Talk:List of scientific journals

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1 Unnamed
2 Inclusion criteria
3 Scientific American
4 ISSN?
5 More on inclusion criteria
6 Missing sections
7 Area studies
8 Materials science section
9 Medicine section
10 Remit of list
11 economics, social science generally, and humanities
12 Journals in (Country)
13 ISSNs
14 Objection to the concatenation of Biology
15 Criteria for inclusion

[edit] Unnamed

hi i'm new at this so forgive me if i would be braking wiki form but many of the journals on this page have free online access to them, is there not any way in which we could post links to these as they are much more valuable in some cases then the home pages of the journals. Diploid

I don't understand. Normally, if the journal is freely accessible, then the journal homepage is the best entry point to get to the articles. For example, PLOS Biology makes all articles available for free, and the journal home page www.plosbiology.org links directly to the latest issue and the journal archives. Could you give an example where the articles are freely available, but the journal homepage is a bad place to go?Wilke 22:21, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I was just looking over the sites i had concerns about and found the links to the online copy, although not initially obvious, were there so i retract my previous complaint. Just for reference the sites i had concerns over were:

IEEE Transactions on Aerospace & Electronic Systems

IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control

IEEE Transactions on Communications

IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks

IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing

These are all under the engineering/comp sci section.

also there are many more engineering journals listed on :http://www.ieee.org/portal/site/mainsite/menuitem.818c0c39e85ef176fb2275875bac26c8/index.jsp?&pName=corp_level1&path=pubs/transactions&file=index.xml&xsl=generic.xsl

is there any reason why these are not/should not be listed? Diploid 18:07 EST, 31 Jan 2005

It is recommended you check first, to see if the journal is open access. Then you can do it yourself. If it isn't try Google Scholar and then have it check Google--there's a reasonable chance for recent articles. DGG 09:29, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

How true. Some are freely available but many are not. Resource Exchange is only concerned with the ones that aren't free. ---J.S (T/C/WRE) 22:16, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Inclusion criteria

Does anybody else think we should have some kind of "inclusion critera" for adding journals to this list? Karol 08:24, 23 November 2005 (UTC)

Sounds reasonable. For one, I think that anything labelled with Category:Pseudoscience should not be here, so I think this anon contribution should be reverted. Would you agree? --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus ^Talk 21:23, 23 November 2005 (UTC)

Yup. Karol 23:24, 23 November 2005 (UTC)

I think it is important that we make an inclusion criteria for this list, becuase we'll have a VERY long list soon (there are tens of thousands of journals in the world today). I propose that we use impact factor as a criterion - it's not the best, but it's still something. I say we only include journals that have had at least once in their lifetimes an impact factor above 1.0. Exceptions could be considered, if the journal is important for other reasons. More comprehensive lists could be created for specific fields, which already has happened in some cases. Does this sound reasonable? I am willing to go through the list and sort things out in a first run. Karol 16:05, 1 January 2006 (UTC)

I'd rather have a list of all those journals, past and present. If the list gets to long, then split it not sublists, but don't remove any info. Even 'pseudoscience' journals should have their own list(s).--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus ^Talk 18:00, 1 January 2006 (UTC)

If impact factor is used as a criteria, then I would say list the highest impact factor journals in each subject area. I think that journals covering highly funded areas of science, such as cancer research, tend to get high impact factors simply because the field is very active and producing a lot of papers (which cite earlier papers in the area). At the same time, I think that even highest impact journal in agricultural research, gets a low impact factor, because the pace of the field is somewhat slower. So listing the highest impact journals in each area would give a more balanced list. ike9898 21:32, 1 January 2006 (UTC)

Yes, you're right. How do we then decide which journals should be included in each particular category? Maybe the first ten journal in each section, ranked by impact factor? Is that a good idea? Karol 11:53, 2 January 2006 (UTC)

