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Draft proposal regarding journal abbreviations

It has been suggested above and in a discussion at WikiProject Academic Journals that a journal's infobox should be able to show a few kinds of abbreviations -- the ISO one (relevant to sciences at least); the NLM one, relevant to medicine; the Bluebook one, relevant for US legal publications; and a commonly-used one, relevant at least to mathematics, history, and social sciences; and conceivably foreign language or other abbreviations. Usage might be simple, e.g.: 

 abbr-common = YYJ
 abbr-iso = Yadda Yadda J.
 abbr-nlm = Yadda Yadda J
 abbr-bluebook = U.Pa.J.Int'l.L.

Only the ones which had been filled in should be shown, and ideally the article editors determine the order of display. Please let's move in this direction. I do not know if implementing this in a simple way would break existing pages which use the current "Abbreviation" label however. Comments? -- Econterms (talk) 14:53, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

  • Oppose, per reasons indicated at the above-linked talk page. Note that NLM has started using ISO, I cannot remember a single instance where the NLM abbreviation was different from the ISO one. --Crusio (talk) 15:04, 4 August 2011 (UTC)
  • The "common" one is the one I would use. Can leave the others out, indefinitely, though foreseeing a possible need for bluebook. Can also leave "abbr-iso" as "abbreviation" to maintain backwards compatibility. I'm inviting input from wikiprojects on sociology, economics, and other fields where the "common" one would be relevant. -- Econterms (talk) 09:26, 5 August 2011 (UTC)
  • Support, as discussed above. Remember that only those fields with values entered will be displayed. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 09:45, 5 August 2011 (UTC)
  • Note to participants in this discussion: please note that a much more extensive parallel discussion can be found at the WikiProject Academic Journals talk page. --Crusio (talk) 10:26, 5 August 2011 (UTC)
  • Support: the ISO abbreviation is, in some cases, merely a bit of trivia as in the example that started this whole discussion: the Annals of Mathematics. The entire mathematical community and the journal itself use the abbreviation "Ann. of Math.", and hence the ISO abbreviation is mostly a matter of arcane knowledge. I understand the desire to list the ISO abbreviation since it is apparently a commonly accepted standard, though I believe that in some cases it is simply confusing: we don't need anyone thinking that people actually abbreviate the annals as "Ann. Math.". I think it's very useful to have a field in the infobox listing abbreviation(s), and I think it would only make sense to be able to list abbreviations that are actually widely used. Whether or not the ISO standard is commonly accepted has nothing to do with the fact that there are notable cases where it is not used. RobHar (talk) 13:15, 5 August 2011 (UTC)
  • Interestingly, if one searches Zentralblatt MATH (here) for Ann of Math, what you get is Ann. Math. Apparently, not the whole field of mathemathics uses non-ISO abbreviations. --Crusio (talk) 13:30, 5 August 2011 (UTC)
  • Yes, well, Zentralblatt is a German entity. Perhaps I should've said that the whole anglophone mathematics community uses "Ann. of Math.", but I didn't think that that was necessary. Perhaps it's also necessary for me to have the caveat that maybe not the "whole", but almost all. I'm unsure how specific I have to be here. As previously mentioned, "Ann. of Math." is the abbreviation suggested by the American Mathematical Society, the journal itself, and every other journal I've ever looked at. RobHar (talk) 19:29, 5 August 2011 (UTC)
  • Support Though with the caveat that many mid to high importance econ journals don't seem to have converged on a common name apart from academic colloquialisms (e.g. JoLE). Protonk (talk) 14:05, 5 August 2011 (UTC)
  • Oppose all but bluebook See Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Academic Journals#Abbreviation standards for reasons (and everyone should read this anyway), and trout Econterms for starting the same discussion as two places, and for canvassing (see [1][2][3][4][5]). For the lazy people

    ISO is the standard and should be understood by people across different fields (Int. J. Mod. Phys. will be recognized as International Journal of Modern Physics by most people who ever dealt with abbreviation). NLM uses ISO, so there's no "different" NLM abbreviation. "Common" abbreviations will be obvious (Journal of Physics A → JPA) so there's no need to list them in the infobox (although they certainly can be used in prose like in Earth and Planetary Science Letters). However, the bluebook abbreviation for law journals seems to be a recognized standard, so I wouldn't object to listing it in addition to the ISO one. But journal articles aren't and shouldn't be compendiums of abbreviations.

Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 14:17, 5 August 2011 (UTC)
  • (1) Noted re canvassing: I reread the guideline, which lays out "appropriate" and "inappropriate" forms of notification. I'd notified (a) editors who had expressed a specific interest in this topic, and (b) people in fields whose journals would use the new abbr-common. I did not notify people whose wikiprojects are associated with fields where the proposal would have no effect; that's non-neutral in a sense, I recognize, but I think it was "appropriate" and common sense. (2) Re "two conversations" -- I proposed to change the template, and the template-talk page seemed the best place to say so. I linked to this conversation from the academic journals project talk page and to that discussion from here. (3) Re the proposition that journal articles "aren't and shouldn't be compendiums of abbreviations" -- agreed. (4) It seems to me we're past the point of absurdity here in substance; it's frustrated me for years to see the existing apparently-irrelevant abbreviations on articles about major journals. Multiple other people have expressed the same thought, and suggested the nondestructive form of adding a new line. The proposed change is practically harmless and undetectable. The community should make the obvious decision, to tolerate some diversity and get this done. There's no owner. If it could be done without outrage, that would have been better, but it did not seem possible. -- Econterms (talk) 17:52, 5 August 2011 (UTC)
Well, the NLM now uses ISO fairly consistently, but it certainly hasn't always, and indeed still lists multiple forms, for instance here it lists

