User:Randykitty/Thoughts on NJournals

These are some thoughts on whether or not we need an essay/guideline like WP:NJournals to assess the notability of academic journals. This is not about particular details of wording or where to lay the bar. ''As this is my personal opinion posted in my user space, I request that other editors refrain from editing here. If you have comments, please use the talk page.""

Let's do a thought experiment and suppose that NJournals would not exist. Where would that leave us with academic journals?

Some basic observations (in more or less random order):
 * 1) Reliable sources providing in-depth discussions of any academic journal are rare.
 * 2) In the real world, the importance of a journal is often gauged by judging where it is indexed
 * 3) Also in the real world, despite a lot of criticism, whether or not a journal has an impact factor is hugely important. The higher the IF, the more esteemed a journal is judged to be.

So where does this leave us if we don't have NJournals?

Solution 1. Rigorously apply WP:GNG and only accept journal articles for inclusion if we have multiple (at least two) reliable sources providing in-depth coverage (of the journal, not of some article that appeared in it). Coverage of an article may render that article notable, but not the journal per WP:NOTINHERITED.
 * Result: this would mean that only the most notable of journals (such as Science or Nature) would be notable. In addition, some journals would meet GNG if they were involved in some scandal that resulted in significant coverage. I estimate that 99% of all articles on academic journals that we currently have would have to be deleted.
 * Consequence: Many (most?) references in any science, social science, or humanities related articles are to articles in academic journals. However, readers would not be able to find even the most basic info on them anywhere on WP. This would seem to be an undesirable situation.

Solution 2. Apply WP:IAR and decide that every peer-reviewed academic journal should be covered, regardless of notability.
 * Result: This would mean that users would be able to find information on any journal used as a reference in WP. We would have to create tens of thousands of articles on journals that currently are considered not notable.
 * Consequence: There would be no reasonable way to keep out sub-par journals, not even predatory ones. Also, any new journal would be included immediately, unless we would impose an arbitrary minimum age limit. Limiting coverage to only those journals that are cited in WP articles would incentivize publishers (especially the seedier ones) to spam lists of references with articles from their journals. We could decide to exclude predatory journals, but that would basically mean that we would give one person (Jeffrey Beall, currently the only maintainer of lists of predatory journals/publishers) the power to decide what gets included in WP and what not. Note: since I wrote this, Beall's list has been discontinued. Cabell's International publishes a blacklist, but it's behind a paywall.

Conclusion: From the above 2 solutions, the first one seems to be least harmful (I shudder to imagine the spam we would need to fight or all the edit wars this would cause over which references to include/exclude from an article, which would be the result of solution 2). Nevertheless, this solution clearly seems undesirable to me, too, and it would appear that there really is a need for an essay/guideline like NJournals.

It will be difficult to formulate a set of criteria that everybody can agree upon, because editors vary on the whole spectrum between solutions 1 and 2 and few seem to be willing to compromise. So at best we would obtain a majority view, if not an absolute consensus. Once we would be at that stage, the resulting guidelines should be applied rigorously.

Personally, I would argue for guidelines that are more stringent than what we have now. No more arguments like: "It's mentioned in three books, so it's notable"! "It's the only journal ever to publish an article in Cree, so it has a historic purpose!" (That particular argument came up for a journal that only ever published 6 largely ignored issues). Instead, we would need a set of clear, objective criteria that a majority of editors could agree upon. Anything that didn't fall within those criteria could still be included if it would meet GNG (or any other specialty guideline, such as WP:NFRINGE).