The first two journals listed in the General Science part are not really scienfic journals as explained above, but rather journals like New Scientist and Scientific American. I think impact factor should be taken into account, but also historical importance. Please bear in mind that impact factors are often overestimated. For example, PNAS has a much lower impact factor than Science, but a much larger number of articles (and longer articles) are published in PNAS. Nobbie 14:45, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

Let's start sorting things out. I added a word in the introduction of the list, revise at your will. Karol 17:08, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

I had rather missed this article until someone added a link to it on List of scientific journals in chemistry where I have been active for a while adding new journals to the list and articles for some of them. This page has an awefull possability of becoming NPOV. To just let anyone select 10 journals is bound to be from a POV. I am not a fan of citation impact factors but it is something we can source. I have just edited the Chemistry section, removing the "Physical Chemistry" sub-section and listing 17 journals. These are selected as below and this comes now from the article itself as the source of the data:-

"The journals listed below are the chemistry journals that appear in the top ranking 40 journals most frequently referenced in Chemical Abstracts in "Chemical Abstracts Service Source Index, 1907 - 2004 Cumulative", Part 1, Page 46I. The data is based on a coverage analysis of the two volumes 140 - 141 of "Chemical Abstracts"."

I then left the three review journals that had been there even though they either do not appear in the 1000 most referenced journals by Chem. Abs. or they are not near the top rank. This is contrary to what I said above. Is adding these three POV?

NPOV is not a problem for the List of scientific journals in chemistry. We can really afford to list all chemistry journals there or at least all covered by Chem. Abs., and it is not too much of a worry that it will probably always be incomplete.

It is a bit of a worry that 10 of the 17 are redlinks. They do not have an article. Four were not even in the longer list. Fixing these should be on the chemists TODO list.

I added 17 because I thought that going down to 40 was reasonable, and it gives scope for people to argue that some of them are not really "proper chemistry". It is interested that those ranked 2 to 5 on the Chem Abs reference list are Physics Journals. J. Biol. Chem. is no. 1 and JACS is no. 6. Please suggest comments for improving what I have done. I also suggest that other disciplines should list journals using a similar criteria. --Bduke 08:09, 28 February 2006 (UTC)

I think the limit of ten representative journals in each field should be strictly obeyed. Karol 09:36, 28 February 2006 (UTC)

Karol, I am quite happy about that, but I would like to see:-

whether anyone thinks some of the 17 should not be there
whether we should have the review articles in
if so in the 10 or on top of the 10?
if so, how do we justify having them?
or whether we find a different place for review journals

before I fix it. What do people think? --Bduke 09:52, 28 February 2006 (UTC)

My thoughts after a night's sleep are to create a new page List of review journals in chemistry and move all the purely review journals from List of scientific journals in chemistry to there. This will make the latter more manageable as there are many many more journals to add and will also allow an introduction on the importance of review articles for people entering a field and also allow mention of which review journals have high impact factors. What do people think? --Bduke 02:12, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

In my opinion, all the chemistry journals should be in one list - list of scientific journals in chemistry (which isn't insanely long yet) - because review journals still are scientific, no? The section in list of scientific journals concerning chemistry could have 7-8 regular journals with the highest impact and prestige, plus 2-3 noteworthy review positions. This way would be simpler, and I favor simplicity, but your way is probably more comprehensive. Karol 09:20, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

You are correct that the main list is not insanely long, but it is very incomplete. I went through the RSC web page and added all theirs. That added a real lot. I plan to go through ACS and then the list I can access from my Uni account. It will get long but maybe manageable. I also note that there are not many review publications, such as "Advances in X", "Annual Review of Y", "Progress in Z", etc. I presume we add these. We already have "Annual Reports of RSC". My concern is this - how do we select "2-3 noteworthy review positions"? What criteria? Review journals are scientific, of course. I would add to the "scientific journal" page that these are journals with a primary intent to publish original work, but may have some review articles and then link the "Review page". I also think that List of review publications in chemistry would be a better title to include the like of "Advances in Quantum Chemistry". It it would be nice if someone else commented. However, many thanks for your comments. I appreciate them. --Bduke 09:45, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