NLM Title Abbreviation:N Engl J Med
ISO Abbreviation:N. Engl. J. Med.
Title(s):The New England journal of medicine.
Other Title(s):NEJM
N. England J. M.
New Eng J Med
New Engl J Med

Of course it gets really confusing when neither the ISO nor the NLM follow their own rules, as for JAMA, but at least they agree in that case. The thing is that given the limitations of WP's search, it is very likely that someone who tries linking to one form of the title will be redlinked while another form finds the article. Other that the infobox, where else would we routinely capture the known variants so that they all can be redirected to the article? LeadSongDog come howl! 20:53, 5 August 2011 (UTC)
Redirects aren't the issue, let's stay on topic here. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books}
  • As you saw when you linked all those different abbreviations, they all redirect to the correct article (but as Headbomb said, redirects are a different issue). And our article on JAMA should perhaps be moved, because neither NLM nor ISO ignore their rules: "JAMA" is nowadays the official title of this journal, with The Journal of the American Medical Association as a subtitle. --Crusio (talk) 03:33, 6 August 2011 (UTC)
Actually when I linked them, they didn't all redirect, but Headbomb then fixed that. (Who says redlinks don't work?) I'm not so sure the issues are separate, but I'll take it as given for now: users should be able to find the WP article without having to guess which spelling was used. I still see no strong argument for omitting variant spellings that others have seen fit to use in reliable sources. After all, wp:NOTPAPER. The alternative is an open door to wp:UNDUE and to wp:OR in deciding which subset to list.LeadSongDog come howl! 04:49, 7 August 2011 (UTC)

Not really. The current practice is rather simple and straightforward. Concerning abbreviations, the infobox takes the dotted ISO abbreviations (and perhaps should be expanded to take the bluebook abbreviations for law journals) since it's the abbreviation system understood and used by most of the academic world. If it's got some common name in the field, mention it in prose. Take a journal such as Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (ISO abbreviation, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, "common" name PNAS). Now if we cover "all abbreviations" in the infobox, we'll have half a zillion abbreviations such as (I've omitted the dotted and spaced variants for brevity's sake).

This is obviously ridiculous (and there are other abbreviations too) and adds pretty much nothing over a single mention of the ISO Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA. The short-and-sweet version of PNAS is mentioned/used in the main prose because it's much much more convenient to write "PNAS is published by the National Academy of Sciences" than "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America is published by the National Academy of Sciences". That some people have used "P. Nat. Acad. Sci." or "Proc. of Natl. Acad. Sci. USA" instead of "Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA" falls directly into WP:DIRECTORY-territory. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 06:57, 7 August 2011 (UTC)

Yes, what you've suggested is obviously ridiculous, but luckily, it is also not what was proposed. What was proposed was the ability to list a common abbreviation, not all abbreviations ever found anywhere. All you have to do is say: "if a journal uses an abbreviation that does not agree with the ISO standard, then you can list it in the "common abbreviation" parameter, or if a "significant source" lists an abbreviation as being the abbreviation to use, then you can list it in the "common abbreviation" parameter; don't list abbreviations randomly found somewhere". Is that really too hard? RobHar (talk) 18:18, 9 August 2011 (UTC)
All these abbreviations are common. That is the point. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 20:12, 9 August 2011 (UTC)
*In this case I'd be looking to list PNAS (common) and Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA (ISO) in the infobox, preferably in that order. The others seem to me to be less useful to the reader, although they reduce ambiguity. The redirects do an ideal job of enabling an editor to use, e.g. PNAS USA or the others in a footnote without having to think about the issue very much. I don't see a serious original research issue here because I expect so few disputes about which are the most common abbreviations; if editors actually disagree, they can just list two or three, and so be it. We can avoid the (WP:DIRECTORY compendium/directory) situation especially in infoboxes, and I'd like to. We already have something like directories of index/abstract/archive services at some articles (e.g. AEHR) which takes more space than I like given the value it provides. I'd rather veer to the flavorful/interpretive side (e.g. I was happy with the L'Aerophile entry, not an academic journal), and get a feel for the journal. -- Econterms (talk) 04:54, 8 August 2011 (UTC)
  • The notices on WP:ECON and WP:Academic Journals were perfectly fine. Both are interested wikiprojects in the subject and the notices were neutrally worded. I don't see a problem with them. Protonk (talk) 23:23, 5 August 2011 (UTC)
The problem is they were notices to a select few people who were known to be "pro-more-abbreviations" and to a select few wikiprojects (which may or may not be "pro-more-abbreviations"). Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 23:27, 5 August 2011 (UTC)
I didn't know there were pro/con abbreviation factions, though I guess I could have guessed. I only saw the two messages. However I talked to econterms yesterday at Wikimania and I can confirm that he does have a belly button, so perhaps we can entertain the possibility of an honest mistake. Protonk (talk) 15:15, 6 August 2011 (UTC)
  • Comment Since this appears to hinge on a distinction I'm not familiar with, I'll reserve a vote either way. If this is to mean it would allow inclusion of, frex, USNIP or RUSI, in additon to the full form, I'd support. (If "rather than", perhaps not...) TREKphiler any time you're ready, Uhura 09:59, 6 August 2011 (UTC)
  • Are those military-related? I'm not finding solid info. Can you link to some explanation? -- Econterms (talk) 11:14, 6 August 2011 (UTC)
Seems that USNIP and RUSI are organizations, not journals. No idea what frex is however. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 14:01, 6 August 2011 (UTC)
  • My guess is that "frex" is a non-standard abbreviation meaning "for example"... :-) --Crusio (talk) 16:27, 6 August 2011 (UTC)
  • I strongly support some form of abbr-common and defer to WikiProject Academic Journals on the rest. CRGreathouse (t | c) 14:21, 17 August 2011 (UTC)

