User:Randykitty

When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream, and shout!

(Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough For Love)



My username
For those who wonder, especially those more used to British-English usage, Randy does not reflect on my physiological state but is short for Miranda. Of course, I'm not a kitten and Miranda is not my real name :-) The original (adorable) Randykitty lived a full (cat-)life of 20 years during which she spread a lot of joy around her. According to some, I'm not a kitten but "a Jeffrey Beall". In principle, I never confirm or deny any attempt at outing, whether on- or off-wiki. In this case I am making an exception. Beall edits under his own name and I am not him.

Editing interests
My editing interests are rather broad, but I currently spend most of my time editing articles on academic journals. A secondary interest are biographies of scientists, especially neuroscientists. I also regularly spend some time on new page patrol (and there, of course, encounter a wider variety of articles). If your interests are similar, you may find some potentially useful links below.

Editing philosophy

 * Notability: Not everything that is worthy is also notable, and the other way around. If there exist no good sources on a subject, then it should not have an article on Wikipedia. Even if sources exist, an article is still not justified if there is no encyclopedic information. For instance, if all we can say about a certain person is that she likes coffee and cookies, sings hymns, and lived a long time, then any useful information is better contained in a list.
 * Be brief. Don't use 300 words if you can say the same thing in 30. This is not about removing information, this is about presenting information.
 * Not everything that can be sourced merits inclusion. Don't include trivial stuff, this is an encyclopedia, not Facebook. Even if, for example, we would have sourced information that Einstein preferred his coffee with two lumps of sugar, that is not encyclopedic information that in any way increases our understanding of him. This means that existing text often needs pruning and rewriting.
 * Wikipedia is not a vehicle for promoting your company/journal/band/etc. Articles should be encyclopedic, meaning that articles should be presented in a neutral way. Words such as "famous", "renowned", "foremost", etc. rarely have a place in an encyclopedic article. Hence, our Einstein article starts with "Albert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist", not "Albert Einstein was the most famous scientist ever", even though one certainly will be able to find reliable sources saying so.
 * Deletion/Inclusion. I don't see myself as an inclusionist or a deletionist. Everything depends on the sources. If there are good sources, then an article should be written, even if our personal feeling would be that the subject is utterly trivial. If there are no good sources, then an article should be deleted (or, even better, should never even be created), even if our personal feeling would be that this is a subject of the utmost importance. We report what sources find notable, not what we find notable.
 * Academic journals. Some thoughts on the notability of academic journals can be found here.

Notability

 * If enough people say that a recent event is important, then WP obviously has to act like it is a newspaper, not an encyclopedia.
 * Systematic bias: if some subject comes from an area that is supposed to be the victim of systematic bias, then all considerations of notability can safely be thrown out of the window and proof that the subject exists (such as it having a website and/or some in-passing mentions that would never be sufficient for any other subject) is enough to have the article kept at AfD.
 * "Eating foods such as rice, small fish and soup, as well as drinking lots of water" is encyclopedic content worthy of inclusion. Similarly, "eating eel, drinking red wine, and never smoking" is important information, justifying keeping an article, instead of simple inclusion into a list.

Observations

 * My Ph.D. supervisor often remarked that only very few people are capable of "clean thinking", meaning applying logic uncontaminated by emotions and preconceived notions. I think he was right and, as in Real Life, this is often demonstrated during discussions on WP.
 * If I am in disagreement with an editor about including some trivial stuff in an article, the sooner they accuse me of being biased or pushing a certain POV, the more likely they are to be pushing a POV themselves. My POV is sourcing, sourcing, sourcing (and I hope that it is not necessary to specify that this sourcing should be independent of the subject).
 * A useful definition of discretionary sanctions is holy 'thou shall nots' issued on high by ARBCOM to deal with the worst shit shows of Wikipedia, giving licenses to admins to rain down holy fire on offenders without remorse. (Thanks, Headbomb).
 * My RFA standards.
 * My thoughts on WP:NJournals.

