Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Journal of Transatlantic Studies


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was   keep. – Juliancolton  &#124; Talk 16:49, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

Journal of Transatlantic Studies

 * ( [ delete] ) – (View AfD) (View log)

Non-notable journal with no claims of notability, but there doesn't appear to be a CSD category for journals. Who then was a gentleman? (talk) 01:39, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Comment--I don't have time right now to do a more detailed investigation, but this search on Google Scholar gives plenty of hits. Drmies (talk) 01:46, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Please see WP:GOOGLEHITS Who then was a gentleman? (talk) 01:48, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
 * I am a bit surprised by the "no claim of notability", after all the journal is published by one of the major academic publishing companies (who obviously wouldn't invest money in it, if it wasn't "notable").I think it also has also enough hits on Google, Google Books, and Google Scholars; there are plenty of topics on wikipedia that score substantially less hits on Google. --Parisienxx (talk) 01:54, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Counting Google hits is not research. We don't use Google hit counts as a measure of anything, because (as anyone who knows how Google works will tell you) they don't actually contain any useful information, being, as they are, estimates.  Notability is governed by the existence of multiple independent published works, that document the subject in depth, by identifiable people with good reputations for fact checking and accuracy.  A simple Google Scholar search for a journal title, which (of course) will match articles in the journal, which aren't necessarily about the journal at all, is useless, even if one were to accept that the hit counts, which are only estimates, mean something useful. Uncle G (talk) 02:58, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Hey Uncle, I just wanted to drop a note there, on the top of the AfD page, as a word of warning--that editors not simply say "delete per nom." The answer I gave below took me an hour, and I didn't have that time earlier. Oh, nominator, that's how an AfD takes up valuable time. I could have read an article from Journal of Transatlantic Studies or made sweet, sweet love in the time it took me to get the "keep" answer together. Drmies (talk) 04:57, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
 * I know. I'd already noted that you were not presenting an argument for either outcome there, below, as you can see.  &#9786;  It was Parisienxx whom I was replying to, and Parisienxx who pointed to the useless hit counts as a rationale for keeping. Uncle G (talk) 04:46, 18 June 2009 (UTC)
 * WP:GOOGLEHITS says "Google's specialty tools, such as Google Book Search, Google Scholar, and Google News are more likely to return reliable sources that can be useful in improving articles than the default Google web search." So uh, please see the essay you cite before telling other people to see it. Web results are generally useless but no one was citing web results. Scholar/books/news results are potentially useful and shouldn't be dismissed automatically. --Chiliad22 (talk) 02:35, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
 * I suggest that you read the rationale being addressed before questioning the response to it. It wasn't a pointer to any actual sources.  It was "This search on a search engine results in lots of hits.", to which the correct response is, indeed, to point out that hit counts have no meaning, and that Counting Google hits is not research. Uncle G (talk) 02:58, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
 * A lot of results on Google Scholar, Books or News is much more likely to be meaningful than a lot of web results. Of course there can be many reasons why those high numbers still don't show notability, but merely referring someone to an essay, which specifically says Scholar results are "more likely to return reliable sources", was a poor way of handling the situation. There are some obvious reasons why those scholar results aren't all that useful in this specific case, but tritely citing an essay didn't explain any of those reasons. --Chiliad22 (talk) 03:08, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Notice that Drmies wasn't giving that as an argument for either outcome, Who then was a gentleman. Uncle G (talk) 03:04, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
 * This was a journal started in 2002. However it has a notable editor and publisher, so there blatantly are claims of notability. Still, claims of notability are different than Wikipedia notability, meaningful coverage still needs to be found. I see a couple of books mentioning the journal in passing, citing it briefly as an example of rising interest in transatlantic studies. To warrant an article, though, there would need to be more meaningful coverage. It's rare cases like this where I wish we could have a space to write about references, even if they aren't Wikipedia-style notable... since information on them might still be useful to readers. --Chiliad22 (talk) 02:47, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep. The first dozen or more pages of the Google Scholar search for the journal give hits from the journal, it is true, but after that there is mention of and citation from the journal. But then again, that was to be expected: academic journals aren't discussed the way Bigfoot is. A link to a Google Book search is more insightful, this one, which gives on the first page alone a couple of mentions, some lengthier than others, of the journal in books. Laura M. Stevens, in "Transatlanticism Now" (American Literary