Journal link

The last edit resulted in the display of bare URLs in the template, which is rather ugly, I feel. Is there any compelling reason why this edit should not be reverted? --Crusio (talk) 08:19, 13 October 2011 (UTC)

Peer Review Parameter

I think it would be valuable to have a parameter identifying if the journal/magazine is peer reviewed. Right now this information is often added to the Discipline parameter, when it should have a field of its own. Thoughts? Clifflandis (talk) 14:57, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

checkY Done. Added a peer review parameter. Clifflandis (talk) 13:28, 18 September 2009 (UTC)
  • Only now see this remark, sorry for not responding earlier. I think this is unnecessary and should be reverted: if a journal is not peer-reviewed, it is not an academic/scientific journal (I really cannot think of even a single example; if there are some, then it still is only a very rare exception) so basically this parameter will read "yes" for at least 99.9% of all journals. If someone includes this info under the Discipline parameter, then that is simply incorrect and should be removed. --Crusio (talk) 15:14, 20 September 2009 (UTC)
Is Model Railroader considered peer-reviewed? It uses the infobox.
I think it likely that the infobox has escaped the realm of scientific journals now, so the peer-reviewed flag will have some value. --Alvestrand (talk) 21:12, 20 September 2009 (UTC)
Infobox journal covers a wider-range than simply science research journals. Plus, it simply confirms that it is, or isn't a peer-reviewed journal. Thus the reader will not be left wondering whether the journal it's peer-reviewed or not. Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 19:10, 21 September 2009 (UTC)
  • For non-academic journals infobox-journals is inappropriate, we have infobox-magazines for that. I would say that Model Railroader falls under magazines, not academic journals. For academic journals, not being peer-reviewed is the rare exception (as I said earlier, I don't know of an example), so if it occurs, it can simply be mentioned in the text of the article instead of burdening hundreds of academic journal infoboxes with an unnecessary parameter. --Crusio (talk) 19:56, 21 September 2009 (UTC)
  • Crusio is correct that peer-review is a standard in scholarly publishing. It is also true that the field will be labeled as "yes" in most cases with academic journals. However, because it is a standard for establishing scholarship and credibility, it is also information that researchers look for when exploring journals. Wikipedia users looking to establish whether a periodical is scholarly, popular or trade will not necessarily be able to tell based on which infobox is used (as we saw with Model Railroader). Additionally, there are many blurry areas in periodical publication (for example, some trade journals are peer-reviewed--which infobox should they use? Should they be considered scholarly?). Peer-review is a standard metadata field in all periodical indexing databases, and I believe it is a valuable edition to the infobox.Clifflandis (talk) 14:21, 25 September 2009 (UTC)
  • As far as I am concerned, if it's not reviewed, it's not an academic journal but a magazine and belongs in that Wikiproject, but not here. I am slowly going through the many unrated articles, rating them, but also removing the WPJournals template and replacing Journals infoboxes with Magazines infoboxes where appropriate (and plan to do that with the Stubs category, if ever I get through the unrated ones :-). I don't think we should modify our infobox because some people might choose the wrong infobox for their article. Model Railroader clearly is not an academic journal, does not belong in this wikiproject, and should not use the journals infobox, requiring info such as "discipline", "impact", etc. that is clearly irrelevant for that magazine. It should use infobox magazines which requires information irrelevant for academic journals but relevant for magazines. Perhaps someone could clarify the use of these two infoboxes on their respective pages? Having said all this, I also note that when I create a new journal article/stub, I always start with "Foo Journal is a peer-reviewed academic journal covering the field of foo." --Crusio (talk) 16:07, 25 September 2009 (UTC)
    • In the case of a periodical, online or print, which is published through a university/college, and where all its contributors are academics (let's say based at that institution), but its content is not subject to outside peer-review, would you remove its journal-related template and infobox? –Whitehorse1 02:58, 1 October 2009 (UTC)
  • It would depend what the periodical is about. If it covers academic subjects, I would probably leave the journal template but note in the article that the journal is not peer-reviewed (no example comes to mind though, even a local periodical like that is likely to be peer-reviewed). If the periodical would be about campus life (interviews with people, announcements of parties, reports on the exploits of the baseball team, whatever), I would use the magazine infobox. --Crusio (talk) 08:10, 1 October 2009 (UTC)
  • Everybody having had time now to think about this issue, I propose to remove this parameter from the infobox and return to the earlier version. Any objections? Perhaps it would also be good to rename this infobox to "infobox academic journal", to avoid any confusion. --Crusio (talk) 23:13, 20 October 2009 (UTC)
  • I still oppose the removal of the parameter, based on the arguments above, but defer to consensus. I have no problem with renaming the infobox. Clifflandis (talk) 17:30, 21 October 2009 (UTC)
  • OK, how about this compromise: let's put in the instructions that only when an academic journal is not peer reviewed, this parameter should be included with "no", but should be omitted if an academic journal is peer-reviewed? --Crusio (talk) 03:02, 22 October 2009 (UTC)
I don't think that's helpful. It's not self-evident that a journal is "peer reviewed". A reader would be interested to know whether it is peer-reviewed or not. If the infobox doesn't include any information on this, it does not answer that question. A casual reader does not read Template talk:Infobox journal. If we have a parameter for peer review, it should be used when it's relevant. Mrs Underman (talk) 07:36, 6 January 2010 (UTC)