Admin stuff

 * Administrators' reading list
 * New admin school
 * Nominate someone for admin
 * Old AfDs needing closure
 * Requests for adminship
 * Small wiki patrol

Biographies

 * AfD on stand-alone bibliographies for academics
 * Advice from DGG for writing bios
 * Biography infoboxes
 * WikiProject Biography template

General
• Antandrus' observations on Wikipedia behavior

• Biomedical citation maker

• Citation bot

• Citation templates

• Citation tools

• Earwig's copyvio detector

• Editor Interaction Analyser

• Find link (to de-orphan articles)

• Infobox Bibliographic Database

• Interaction Timeline

• Internet Archive

• Jytdog's advice to new editors with a possible COI

• New Pages

• PetScan

• Randy in Boise

• Reference generator

• Tables of conference dates and locations RfC

• Template filler

• Tools

• Write the article first

Links/references

 * AGRICOLA list of journals covered;
 * Atla journal listings;
 * Jeffrey Beall's list of predatory publishers (references: ) and standalone journals (archive 2017-01-11)
 * CAB Abstracts coverage list;
 * Cabells' Predatory Reports, access via WP library.
 * CASSI (CODEN, ISSN, journal abbreviations);
 * CINAHL coverage list;
 * Directory of Open Access Journals, DOAJ has significantly cleaned up and can be used as an RS that a particular journal is not predatory;
 * EBSCO Information Services coverage lists
 * EconLit list of journals covered;
 * Ei Compendex source list;
 * Embase coverage lists;
 * European Reference Index for the Humanities: Non-selective inclusion criteria (ESF page)
 * GEOBASE source list;
 * Infobox journal
 * Infobox magazine
 * Inspec list of journals covered;
 * ISI (Clarivate) Master journal list;
 * ISI (Clarivate) Journal Coverage Changes (last 12 months)
 * ISO List of Title Word Abbreviations
 * JCR: According to the Journal Citation Reports, the journal has a 2023 impact factor of x.x.
 * JCR with ranking: According to the Journal Citation Reports, the journal has a 2023 impact factor of x.x, ranking it xxth out of xxx journals in the category "CATEGORY". ref same as above
 * JournalGuide: maintains white- and blacklists of journals and lists reliable databases in which journals are listed
 * Library of Congress, reference to catalog record (LC Catalog):
 * MathSciNet, lookup journal URL here;
 * MEDLINE, reference for inclusion (NLM Catalog):
 * MIAR: Information Matrix for the Analysis of Journals: lists indexing services for most journals (link to search for indexing info);
 * NJournals; Thoughts on NJournals
 * Philosopher's Index, inclusion criteria (not selective) and journal lists
 * ProQuest databases are not selective according to Jeffrey Beall
 * PsycINFO journal coverage,
 * Scopus coverage lists; Scopus discontinued sources list; Search Scopus sourceID
 * Sources for journal title abbreviations
 * Ulrich's Periodicals Directory aims to be all inclusive.
 * WikiProject Journals template
 * zbMATH Open title search;

Journal article writing guide

 * Writing guide: WP:JWG
 * Handy shortcuts:
 * Editing journal articles with a COI: WP:JWG/COI
 * What to include: WP:JWG/YES
 * What not to include: WP:JWG/NO

PROD
General PROD message for journals: Non-notable journal. Not indexed in any selective databases, no independent sources. Does not meet WP:NJournals or WP:GNG.

Examples of particular journals

 * Examples (by far non-exhaustive) of journals started by major publishers that failed after a few years: Comparative Technology Transfer and Society (Johns Hopkins University Press), PhysChemComm (Royal Society of Chemistry), Human Genomics and Proteomics, Journal of Asthma & Allergy Educators (Sage), International Journal of Sexuality and Gender Studies, Research on Language and Computation (Springer Science+Business Media), Expert Opinion on Medical Diagnostics (Informa), Complexus (Karger), New Negatives in Plant Science (Elsevier), GeoResJ (Elsevier), Contemporary Organic Synthesis (Royal Society of Chemistry), International Journal of Dharma Studies (Springer Open).
 * Example of a journal rapidly becoming notable: ECS Journal of Solid State Science and Technology, established in 2012: already in 2014 indexed in Science Citation Index Expanded, Current Contents/Physical, Chemical & Earth Sciences, Current Contents/Engineering, Computing & Technology, Chemical Abstracts Service, and Scopus. Also a 2013 impact factor was released in summer 2014.
 * Example of an OA journal launched by a dept. at Texas A&M University that failed rapidly: see Obituary for an Open Access Journal by Jeffrey Beall.