History 16.1 (2004): 93-102) mentions the journal (together with Symbiosis) in the opening paragraph as indicative of a new interest in transatlantic studies. There is a fairly lengthy evaluation of the journal in a footnote in Paul Giles and R.J. Ellis, "E Pluribus Multitudinum: The New World of Journal Publishing in American Studies" (American Quarterly 57.4 (2005): 1033-81): "Another new journal aiming for a niche is the Journal of Transatlantic Studies (JTS), published since 2003 by Edinburgh University Press. This latter publication, however, is oddly named, because its first three volumes have concentrated almost exclusively on politics and international relations within a transatlantic framework, examining the problems of the NATO alliance, and so on; despite JTSs promotion of itself as "multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary," it has so far published only one article in the field of literature and culture." All of this together is not bad for an academic journal that's only been published for a couple of years. I'm not in the business of political sciences, so I don't know what the main databases are and if the journal is indexed by the big players in that field, but Academic Search Premier offers full-text access to it, and that's a good sign too. Lastly, I would your draw attention to an essay, User:S Marshall/Essay, which I and another user believe has a few valid guidelines for precisely this sort of publication--academic, professional, peer-reviewed. Chiliad, you might like what we proposed there; please have a look. Keep. Drmies (talk) 04:54, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep it per my essay that my friend Drmies linked above. Also, it has a lot of googlehits. And bugger WP:GOOGLEHITS — that's an essay I do not agree with, and I fully intend to disregard it. Reasoning: 1) Notable things have a strong tendency to generate a lot of google hits, so it's a useful quick indicator; 2) I view it as simple common sense that proper scholarly journals merit articles on Wikipedia. Wikipedia's notability criteria tend to be kind to academics and scholarly things, which I view as absolutely right and proper.— S Marshall   Talk / Cont  07:50, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
 * I suggest that you look into how Google works. The hit counts really are useless.  They are estimates, for starters.  Want to learn about this?  Try putting "google" "hit count" and "estimate" into Google.  Uncle G (talk) 04:46, 18 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Since you've only responded to my second point, I'll take it you agree with the first.— S Marshall  Talk / Cont  07:10, 18 June 2009 (UTC)
 * That's actually a response to your first point, if you check your numbering. As to your second point: Our nomal notability criteria apply, and there is no need for an exception.  Scholarly journals should be covered inside Wikipedia in the ways that they are covered in the world at large outside Wikipedia.  If they are no more than entries in long lists of "journals published by publisher X" in the world outside Wikipedia, then that is what they should be in Wikipedia.  Similarly, if the world outside of Wikipedia independently documents them in depth, then they warrant articles in Wikipedia.  Notability is not a blanket.  Human knowledge is lumpy and uneven.  Uncle G (talk) 10:54, 19 June 2009 (UTC)
 * My first point was "Keep it per my essay"...— S Marshall  Talk / Cont  16:39, 20 June 2009 (UTC)
 * He's referring to your numbered statements. Perhaps you should refactor and make your first keep reason #1 and then you'll have 3 numbered listings and the rest of us won't be confused. :) ChildofMidnight (talk) 17:35, 20 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Looks like a keep to me. Although I have to point out the absurdity of the argument that "it's notable because a major publisher put money into it". This puts the cart before the horse. It also ignores the notorious case of the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine. Hairhorn (talk) 11:47, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep Moderately established peer-reviewed publication by a respectable second-rank academic publisher. Included in the basic standard indexes for the field, America: History and Life and Historical Abstracts, but not Scopus or WebofScience--with the caveat that  their coverage in this sort of topic is weak & they omit many good titles.  Included in Ebsco, but not the other collected journal databases.--all this as confirmed by Ulrichs, which is the standard reliable reference for periodicals, & a good secondary source. It does more than lists it, it provides enough information   to make a WP article.  Held in 294 academic libraries, according to WorldCat. It is not yet in my opinion a very important journal, but its over the bar for notability. Uncle G is wrong this   about Scholarly journals--they do not get covered by secondary sources in the normal way--yet this one does have some recognition in secondary sources. (the basic problem with academic journals is the same as with academic books or academics themselves--they are not of interest to the news media, and notability in their field  has to be measured by the criteria of the field.) There is nothing sacred about the General Notability Guideline--it's just a convenient device for some articles. That said, there are some people here who consider all peer-reviewed journals notable; I do not. It depends on their influence in the subject, and that can be measured by library holdings and citations to their articles. For this, had there been 30 library holdings instead of 300, I would have said delete, because the other factors are a little on the weak side. DGG (talk) 01:42, 23 June 2009 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.