Basically, "peer review" is practiced very differently (it varies with time, country and discipline), and I can think of several journals (former ones and current ones) that are considered academic that are not "peer-reviewed". Also note that the practice of peer review is a rather modern invention, it is not universally adopted, and particularly journals in the past did not necessarily use it (and this infobox is intended not only for natural science journals that are published today in the United States, but also for, say, French or German journals within the field of humanities that were published hundred years ago). Also, a casual reader would hardly be aware of which infobox that was used in an article. Mrs Underman (talk) 07:29, 6 January 2010 (UTC)

  • Just stumbled upon this old discussion. Has there been any case yet where the peer-review parameter was set to "no"? --Guillaume2303 (talk) 10:13, 13 January 2012 (UTC)

Link from "Abbreviated title (ISO)"

It seems that the link from "Abbreviated title (ISO)" to the organization ISO itself is not so useful, at least for me. Why don't you link to the standard ISO 4 (Information and documentation -- Rules for the abbreviation of title words and titles of publications)? --T.Kimura (talk) 14:19, 2 December 2011 (UTC)

Preprint policy

Some of us have just finished putting together a List of academic journals by preprint policy, e.g. whether journals accept submissions that have also been deposited in a preprint archive, like the Arxiv. We've color coded them into "compatible", "mixed/unclear" or "incompatable" along with citations. Would it be possible to add this information to the template? It could of use to the reader. Kramer (talk) 16:53, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

ISO or NLM abbreviation of journal title?

Should there not be guidance somewhere on which to prefer in the infobox? The NLM "Journal" search will, given one, find the other in most cases but it is by no means a fully automatic process. If we want to replace all instances of one by the other it should be under human oversight, as with AWB. Of course redirects are expected, but that is another matter. LeadSongDog come howl 18:33, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

  • I've browsed a bit in the PubMed journal database and as far as I see, the ISO abbreviation is identical to the NLM one, with the exception of periods after each abbreviated word (e.g. "Genes Dev" vs "Genes Dev." for "Genes and Development"). --Crusio (talk) 19:13, 14 December 2009 (UTC)
    • Archh! I know that wasn't the case a few months back, but do you think I can find the reference now? As I recall, the differences mostly pertained to NLM grandfathering the use of old abbreviation rules while the ISO used the new rules consistently. I think this pertains, but there was more to it. LeadSongDog come howl 20:47, 14 December 2009 (UTC)
  • From that fact sheet it looks like there must be a bunch of names that are different between ISSN and NLM. I actually didn't knoz this. Perhaps the titles I looked at are not a representative sample (I just entered the first possible title word that popped into my mind, "genes" and looked at those hits). In my field, it is common usage to follow NLM for journal abbreviations in lists of references. Personally, I'd just ignore the other one, but perhaps there is a use for those, too? --Crusio (talk) 07:12, 15 December 2009 (UTC)
Not all journals are listed in the NLM, they focus on hard science, especially biomedical topics. For art, history, linguistics, et cetera the ISO abbreviations may be the only real systemic choice. Looking into it on scholar, it becomes clear there's been quite a large and protracted effort behind standardizing the vocabulary used in journal titles and their abbreviations.2004 1971 1962 The topic might make for an interesting article if one hasn't already been created. Further: 2005
There are structured lists of journal title abbreviations, formated for Endnote and in plain text available here from the University of Queensland that include journals in "Bioscience", "Chemistry", and "Ancient history and classics" abbreviations from the "BIOSIS" "CASSI" and "L'Année philologique" systems. It appears the three lists are independently developed, although I presume there is some coordination, likely under the Z39 rubric. LeadSongDog come howl 17:44, 15 December 2009 (UTC)
  • Why is the ISO or NLM abbreviation used for law journals when they are never referred to by those abbreviations. There is already a universal abbreviation for every law journal in the Bluebook. Being able to use meaningful abbreviations would be advisable. As someone on the editorial board of a law journal, seeing an ISO abbreviation for a law journal looks quite alien and nonsensical. ballpointzen (talk) 00:21, 24 March 2010 (UTC)
If I understand correctly, the Bluebook is limited to only US-based publications and is written for use by US legal writers. In contrast, Wikipedia is written for a WP:worldwide general audience. ISO journal abbreviations are unambiguous in that worldwide multidisciplinary context. User:LeadSongDog come howl 03:14, 24 March 2010 (UTC)
  • I see the problem. Perhaps a compromise could be to mention somewhere the Bluebook abbreviation. Perhaps a short line somewhere "Its Bluebook abbreviation is xxxxx"? I wouldn't list both in the abbreviation field, because that would be confusing and there is hardly space there to explain that one is ISO and the other is Bluebook. --Crusio (talk) 06:25, 24 March 2010 (UTC)
There's no reason that |abbreviation= for this template can't list several abbreviations with <br/> to separate them. Many articles on journals have variant titles and abbreviations redirected to the fully-spelled article title. See New Engl. J. Med., NEJM, New Eng J Med for example. You could do the same in the general form
|abbreviation=Yadda Yadda J.(ISO)<br/>U.Pa.J.Int'l.L.(Bluebook)
(just guessing). For good measure you could add the variations that drop the periods to improve the odds of mediawiki search finding the string. Some long-published journals will continue to internally use their established abbreviations irrespective of conformation to any external standards. If we catered to that we would have no way to fairly draw the line without WP:OR and we'd wind up disambiguating with North-East Jersey Magazine (or some such using the same abbreviation). User:LeadSongDog come howl 15:36, 24 March 2010 (UTC)
That's not a good idea; as it corrupts the emitted metadata. Better to have a table row for each abbr:
header50 = Abbreviations
label51 = ISO
data51  = {{abbr-iso}}
label52 = Bluebook
data52  = {{abbr-bluebook}}

abbr-iso = Yadda Yadda J.
abbr-bluebook = U.Pa.J.Int'l.L.
The label could also be made a variable in an additional row, if there are too many options to code one-by-one. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 15:51, 24 March 2010 (UTC)
  • For what it's worth, the Bluebook citation for the example journal does properly include spaces. E.g., "U. Pa. J. Int'l L." ballpointzen (talk) 01:57, 25 March 2010 (UTC)