I agree that someone else should comment. Also, I'm not exactly an expert in academia-related subject matters. Karol 20:41, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

Itub has pointed out on Talk:List of scientific journals in chemistry that Chem Rev has a high impact factor. I am confused about what we mean by impact factor and am awaiting more information. If we can get a good criteria for having at least Chem Rev in the top 10, I'll not go for a separate review list. For now, I'm leaving it as it is. --Bduke 22:08, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

Itub has responded on Talk:List of scientific journals in chemistry with a list of impact factors from Science Citation Index. Because the review journals have few articles but get a lot of references, they dominate the top 10 with 6 out of 10. The list I used and Itub's list have no items in common for the top 10 and I think only JACS is in common in the two lists of the top 20. The impact list, in my opinion, has too many review journals in the top 10 to give readers, if we use that, a sense of what are the important journals for original research. The list I used looks better for that. However, these comments are not NPOV. So, how do we decide what to put in the chemistry section in an objective manner? It seems to me that both total number of references and average number of references per article are both usefull measures of the importance of a journal. I am almost inclined to suggest that List of scientific journals be deleted as being essentially POV and we add information on the top 10 or 20 journals using both criteria to the full list article in List of scientific journals in chemistry. We could do that anyway. --Bduke 22:50, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

My opinion is that it is impossible to produce a useful list "mechanically" based only on objective measurable parameters such as the impact factor. However, impact factors can be a useful aid, together with common sense. However, I think it should be possible to produce a rasonably plausible list, even if it involves judgement. The following argument will focus on chemistry journals.

First, there should be a conscious attempt to include the represent the main subdisciplines withing chemistry (organic, inorganic, physical, analytical, biological...). Otherwise an entire field might neglected because they are overwhelmed by a more popular field. Second, there should be a special effort to include important journals that cover all areas of chemistry, since this is a general list. Journals that are too specialized (for example, heterocyclic chemistry or fluorine chemistry) should be excluded from a short list such as this. Third, the type of publication (articles/reviews/letters) should be taken into account. However, this is complicated because some journals publish more than one type.

Here are some journals that I think no one would disagree that are pretty influential:

General: JACS, Angew. Chem.
Review: Acc. Chem. Res., Chem. Rev.
Organic: JOC, Tetrahedron
Physical: J. Phys. Chem. A/B, J. Chem. Phys.

(inorganic, biological and analytical: to be added...)

Itub 00:45, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

I think Itub's line of thoght is good. The list he gives is reasonable (both taking into account impact factor, prestige, and my judgement). He listed 8 journals, so with about two others we have our ten for the central list of scientific journals; others will need to go in the specific chemistry list. To BDuke - of course, there will always be a bias, as in every list, but this list is only meant as an overview. It's jsut a question of getting to a consensus the majority agrees upon. Also, the POVs that include information are more dangerous than excluding POVs (the kind we have here). Karol 07:21, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

I have just spent a few hours in Melbourne University and talked some of these questions over with another retired academic chemist. This has clarified what passes for my mind these days. I'll make several points.

