR for example. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 21:39, 19 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Here's their selection criteria:

https://support.publishers.jstor.org/hc/en-us/articles/360044318434-Editorial-Review-Process fgnievinski (talk) 03:59, 20 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

See Open peer review and ScienceOpen. Do we treat them the same way as we do traditional peer review? Doug Weller talk 13:42, 13 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Interesting question. F1000Research does this. Articles only get into MEDLINE and other databases if they pass the (open) peer review. --Randykitty (talk) 14:11, 13 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• As for ScienceOpen, I found them when I found this terrible article.[1] he Hopewell Cosmic Airburst Event: A review of the empirical evidence Kenneth Barnett Tankersley . Stephen D. Meyers 2 ,.Stephanie A. Meyers .

This is published in "Airbursts and Cratering Impacts"[2] who have an interesting editorial policy:

"Our journal collection, "Airbursts and Cratering Impacts," covers all aspects of impact events on the Earth by comets and asteroids. It is open-access, peer-reviewed, and multidisciplinary, and it encourages submissions on significant, cutting-edge, impact-related investigations that:

Are broadly multidisciplinary, making them difficult to review;

Run counter to a prevailing view;

Are too novel to receive a fair review; or

Have been rejected by other journals. "

There's more but I won't quote it here.

As for Tankersley, he's a weird choice given his specialty is Native American sociopolitical issues and human adaptation to catastrophic events.[3] Not sure why he's first on this. There are other serious issues to do with him but no need to bring them here. The point is that this is a fringe journal. Doug Weller talk 14:20, 13 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Acta zool. cracov. is on the list of most-cited journals that don't have an article, in the top 10. However in trying to remedy the missing page I found barely anything independent about it, not even a list of places it's indexed. Has anyone else tried to document this before and ran into the same issues I've had? (For anyone interested, I've made a draft: Draft:Acta Zoologica Cracoviensia) Reconrabbit 20:55, 23 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

http://www.isez.pan.krakow.pl/en/acta-zoologica.html says Indexed in: BIOSIS Previews, Zoological Record, AGRO, Index Copernicus International, PBN - Polska Bibliografia Naukowa. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 21:48, 23 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• According to Clarivate's Master Journal List, this journal is indexed in Biological Abstracts, BIOSIS Previews, and the Zoological Record. That makes it (borderline) notable, I think. --Randykitty (talk) 09:17, 24 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Half of the journals in Polish Academy of Sciences#Periodicals doesn't list an impact factor. In case their notability is disputed, they could all be merged into a new List of Polish Academy of Sciences academic journals. fgnievinski (talk) 00:36, 4 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I think editors are needed to take a look at recent edits at Journal of Health Psychology and see what should be considered acceptable. An enthusiastic IP has made some edits in good faith, adding links to Special issues[4] and Special collections [5]. But these types of edits are not usually acceptable in Academic Journal articles.

Also, is it necessary to explicitly quote and retain these remarks pertaining to a controversy about the journal? [6]. ---Steve Quinn (talk) 14:57, 1 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

This AFD could use some input from knowledgeable editors. --Randykitty (talk) 08:57, 7 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted for a third time, please participate in the discussion. --Randykitty (talk) 16:34, 14 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

This one, too. --Randykitty (talk) 00:04, 8 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

It has now been relisted twice with still only minimal participation. --Randykitty (talk) 21:15, 13 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:TACL#Requested move 12 March 2024 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. Brusquedandelion (talk) 01:08, 13 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]