I have proposed three abbreviation properties on Wikidata; see d:Wikidata:Property_proposal/Creative_work#ISO_4_abbreviation. I think Wikidata may also need an 'Old Medline abbreviation' property for storing there abbr. before 2007. @Ballpointzen:, Bluebook has been proposed. John Vandenberg (chat) 12:59, 5 December 2013 (UTC)

ADS bibcode

Astrophysics Data System bibcode is supported by {{cite journal}}, and I think it would be useful to add the ADS journal code to this infobox. We could link to their journal table of contents service, either for the first or the latest volume, or to the prepopulated search form, [6] . John Vandenberg (chat) 03:07, 11 September 2010 (UTC)

That's not a crazy idea. A very high-value link for journals with bibcodes. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 03:24, 21 October 2010 (UTC)
I'm comforted to know I am not always crazy ;-)
Where should the link go? first or latest TOC, or the pre-populated search form (e.g. [7])? All have their benefits. I'm guessing the average reader would most often want to go to the latest TOC, but does ADS always have the latest TOC?
John Vandenberg (chat) 04:30, 21 October 2010 (UTC)
I'd go with the first issue, as it usually (often) contains various historical facts about the journal (reasons for establishing the journal, first editorial statement, etc...), or the search. IMO, the latest issue would be the least-relevant from an encyclopedic standpoint. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 04:39, 21 October 2010 (UTC)
WP:PHYS and WP:AST should have relevant feedback/opinions since this would mostly affect physics and astronomy journals. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 04:40, 21 October 2010 (UTC)
Good idea; I'll ask for suggestions from them. John Vandenberg (chat) 05:21, 21 October 2010 (UTC)
I've always used it just to link to the specific journal abstract summary page as it includes both links to the journals and to online data. (For example: 2006Sci...313..196S.) Having to go through the extra ToC form would seem an annoyance in most cases.—RJH (talk) 16:55, 21 October 2010 (UTC)
RJH, this is about the link that would go in {{infobox journal}}, it wouldn't be a link to any specific article, but rather page related to the journal (such as a link to a query returning the results of the first issue of the journal or something). Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 17:22, 21 October 2010 (UTC)
If the choice is to link to the prepopulated search form for volume 1, it should (unlike the above example) omit the page number so that all articles are returned. LeadSongDog come howl! 17:31, 21 October 2010 (UTC)
Ah, okay. Thanks for the clarification.—RJH (talk) 17:16, 22 October 2010 (UTC)

This exists on Wikidata as d:Property:P819, so it can be used on journals. John Vandenberg (chat) 13:10, 5 December 2013 (UTC)

Add NLM ID?

I'm not sure how to do it, but NLM ID would be a nice thing to have. It gives a link to a bunch of generalized information, for example, for General Systems journal. Rhetth (talk) 18:43, 14 August 2009 (UTC)

NML? Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 19:12, 21 September 2009 (UTC)
NLM=National Library of Medicine (US). Easiest access is by way of PubMed, example Genes, Brain and Behavior: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=nlmcatalog&doptcmdl=Expanded&cmd=search&Term=101129617[NlmId] (the end of this URL screws up the external link, you'll have to copy/paste). Not sure it adds much to the link to WorldCat provided by the ISSN in the infobox. --Crusio (talk) 19:57, 21 September 2009 (UTC)
To write URLs that have square brackets, you have to percent-encode them, like this: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=nlmcatalog&doptcmdl=Expanded&cmd=search&Term=101129617%5BNlmId%5D. A more compact form of this particular URL is http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nlmcatalog/101129617. Klortho (talk) 05:24, 22 December 2013 (UTC)

Rhetth, I have proposed NLM ID as a property for Wikidata. See d:Wikidata:Property_proposal/Authority_control#NLM_ID. John Vandenberg (chat) 12:51, 5 December 2013 (UTC)

Common abbreviation

I've run into a problem with Germanic studies journals - I don't know what other humanities fields it may extend to. The ISO 4 abbreviations are virtually never used; there are standard abbreviations that appear in all bibliographies and citations in the field, and in many cases in the OCLC Worldcat listing, on the publishers' page for the journal, etc. etc. Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur is ZfdA, Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie is ZfdPh, Journal of English and Germanic Philology is JEGP (even uses that in its masthead) ... and Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur is PBB. These have official standing and wide use, and the reader needs to know they are the common abbreviations. In such cases it seems silly to instead list an abbreviation that is almost never used. Would it be possible to add a "common abbreviation" line that would output simply "abbreviation", since the other one has ISO 4 appended? Yngvadottir (talk) 20:42, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

Hi Yngvadottir, the abbreviation data in this infobox is quite a mess. Many articles use this field for non ISO4 appreviations, for the reasons you state. We have three different abbreviation standards in Wikidata now, and I would love more to be added (e.g. botany has its own). See Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Academic Journals#Academic journal database in Wikidata. John Vandenberg (chat) 23:41, 2 March 2014 (UTC)

APC (fees)

How about a new field for article processing charges or publication fees? This applies to both closed-access and open-access. Fgnievinski (talk) 02:01, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

I think it's too much subject to change (and sometimes not simply a single number but a range of charges). This degree of specificity belongs on their web site. DGG ( talk ) 15:15, 4 October 2014 (UTC)

