Talk:Astronomy and Computing

Untitled
The second paragraph is adapted from the journal webpage, and from the text of the cited editorial.

Disclosure: I'm one of the journal's editors (and responding to a community suggestion that the journal have a wikipedia page). That's why I've left this as pretty much a stub page, and do not plan to significantly extend it myself. NormanGray (talk) 14:42, 22 April 2013 (UTC)
 * I have removed most of the text, as it was rather promotional (not surprising given that it came from the journal website and an editorial in the journal). Article creation for such a new and no-yet-established journal is vastly premature. There are no independent sources and it is (obviously) not yet indexed in any selective major databases. Unless notability can be shown (either by meeting WP:GNG or by meeting WP:NJournals), I will propose this article for deletion. Thanks. --Randykitty (talk) 15:07, 22 April 2013 (UTC)

Sure, I'm aware of this issue, which is why I kept the stub short, and noted my connection here. Points: I would potentially agree that the page is a tad early ('vastly premature' is an exaggeration). But the absence of a WP page was noted by someone in the target community, so I added the inevitable page now rather than later. NormanGray (talk) 09:57, 24 April 2013 (UTC)
 * Length: Most journal pages are pretty short, and take their material more-or-less exclusively from the journal web site, because there are few other meaningful sources of information. I took A&A and ApJ to be paradigmatic here.
 * I disagree that the text I included was promotional rather than descriptive – I deliberately left out any argumentative passages from the editorial; but this is not a big issue.
 * Indexing: I understand that the journal will be promptly indexed in Scopus (unsurprisingly, since that's managed by the same entity). The application for inclusion in Web_of_Knowledge happens promptly after the first physical issue appears (they like dead trees, it seems!), and a listing there happens after enough time has elapsed to accumulate an impact factor (up to three years in the standard case).   ADS will be taking the journal feeds promptly.  Thus meeting the journal notability criteria is merely a matter of scheduling, and data plumbing.  The page at A&C indexing should remain up to date.
 * The article rejection rate is already respectably high.
 * Creating an article for a journal that has hardly published anything yet is "vastly premature". Even large experienced publishers occasionally establish a new journal that eventually fizzles and folds after a few issues. At this point, we don't know what will happen with this particular journal. Probably it will, as you say, become notable in the (near) future, but at this point we don't know and WP is not a crystal ball. As for WoK, you don't apply for inclusion in WoK, but for inclusion in one of the databases that it is a portal for, such as the Science Citation Index. They have absolutely no preference for dead trees and include many online-only journals. They do require that a certain amount of material has been published in order to be able to evaluate a journal (generally a minimum of 3 issues, not just one). Also, we don't create articles because "target communities" ask about it, but because the subject is encyclopedic and notable. --Randykitty (talk) 16:03, 26 April 2013 (UTC)

Journal self-description
For information, the first issue of the journal (including the descriptive editorial) has now been made open-access: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/22131337/1/ NormanGray (talk) 14:33, 2 July 2013 (UTC)

The initial editorial is at doi:10.1016/j.ascom.2012.10.001 (open access), and includes the detailed rationale for the journal. Incidentally the journal is now indexed enough that it should get Impact Factors from 2016. NormanGray (talk) 21:00, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

The journal has now been given an Impact Factor of 1.9 (see 'journal metrics' on ). NormanGray (talk) 19:01, 29 July 2016 (UTC)

Lack of editor in chief
My private notes indicate that in till mid-2018 the journal did not have editor in-chief. The website was listing all the editors and none of them was indicated to be a leader in any capacity. I think this is an interesting approach for a scientific journal and maybe should be noted on wiki. Can somebody find the details? Rpoleski (talk) 22:36, 4 July 2022 (UTC)