Contributions



 * Edit stats
 * More stats
 * Stats galore
 * Categories created
 * Images uploaded
 * Pages patrolled
 * Talk pages created (mainly wikiproject tagging)
 * User talk pages created (mostly welcome templates, vandalism, or deletion -CSD, PROD, AfD- warnings)
 * File talk pages created (mainly wikiproject tagging)
 * AfD's initiated by me
 * My AfD !votes
 * My AfD closures
 * DYK credits

Under construction

 * Yann Mineur

Articles that I have started
(excluding redirects, disambiguation pages, and contributions to Wikispecies, Wikidata, and other language wikis) • #Acta Medica Mediterranea

• #Acta Neurobiologiae Experimentalis

• #Acta Neurochirurgica

• #Acta Neurologica Belgica

• #Actas Españolas de Psiquiatría

• #Acupuncture & Electro-Therapeutics Research

• #Alexander Cools

• #Alzheimers Research & Therapy

• #American Journal of Neuroradiology

• #Annali dell'Istituto Superiore di Sanità

• #Annual Reports on the Progress of Chemistry

• #Anubias gilletii

• #Anubias hastifolia

• #Anubias pynaertii

• #Archives Italiennes de Biologie

• #Arie de Graaf

• #Arquivos de Neuro-Psiquiatria

• #ASN Neuro

• #Behavioural Pharmacology (journal)

• #Biosemiotics (journal)

• #Bipolar Disorders (journal)

• #Brain and Behavior

• #Brain Stimulation (journal)

• #Brain Structure and Function

• #Brian M. Lucey

• #Carmen Sandi

• #Cell Biochemistry and Biophysics

• #Cellular and Molecular Neurobiology

• #Chinese Chemical Letters

• #Christy Holland

• #Clinical Autonomic Research

• #Clinical Practice

• #Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience

• #Cognitive and Behavioral Neurology

• #Communication Research Reports

• #Current Neurology and Neuroscience Reports

• #Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences

• #Current Opinion in Neurology

• #Current Pediatric Research (Deleted)

• #Developmental Neurobiology (journal)

• #Economic History of Developing Regions

• #Educational Research and Evaluation

• #European Journal of Neurology

• #Food, Culture & Society

• #Friedrich Vogel (human geneticist)

• #Fritz Lukoschus

• #Frontiers in Neuroendocrinology

• #Frontiers of Information Technology & Electronic Engineering

• #Genes & Diseases

• #Glia (journal)

• #Hallo Bandoeng

• #Hans Ferdinand Linskens

• #Heliyon

• #IEEE Internet of Things Journal

• #International Journal of Pharma and Bio Sciences

• #International Journal of Sensor Networks

• #International Society for Structural and Multidisciplinary Optimization

• #Jan Cremer

• #John Aggleton

• #Journal of Gastrointestinal Surgery

• #Journal of Ginseng Research

• #Journal of Institutional Economics

• #Journal of Marketing Theory and Practice

• #Journal of Neuropathology & Experimental Neurology

• #Journal of Neurotrauma

• #Journal of Operations Management

• #Journal of Psychiatry & Neuroscience

• #Journal of Systematics and Evolution

• #Karla Kaun

• #Learning & Behavior

• #Learning & Memory

• #Libri

• #Louis van de Laar

• #Mathematical Biosciences

• #Medicine Publishing

• #Melly Oitzl

• #Minosuke Hiroe

• #Molecular Brain

• #Molecular Neurobiology (journal)

• #Molecular Neurodegeneration

• #Molecular Pain

• #Nancy Zahniser

• #Neural Plasticity (journal)

• #Neurobiology of Disease

• #Neurobiology of Stress

• #Neurochirurgie

• #Neuromolecular Medicine

• #Neurotherapeutics

• #Neurotoxicology and Teratology

• #Numerical Methods for Partial Differential Equations

• #Optometry and Vision Science

• #Orphanet Journal of Rare Diseases

• #Oscar van Hemel

• #Pharmacology, Biochemistry and Behavior

• #Physics Essays

• #Prime Scholars

• #Progress in Brain Research

• #Progress in Neurobiology

• #Rainer Spanagel

• #Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews

• #Research Evaluation (journal)

• #Research in Sports Medicine

• #Restauration Ecology (journal)

• #Richard F. Thompson

• #Richard G. Morris

• #Rodriguésia (journal)

• #RUSI Journal

• #Science Immunology

• #Serials Review

• #Sleep (journal)

• #Sleep Medicine Reviews

• #Society for Economic Botany

• #Suman Sahai

• #Taxon (journal)

• #The Veliger

• #Tijdschrift van de Koninklijke Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis

• #Tijdschrift voor Entomologie

• #Tijdschrift voor Gerontologie en Geriatrie

• #Tijdschrift voor Rechtsgeschiedenis

• #Tropicos

• #Turkish Journal of Chemistry

• #William E. Skaggs

• #Zangeres Zonder Naam

• #Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palästina-Vereins

• #Zeitschrift für Gerontologie und Geriatrie