What to do when Impact Factor will be taken away in the future

The Scientific World Journal has a 2013 impact factor of 1.219. However, the journal did not receive an impact factor over 2011 and will not be listed in the 2015 Journal Citation Reports any more because of "anomalous citation patterns". I don't think the IF should be included in the infobox since the IF is about to go away. I've started a discussion on this at Talk:The Scientific World Journal and perhaps folks from this page would want to weigh in on this more general problem? Thanks - Pengortm (talk) 00:19, 22 October 2014 (UTC)

Impact factor copyright

Recently 'impact factor' was added to Wikidata, as d:Propery:P1169. I have started a discussion about the copyright status over at d:Wikidata:Properties_for_deletion#impact_factor (P1169). The inclusion of impact factors on English Wikipedia is less problematic, due to fair use, and also the copyright holder doesnt appear to be interested in chasing cases where the impact factor for a single journal is displayed. However if we had articles about all journals, and current & accurate impact factors in all articles, I suspect they would come after Wikipedia. IMO they should be removed from the infobox. It was added in 2007[8] by user:Weihao.chiu. John Vandenberg (chat) 18:03, 7 March 2014 (UTC)

If it is allowable under fair use to put an impact factor in the body of an article, then it is equally allowable to include it in the infobox on that article. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 10:42, 6 November 2014 (UTC)

link to open access journal not just open access

possibly with [[open access journal|open access]]. Fgnievinski (talk) 14:18, 19 November 2014 (UTC)

  • Seems to b uncontroversial and actually rather logica, so I have gone ahead and made this edit. --Randykitty (talk) 15:14, 19 November 2014 (UTC)

"peer reviewed"

The infobox contains a field "peer reviewed". I'm not sure it is used in any article, because, what could it say: "yes"? That's silly, given that we define an academic journal as being peer-reviewed. "No"? That's equally silly: if a periodical is not peer-reviewed, then it should get a magazine infobox. In short, I doubt the utility of this parameter field (and indeed I have deleted it from any infobox in any article I have edited) and propose that it be deleted as useless and also to avoid confusion. --Randykitty (talk) 17:41, 22 November 2014 (UTC)

I'm minded to agree, but it would be wise to use a tracking category to check whether (and if so where) it is used, first. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 22:48, 22 November 2014 (UTC)
See Category:TEMP Infobox journal with para 'peer-reviewed' (once its has chance to populate). Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 22:51, 22 November 2014 (UTC)
Thanks, that's very useful! As soon as I have time (I am currently traveling), I'll go through and remove all "yes" occurrences and review the "no"'s and then report back here. --Randykitty (talk) 23:39, 22 November 2014 (UTC)
An interesting response is in Medical Hypotheses: "since June 2010". Quite an interesting story about it, check it out. But I'd agree that peer review ought to be a defining characteristic of scholarly journals. It'd be more useful to ask what type of peer review is in place: blind, double-blind, open, etc -- but I'm not sure we want that level of detail. Fgnievinski (talk) 19:06, 23 November 2014 (UTC)
At least some articles have |peer reviewed=no; for example Cumberland Law Review, Texas International Law Journal, Speculative Grammarian, Sinister Wisdom, The Concord Review. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 19:42, 23 November 2014 (UTC)
The problem seems concentrated in Category:Law journals and Category:Healthcare journals: e.g., Talk:Law review#Law Review v. Law Journal: "very few american law journals are peer-reviewed"; Medical journal#Review process: "A more stringent review process [than editorial review] includes a full peer review". I'm puzzled as it seems that the very definition of scholarly journal needs expansion: Talk:Academic journal#Refereed vs non-refereed journals. Fgnievinski (talk) 00:18, 24 November 2014 (UTC)

Eigenfactor?

Would it be a good idea to start listening Eigenfactors and/or article influence scores in addition to impact factors? (See http://www.eigenfactor.org/). There is an argument to be made that Eigenfactors are superior and I think there are less copyright issues and that we could probably get the eigenfactor folks to even help with some sort of API to connect the wiki database to. - Pengortm (talk) 00:21, 22 October 2014 (UTC)

@Pengortm: Agreed, absolutely. And also SCImago Journal Rank. And H-index for journals. And I'd say more, journal infoboxes shouldn't be allowed to enter only one citation impact metric, otherwise Wikipedia is endorsing a single proprietary product. Fgnievinski (talk) 03:51, 6 November 2014 (UTC)
I think that's a horrible idea. There are (at least) two reasons for this. First of all, like it or hate it, the IF is at this point the only metric that academics look at. Nobody cares about an Eigenfactor, h-index, or whatever. That's the practice and whether we like it or not, WP has to follow what's the practice. As I have already stated elsewhere, IF is not a "product", but an index. Second, unless all of these statistics would be updatable with an API, we would create an enormous amount of work. As it is, it's already difficult enough to keep journals' IFs up to date (Shisha-Tom has been devoting lots of time to that). And if you really think that WP should educate people about the IF and such (which is what WP is not intended for), which is mostly (improperly) used to evaluate research output, we need to get people used to the idea that the only way of doing that is by actually doing something like (gasp!) reading an article... --Randykitty (talk) 09:45, 6 November 2014 (UTC)
Agreed. Eigenfactor is not used enough (that I know of) to make it encyclopedic to include it. Perhaps in the future if other sources/cultural norms show this change.--Pengortm (talk) 15:35, 6 November 2014 (UTC)
A cursory search on google books for "impact factor eigenfactor scimago" yields several hits: [9]; the burden of proof of the insignificance of other citation impact metrics is on you. By siding with a single commercial product when there are multiple alternatives, we're violating WP:NOTADVERTISING. You seem to be extrapolating your biased worldview. The fact that you heard less of other citation impact metrics is a testament to TR's marketing efforts of its product. It's like saying Wikipedia needs not list other MP3 players because it's mainly ipods that are purchased where you live. Fgnievinski (talk) 19:05, 6 November 2014 (UTC)
I don't think your interpretation is correct. Nobody says that any of these alternative measures is not notable. There are sources and they indeed all have articles here. However, you are the one that advocates to add them to the infobox, so I think it should be you who shows that these measures are actually being used by people and are having the same "stature" as the IF. In my experience, all people (=researchers looking for a place to publish or bean counters looking for an easy way to evaluate people) are interested in is the IF, ignoring all the rest. I've yet to hear someone boast for having published in a journal with a high Eigenvalue or h-index... And as for TR's marketing: they hardly needed to do much. For decades the only measures around where their IF, citation half-life, and immediacy index... --Randykitty (talk) 19:25, 6 November 2014 (UTC)