I say above "total number of references and average number of references per article are both usefull measures of the importance of a journal". I think this is correct. However the latter (impact factors) is what you might look for in a CV. "Ah, this chap publishes in journals with a high impact factor. He gets the work accepted in a journal that attracts papers that get cited a lot so his work is probably cited a lot." The former however, gives us a measure of how many people go to a particular journal. This is more what I think we are looking for. Journals with lots of articles rank highly but they also attract a lot of people to go there. I think that is why the list I put up using the total number of references looks a good list.
In response to Itub. I share your concern about doing this "mechanically". Perhaps we could reach consensus. However, I fear that this process is inherently POV. It is not the bias on religious or political issues that leads to POV wars on WP, but it is POV nevertheless. For example your list of 9 journals has only one that is not published by ACS or AIP. Are we really that sure that American journals dominate the chemistry world? I would, without a doubt, want to add Chem. Comm. as by far the most important short communication/fast publication journal in the world. But that is my POV. Your list also has another problem. We are bound by the edit "more or less ten journals" and Karol, the only other person to contribute here, has argued we should stick to 10. You have 9 already and you want to add at least 3 more, or perhaps 6 - 9, if these other areas have the same number as you have for organic and/or physical. We might agree on a vague number closer to 20 and compromise by adding both when faced with a choice. I do not see how we can agree on a number as small as 10.
I said above "I am almost inclined to suggest that List of scientific journals be deleted as being essentially POV and we add information on the top 10 or 20 journals using both criteria to the full list article in List of scientific journals in chemistry". I still think this perhaps should be done but I'm not going to be confrontational.
I do plan to put the top 20 lists using both criteria on the page List of scientific journals in chemistry and explain there how they are obtained and what they might mean to the reader. This might take me a liitle while.
For this article I will cut the number in my list to 9 and leave the three review journals which I think are the top three reviews that cover all of chemistry. This is a total of 12, which I think is "more or less 10", but people may disagree and cut some. OK, maybe that is POV. As I said, I do not see how we can avoid it. However I look forward to further debate that changes what I leave here now.
Karol added his edit while I was working on this. I see your point, Korol, but there are 9, not 8, in Itub's list (JCP, A and B). He adds 3 other areas. That is 12. Why add only one per area when we have 3 PChem and 2 Organic. What about environmantal chemistry, food chemistry, Green chemistry? What about CHem. Comm.? I'll leave it there for now. --Bduke 07:38, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

I think we're going in the right direction here. Of course, 10 as a limit is a rule of thumb, and 12 can be rounded off to 10. The "bounding edit" you refer to is also mine, so I must admit that the number 10 is really only my suggestion... a suggestion likely inspired by the fact I see ten fingers when typing my edits :) The only point I wish to stress is that this list should be clear and concise, which means we need to decide what to keep and what to throw out. That is inherently POV, you are right in pointing that out, but it is POV for the sake of readability. Maybe I see things differently, because I don't really care about the particular items in these lists (as long as they are representative somehow of the field); They are just examples to me, not the "top 10". Maybe in the future, if this list ranks high in Google and attracts alot of edits (from customer greedy editors), it will be necessary to reach a strict consensus on what to include. I do, however, feel inclined to combine the review journals with regular ones, because the differentiation makes the list more complicated and prone to further divisions (if we separate reviews, why not separate short communications?). One could also argue that regular journals occasionally publish review papers, and vice versa that articles in review journals often present original research. Anyways, your text about the nature of review journals concerns not only the chemistry section it's in now, and is maybe more appropriate for the article on scientific journals, not for a straight list such as this one. Karol 09:01, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

Karol, I agree we are going in the right direction. Maybe we can not get it entirely NPOV, but what do we say and do when someone edits two of our agreement out and replaces them with two others and we do not like that. What criteria do we use to revert and then maybe sort out a revert war? I do not care what it is in the list either, but I want to feel I can defend it. I think I can defend what I put there earlier today (time zones - about 2 -3 hours ago!), but it is'nt easy. I've gone off the idea of a separate review journal article, partly for the reasons you outline. I'm going to leave List of scientific journals as it is for now and add some material as I suugested to List of scientific journals in chemistry. Lets see what you think about those. It will not happen soon as it is time for bed now here. Maybe tomorrow or the weekend. --Bduke 10:44, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

The only answer I have is: this is probably not a big problem right now. If someone edits the list in the near future, it will probably be spam or vandalism, therefore easy to revert, and the page is not popular enough for the vandal to persist. Karol 08:35, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

There is no way we can get a good sample with only 10 journals, as there are more than 10 subareas of chemistry, especially if you count applied and interdisciplinary areas such as food chemistry. My approach was to include only the five main areas of basic chemistry I mentioned above, plus "general" and "review". Now I see I should also add "rapid communications" as well. I think that to be fair we should try two include two journals in each of these eight categories, because although choosing the "top" journal is certain to be controversial, choosing the top two is not as hard IMO gives less impression of bias. The total would be 16 journals, which I think is a reasonable number, close enough to 10 (we could count JPC A/B as one, or link to only one of them. Part B has the highest impact factor and number of citations).

