Talk:CrossCurrents

Listings in Google Scholar (to facilitate expansion)
HERE is a link to the 1300+ articles listed in Google Scholar. Health Researcher (talk) 23:13, 28 February 2011 (UTC)
 * And has anybody noticed those articles? That's what notability means... Thanks for starting this stub, but please provide some references/sources. --Crusio (talk) 23:22, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

Basis for saying it's an academic, peer reviewed jounral
What is the basis for describing CC as an academic journal? Is there a source for that? Joja lozzo  16:35, 27 October 2011 (UTC)
 * It's abstracted by MLA, which usually means it's an academic journal. On the other hand, it's own homepage starts with "more than just a magazine"... This is not really my field, so I'll go with what more knowledgeable editors say. --Crusio (talk) 17:07, 27 October 2011 (UTC)

The journal's website HERE says "CrossCurrents is a quarterly, peer-reviewed journal" (direct quote, emphasis added). And the journal's website HERE says it is indexed in the following databases. If this listing on the journal's own webpage is sufficient, then maybe this list should be copied (and edited) onto the article page: Academic ASAP Academic Search (EBSCO) Academic Search Elite (EBSCO) Academic Search Premier (EBSCO) Add FRANCIS (CNRS) America: History and Life (ABC-Clio) ATLA Religion Database (ATLA) EBSCO Masterfile Elite (EBSCO) EBSCO MasterFILE Premier (EBSCO) EBSCO MasterFILE Select (EBSCO) Expanded Academic ASAP (Gale Cengage) Historical Abstracts (ABC-Clio) InfoTrac MLA International Bibliography (MLA) OMNIFILE Full Text Mega Edition (Omnifile) Proquest 5000 (ProQuest) Proquest Discovery (ProQuest) Proquest Platinum (ProQuest) Proquest Research Library (ProQuest) Wilson OMNIFILE Full Text Select (HW Wilson) --Presearch (talk) 06:23, 28 October 2011 (UTC)
 * That's sufficient evidence for me. Primary sources like this publisher's website (a very respected publisher, I should add) are perfectly acceptable to source uncontroversial info like this. The abstracting/indexing info establishes notability much more than the fact that notable people published here, so that should absolutely be added to the article. See WP:JWG for instructions/suggestions. The Wiley link should be added to the infobox, too. --Crusio (talk) 06:54, 28 October 2011 (UTC)
 * I agree we have verification and improved support for notability. Good work. By the way, it's not the journal's web site that says it's peer-reviewed, even better perhaps, it's the MLA's site. Joja  lozzo  15:36, 28 October 2011 (UTC)
 * PS Certainly the solicitation of poetry and fiction would be unusual for a scientific journal, but this is a humanities journal, and I don't know how uncommon that is. And even some medical journals publish poetry. -- Presearch (talk) 21:50, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

Retaining vs dropping names of prominent contributors: An exceptional case?
A user just removed the names of a variety of prominent authors who had published in the journal, citing WP:JWG (I have now restored them). Indeed, WP:JWG states that "in most cases, lists of contributors and full editorial boards should be left out of articles." However, in this case, the journal is indexed in only one database. Therefore one may wonder whether retaining a list of notable contributors is important for more clearly displaying notability. I could go either way on this. But I do not want the list of notable contributors removed without adequate discussion. After all, the page WP:JWG only says "in most cases." Perhaps this is one of the exceptional cases. Others' opinions? -- Presearch (talk) 19:36, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

I see that from the Wiley website, the journal does appear to be widely indexed (I guess we already noticed that before on this same talk page, but didn't incorporate it into the article!). The page HERE states it is indexed in:

Academic ASAP (GALE Cengage) Academic Search (EBSCO Publishing) Academic Search Elite (EBSCO Publishing) Academic Search Premier (EBSCO Publishing) America: History & Life (EBSCO Publishing) ATLA Religion Database (American Theological Library Association) Expanded Academic ASAP (GALE Cengage) FRANCIS Database (INIST/CNRS) Historical Abstracts (EBSCO Publishing) InfoTrac MasterFILE Elite (EBSCO Publishing) MasterFILE Premier (EBSCO Publishing) MasterFILE Select (EBSCO Publishing) MLA International Bibliography (MLA) OmniFile Full Text Mega Edition (HW Wilson) OmniFile Full Text Select (HW Wilson) ProQuest Central (ProQuest) ProQuest Discovery (ProQuest) ProQuest Platinum (ProQuest) ProQuest Research Library (ProQuest) This info should be moved to the main article as time permits. This might also answer my earlier question above about need to retain notable authors. If this wide indexing is included, then perhaps notable author list could be dropped. I've run out of time myself for now. -- Presearch (talk) 19:53, 13 December 2012 (UTC)
 * I have provided links and combined some entries (if a publication is in "Academic Search Elite" it is automatically included in "Academic Search", for example). I have also removed the list of notable authors. I think that the "in most cases" referred to above should be interpreted more conservatively. It does not mean: "include names to show notability", because notability is not inherited. Rather, it applies to cases like Annalen der Physik, which in its "History" section (quite justifiedly) mentions that this journal published Einstein's "annus mirabilis" papers, some of the most important papers in physics. (As an aside, this alone qualifies the journal under WP:NJournals#3). Otherwise, however, we don't list in journal articles things like "Nobel Prize winner XYZ once published an article in this journal", because most Nobel Prize winners have published hundreds of articles in many different journals, making the publication of one article not really a big deal. As for the question whether this is a "magazine" or a "journal", I'm torn a bit myself. The journal's own website refers to it as a "magazine". The instructions for authors on the publisher's website describe the editorial procedures, which are like those of typical magazines, not academic journals (no peer review is mentioned, for example). Yes, CrossCurrents is included in academic databases, but that does not necessarily mean that this publication is what we commonly call an academic journal. The quotes from the Wiley website cited in the section just above have apparently been removed and the instructions for authors now call this a "magazine". Given all the indexing, the notability of this publication is not in doubt whatsoever. However, I'd like to see a justification for the reverting of my edits in which I changed the infobox to the magazine infobox, etc. Thanks. --Randykitty (talk) 13:47, 14 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Glad you did the inlinking and removed the notable author list. Thanks also for the very educational full response above, providing the useful background for applying that rule. With regard to journal vs website, let me poke around a bit more. I do see that the serial's own website looks a bit funkier and more magazine-like than the page at Wiley, which looks very much like an academic journal - and in fact, Wiley categorizes it that way (as a journal) (which, in combination with the links you now say are dead, was my justification for changing back to journal). But if there is no longer peer-reviewing then that would reopen the question. Let me poke around a bit more and offer more thoughts later. Thanks for your thoughtful work and dialoguing on this. -- Presearch (talk) 20:30, 14 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Well, that was quick. Note that if you look at the instructions for authors on the Wiley website the bottom of the page says "CrossCurrents is a quarterly, peer-reviewed journal." It seems to me that the journal's web center of gravity, so to speak, has largely shifted to the Wiley website, and that we should take that as current. Since Wiley categorizes it as a journal, I don't see any more reason for doubting Wiley's category for this journal than for any other journal (that is, I would think Wiley should be regarded as a reliable source for this type of info). I will put in a sentence into the body of the article that states it's peer-reviewed, citing that page. If this violates any style or other WP guidelines, feel free to remove. Best regards -- Presearch (talk) 20:40, 14 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Additional comments. I see that the same page I just cited also calls the periodical a "magazine". But other aspects look journal-like. For example, following the link to the current issue, there are abstracts for almost all (or perhaps all) articles. Furthermore, when I download a PDF of an article (e.g., for THIS), the pages are all sequential, and there are no advertisements intermixed with the article. I don't see any reason to think that the Wiley website is mistaken. In sum, if this periodical wants to position itself as both a journal and (for some audiences) as a magazine, I don't think we should insist that those are mutually exclusive categories. And in as much as Wiley's categorization scheme pegs this as a journal, I think we should too. --Presearch (talk) 20:53, 14 December 2012 (UTC)
 * (ec-twice) The links are still there, but they apparently don't say the same thing any more. From your Nov. 2011 comment it appears that the instructions for authors mentioned peer review, but the same link now gives text that doesn't mention peer review. I'll be interested to see whether you can find something I overlooked. BTW, the Wiley website is highly standardized. It looks to me like they have a kind of template for all of their publications. As those are >95% academic journals, it's not surprising that their page for CC looks like a journal page. --Randykitty (talk) 21:09, 14 December 2012 (UTC)
 * After posting the above, I saw your post and went back to the instructions page. It's strange: nowhere does it mention peer review, except in that dangling phrase in a weird place (below the editor's address). I wonder if it is a leftover from an earlier version. I noticed that the text on this page (except for the "dangling phrase"), is identical to that on their own website. Perhaps something went wrong in a cut-and-paste operation... --Randykitty (talk) 21:09, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

Well, true, they don't give any further statement that they will send things out for peer review. But the 4-to-8 week period is not inconsistent with peer review. Plus, as I mentioned in the earlier comment, the articles all seem to have abstracts and be on sequential pages without advertisements. So while the lack of explanation of review procedures may be a bit unusual for a journal (or at least scientific journals... perhaps not so much for the humanities???), these other features would make it very strange as a magazine. In fact, out of curiosity, I just downloaded the PDF of the recent editorial. Here is some text from that editorial (from pages 298-299): "This issue of Crosscurrents on Difficult Dialogue was solicited from colloquium participants (except for Todd Green) and reflects the diversity of the projects. In addition to sharing our scholarship, the colloquium participants engaged in a series of facilitated discussions that set out to define the basic terms that form the discursive field: comparative religions, comparative theology, theology of religions, interreligious dialogue, interfaith dialogue, religious pluralism, dual and multiple religious belonging, hybrid and hyphenated identities. It became evident quickly that this field has expanded rapidly and that new terms and categories were created faster than one could keep up and define. Even after spending a month trying to gain clarity, we could not trust that we were using a particular term correctly, or that there even was a correct way to use a certain concept. Our meta-discussions on interreligious dialogue, comparative theology and religious pluralism were...."