@Randykitty: First, you're right in that other journal rankings are not as famous as TR's IF. Second, to back up my suggestion, I found this in the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment's [10]:

[Recommendations] for Publishers: Greatly reduce emphasis on the journal impact factor as a promotional tool, ideally by ceasing to promote the impact factor or by presenting the metric in the context of a variety of journal-based metrics (e.g., 5-year impact factor, EigenFactor [8], SCImago [9], h-index, editorial and publication times, etc.) that provide a richer view of journal performance

Another source is this article in PLOS ONE [11], "Integrative Approach to Quality Assessment of Medical Journals Using Impact Factor, Eigenfactor, and Article Influence Scores" (the latter is calculated dividing Eigenfactor Score (ES) by the number of articles in the journal [12]):

Conclusion: The rank order of medical journals changes depending on whether IF, AIS or ES is used. All of these metrics are sensitive to the number of citable items published by journals. Consumers should thus consider all of these metrics rather than just IF alone in assessing the influence and importance of medical journals in their respective disciplines.

Third, I don't think Wikipedia should give incentives for this cult of the IF, by providing such prominent space for the promotion of TR's IF. Either we give space for diversity or, better yet, include no single metric -- we've both witnessed how people take a number and run with it. Fourth, I'm not even sure it's legal for Wikipedia to list TR's IF values. For example, I found this remark in an aggregate journal quality ranking [13]:

The editor regrets to inform users of the Journal Quality List that Thomson Scientific Inc. have requested removal of the Journal Impact Factor scores from the JQL. Please destroy any previous versions of the JQL in your possession. Thomson Scientific Inc. remind academics and universities that they do not permit any republication or re-use of their Impact Factor lists.

I've taken the liberty of contacting TR asking for their IF terms of use. Fgnievinski (talk) 01:15, 7 November 2014 (UTC)

  • Fgnievinski, it does not matter what you or I think. And yes, there are references where people say that researchers (and even more the bean counters) should change their idolatry of the IF. But that is not the same as having references that confirm that people have done this. Until that is the case, we should not change our praxis. WP follows what the sources say, we don't lead to where we think people should go. As fr the use of the IF: TR permits publishers to list the IF of a journal on its website, which is the same what we do. I don't think there's a problem with that. If we were to compile lists of IFs (per discipline, for example), then I'm sure TR would be very unhappy. --Randykitty (talk) 10:20, 9 November 2014 (UTC)
Randykitty: TR Publisher Relations Support (ts.prsupport@thomsonreuters.com) has confirmed that "The use you describe is perfectly fine with Thomson Reuters." I've forwarded the full conversation to permissions-en@wikimedia.org. The one thing that concerned me is if someone takes a WP dump and extracts the IF to compile a list of IF. But I guess in that case the copyright infringement would be on the part of whoever does the compilation, not WP's fault. Finally, although I'm not advocating for WP editors to have an agenda, I am a little concerned with WP just reflecting the status quo, re diversity in journal ranks. Fgnievinski (talk) 17:29, 19 November 2014 (UTC)
Just noticed a related discussion on wikidata ID (P1169). Fgnievinski (talk) 18:53, 24 November 2014 (UTC)

Official journal names

Would it be possible for a bot to check the claimed journal name and ISSN correspondence against the authoritative ISSN database? Fgnievinski (talk) 18:43, 28 November 2014 (UTC)

redirects

The Former names and ISO 4 fields are obvious redirect candidates, but often forgotten. If the infobox linked these fields, the resulting WP:redlinks would serve as a reminder for creating the redirect pages. Your thoughts? Fgnievinski (talk) 18:45, 28 November 2014 (UTC)

  • Actually, we need more redirects than just that: the ISO4 abbreviation of any former names, to start with. But with the ISO4 of "Journal of Foo" being "J. Foo", we also need a redirect from "J Foo", and so on. In any case, linking these formernames and abbreviations would be a bit misleading, because readers might think to get to another article if they click them, only to be redirected to the article they are already on, so I don't think this is useful. However, perhaps someone who knows about bots could set one up that warns us if a former name or ISO4 is a redlink (although we do already have a list of journal names and abbreviations used in reference templates - can't recall exactly where, but it's somewhere in project space - which would overlap a lot with that). --Randykitty (talk) 19:01, 28 November 2014 (UTC)
Perhaps you mean Wikipedia:WikiProject_Academic_Journals/Journals_cited_by_Wikipedia/Missing1? LeadSongDog come howl! 20:22, 28 November 2014 (UTC)

Current alternative names

Some examples:

a) original language and script (e.g., 美術研究, Zeitschrift für Psychologie)
b) original language, transliterated into Latin script (Bijutsu Kenkyū, Zeitschrift für Psychologie -- notice umlats/diacritics are acceptable)
c) English translation (Journal of Art Studies, Journal of Psychology)

