Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Academic Journals/Categories

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:Periodicals, 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)

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)