Now I ask you: does that perhaps contain just a tiny hint of academic style about it? To me, except for the occasional claims of "magazine", and an above average degree of vagueness about details of peer-review procedures, this has all the hallmarks of an academic journal, so I'm inclined to accept Wiley's categorizations. -- Presearch (talk) 21:38, 14 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Well, I'm not 100% convinced, but I think there is enough doubt to keep it classified as a "journal" for now. I do think, however, that the two footnotes you added are more something for the talk page than for an encyclopedic article, so perhaps you can remove them now. --Randykitty (talk) 21:52, 14 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Are there any specific ways you could state that you regard the footnotes as against style or policy? My inclination is to think that they provide objective facts that could help readers address questions that some of them are likely to wonder about. So, barring violations or clear downsides, they should be kept. --Presearch (talk)

By the way, certainly the solicitation of poetry and fiction would be unusual for a scientific journal, but this is a humanities journal, and I don't know how uncommon that is. Plus, even some medical journals publish poetry. -- Presearch (talk) 21:59, 14 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Well, as I see it, those footnotes were added in reaction to the discussion that we were having here about whether to call this a magazine or a journal. Discussions like that belong on talk pages, not in articles. I don't think there's a policy about this, but to me it just looks strange to have these discussion-like remarks in the article (including instructions to look at tabs and such). As we have come to a consensus here, I think they can be safely removed from the article. If you want to keep them "in the open" (as opposed to hidden in the history - they won't be lost in any case), you could copy them here. As for having some poetry/literature, as far as I know (but I'm not in humanities either), this is not unusual in humanities journals, although a while ago the WPJournals project started to class all periodicals who did this exclusively, as literary magazines, even if they were published by an academic department at a university. --Randykitty (talk) 10:11, 18 December 2012 (UTC)
 * I've trimmed the 2nd footnote a bit to make it less wordy. But my perspective is that the very fact that we found ourselves disagreeing, and had to do a bit of exploration in order to figure out the answers to our questions, suggests that readers might wonder about these same questions. Therefore, as writers we should seek to address the questions that might justifiably puzzle our readers. We can do this reasonably unobtrusively without violating policies such as no original research. And we can do this in a way that lets readers decide for themselves. And by doing so, we are not implying this should be done for every periodical, since not every periodical displays these same conflicting clues. To me, this seems just the sort of service that Wikipedia aims to provide to its readers, reflecting the fact that Wikipedia is written by people who have the capacity to place themselves in the shoes of the readers, and anticipate their questions. -- Presearch (talk) 20:34, 21 December 2012 (UTC)
 * I still think this is too much. I would agree with you that we should describe the arguments pro- and contra the question journal/magazine if this had been a discussion in reliable sources (i.e., outside of WP). As it it, the discussion was here on this talk page. So I think that the article should just inform the reader that this is an academic journal, with the references that support this, if need be. The reference "more than just a magazine" is not really supportive of this being an academic journal anyway. It's a common marketing phrase (I could think of, for example: "Starbucks is more that just a coffee shop, it's your second home"... or "Campbell's is not just any soup, it means a carefully equilibrated diet" :-). Encyclopedic articles should present the facts (and if that is a documented discussion, then that is part of those facts), but should not reflect our reasoning for getting those facts. --Randykitty (talk) 10:19, 23 December 2012 (UTC)
 * You make an interesting observation that "more than just a ---" is a common marketing phrase. If this phrase were a common marketing ploy by academic journals then I'd agree that we should just ignore it. However, I don't ever recall it being used before by an academic journal. I think it's very unusual among journals. Therefore I do not know what the significance is of the fact that the journal refers to itself in this way. Does this mean that this periodical only recently began to receive peer review, and this is inherited language? Or does this mean that the journal persistently seeks to market itself more broadly than most other academic journals? Or is it some other reason, or a combination of reasons? To me, the "magazine" language remains a bit of a mystery, and I find it an aspect of the journal that is of interest. And the existence of such language is a simple straightforward readily extractable fact, so we can cover it in the article without violating WP:OR. I say we should cover it because it is a fact of interest that I as a reader would want to know about, even if Wikipedia cannot give me the explanation for why the journal talks about itself this way. It seems to me that our disagreement may be resolving itself to a question of WP:DUE: Is this fact of sufficient interest that it should be covered in the article? My judgment is that, yes, this is of sufficient interest. For example, if I were telling a colleague about this journal, one of the things I'd probably mention early-on is that the journal sometimes calls itself a magazine (for reasons that are not entirely clear to me at present). -- Presearch (talk) 20:00, 25 December 2012 (UTC)

Time machine edit
It seems rather unusual that, with all of the above, including the words "the notability of this publication is not in doubt whatsoever" (emphasis added), that a HatNote questioning notability was placed several years later. Time to remove it, and add to the indexing list in the article. Pi314m (talk) 08:51, 16 June 2020 (UTC)