In the APA citation style, journal titles are always in the (b) format: [14] So Wikipedia article names should also follow the (b), which doesn't seem to conflict with WP:UE. It seems that the infobox needs an additional title field for option (a). I'm not sure if there's a place for (c) in Wikipedia. Your thoughts? Fgnievinski (talk) 18:57, 28 November 2014 (UTC)

  • Far as I know, we always use (b) for article titles and the infobox. An English translation (or the name in the original script, followed by the translation) is usually given between parentheses in the lead, directly after the journal title. I don't think we need to cram all that in the infobox. --Randykitty (talk) 19:04, 28 November 2014 (UTC)
  • (after ec, with some overlap) I don't think (c) needs to be accommodated in the infobox (although it can of course be provided in the lede), but the closely related issue of official/common abbreviations remains unresolved and equally important in my view with including original script names. We currently list only an abbreviation that in many fields is never used, and have no field for listing the abbreviations that some journals themselves use on their mastheads. I think that needs to be added as "Common abbreviation" at the same time as your (a), and I note it's been brought up several times here. Yngvadottir (talk) 19:05, 28 November 2014 (UTC)
  • (c) needs to be in the lead in all cases, I think. However, I don't think we need a field for "common abbreviation" in the infobox. Usually this is not an abbreviation but an acronym and it can easily be accommodated in the lead if one suspects that some of our readers might be unable to get this together themselves. Non-acronyum non-iso abbreviations should be kept out of the infobox, too. See, for example Genes, Brain and Behavior, where the non-ISO abbreviation G2B is used and mentioned in the lead. The infobox should provide a rapid overview of the most important info. The ISO abbreviation is a standardized abbreviation used in libraries,standard bibliographies, etc. In the rare field where the ISO abbreviation is not (or less) used, alternatives can be listed in the lead (such as for US law reviews, where we list the Bluebook abbreviation in the lead and the ISO abbreviation in the infobox). I think we should keep the infobox relatively simple and not cram too much stuff into it. --Randykitty (talk) 20:10, 28 November 2014 (UTC)
In the fields I'm most familiar with, the ISO abbreviation is misinformation: it isn't used, and there is nowhere to put what the journals themselves use, which is not always terribly obvious: PBB is the extreme example. I do think the native name if in a non-Latin script would be a good addition to the infobox, and many infoboxes include it. But I think the abbreviation that is actually used is equally important, if the article is to have an infobox at all. Yngvadottir (talk) 20:46, 28 November 2014 (UTC)
  • This somehow sounds familiar, perhaps we talked about this before? In any case, in my field, PBB is Pharmacology, Biochemistry and Behavior (ISO: Pharmacol. Biochem. Behav.). And where PBB may be ambiguàous, the ISO abbreviation is not. --Randykitty (talk) 21:12, 28 November 2014 (UTC)

infobox journal being used in members of category magazine

E.g., McKinsey Quarterly; any idea how to obtain a list such offenders? Thanks. Fgnievinski (talk) 14:41, 18 December 2014 (UTC)

Here's 154 get you started.
Journal template and Magazine parent category (2 Recursions)
If you want every magazine sub-category checked for articles that use Infobox Journal, you could ask someone at WP:AWB/Tasks to create a list of everything in the magazine category hierarchy and then compare it to a list of articles that use Infobox Journal (how I created the list above). I would offer, but I only have normal AWB access ( I'd need a bot account to pull back that amount of articles), the only way I could do it is via scanning a database dump, but I haven't downloaded a current one for a while, and they take a day to download. - X201 (talk) 17:01, 18 December 2014 (UTC)
As I've said previously, these templates should be merged; with a |type= parameter and switches to control fields displayed. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 17:55, 18 December 2014 (UTC)
And as was decided at the discussion about that, a merger is not going to happen. --Randykitty (talk) 18:03, 18 December 2014 (UTC)

Peer-reviewed field

I question the need for a "peer-reviewed" field here. Essentially all academic journals are peer-reviewed. Should we remove that parameter from this infobox, given that it seems unnecessary? Everymorning talk 03:09, 10 January 2015 (UTC)

New field "fees"?

Any cons to having a simple yes/no field in the infobox as to whether the journal charges any publication fees? No need for detailed numerical values. Thanks. Fgnievinski (talk) 20:56, 28 December 2014 (UTC)

  • This will lead to people putting amounts in there, which is promotional. It's something that belongs in the instructions to authors, not in WP. We don't give links to submission sites, or detail manuscript formatting, or give information about subscriptions, either. Also, yes/no isn't unambiguous. What to do with a journal where the first X printed pages are free, but authors are charged a fee if their article surpasses this? For most articles the answer would be "no", for some it would be "yes". Or journals that only charge for color figures (especially in fields where color is not often used). This is the kind of intricate detail that does not even belong in the body of the article, let alone in the infobox. --Randykitty (talk) 21:04, 28 December 2014 (UTC)
  • I agree with Randykitty on this for the reason they outline. --Pengortm (talk) 22:59, 28 December 2014 (UTC)
    • The field would be understood as "any fee". Fgnievinski (talk) 23:07, 28 December 2014 (UTC)

Frequency = continuous

Several online-only journals no longer pack articles in issues and volumes, rather publish on an article-by-article basis shortly after acceptance. I think it'd be beneficial to offer a standard response for the frequency field in the documentation for the journal infobox. In PLOS ONE we have "Articles published upon acceptance". Elsevier calls this "article-based publishing", Springer calls it "Continuous article publishing", BMJ calls "continuous publishing". Any preference? How about just "continuous"? Thanks. Fgnievinski (talk) 14:36, 18 December 2014 (UTC)

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