Another option would be to list only "general chemistry" journals. That way it will be easier to produce a list with only 10. In that case, I would propose the top ten from the following list, which is based on total number of citations:

J AM CHEM SOC
ANGEW CHEM INT EDIT
CHEM COMMUN
CHEM REV
ACCOUNTS CHEM RES
CHEM-EUR J
CHEM LETT
B CHEM SOC JPN
HELV CHIM ACTA
CAN J CHEM
PURE APPL CHEM
NEW J CHEM
CHEM SOC REV
AUST J CHEM
TOP CURR CHEM

The good thing about this list is that it is based on an objective criterion and I think most people would agree that the list looks "reasonable". Itub 16:14, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

A couple more comments about the list above. If we are willing to list 15, I would list all of them. Fifteen seems like a natural cutoff to me in this case because the journals that follow all have very small impact factors (0.3-0.7) while everything in the top 15 has an impact factor greater than 1. I chose total number of citations rather than impact factor as the primary criterion to avoid having too many review journals and artifacts such as the lucky journal that has very few articles but a lot of references. Itub 17:02, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

Itub, I appear to have overlooked this suggestion. I am happy to go along with this and list the top 10 general chemistry journals. I think we should stick to 10 as other disciplines have about 10. I like general journals as this avoids discussion of what are the main areas of chemistry to get balance. I am happy to put this on the page, stating clearly that it is a list of general journals. Could you give me a correct reference (to Sci Citation Index??) for your list of the top 15? Thanks. --Bduke 03:49, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

I'm good with that, too. Karol 08:35, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

I have implemented this - top 10 of Itub's list. Interestingly that list contained several journals that we do not have in List of scientific journals in chemistry. I've added them there. I'm going to put this list to rest now and I hope that others will do so also. The priority now is to fix the redlinks. --Bduke 00:46, 11 March 2006 (UTC)

See-also Impact_factor#Alternatives for a new page-rank style "impact factor" William M. Connolley 17:18, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Scientific American

Is Scientific American really not considered a scientific journal? ISI includes it in its Journal Citation Reports. Karol 16:55, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

To me scientific american seems like a special case. It's somewhere in between a true journal and a popular science publication. ike9898 17:09, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

As far as I know, Scientific American doesn't publish original research or review articles for other scientists; it rather presents scientific breakthroughs to a larger audience. In my opinion, it shouldn't be included. New Scientist and Scientific American are for people interested in science what Nature and Science are for researchers. Nobbie 17:43, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

It's definitely not aimed at a general audience, but includes levels of detail of use only to scientists. It has fully sourced and annotated articles and, in my opinion, should be included here. StuRat 01:39, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] ISSN?

Now that we got ourselves a pretty extensive list, with alot of more specific lists, I guess it would be good to settle if we should add more information in this list besides journal names and links to their web site. Maybe ISSN numbers? Karol 21:39, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

Maybe abbrieviations too? ie [[1]] Piyrwq 16:16, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] More on inclusion criteria

List of publications in biology has recently been at AfD and was narrowly kept as there was no consensus. The original nominator seemed to thing it was a long list of publications. It could happen here. Some time ago there was a long debate about criteria for conclusion but it seemed to be almost entirely from chemists. We chemists discussed this at length and came to a consensus that we should include only journals that published across all fields of chemistry and were the top ten on impact. Meanwhile, I see journals being added, often by anon editors so it is less easy to ask them why they added a journal. Normally no reason for addition is given. The only policing of nonsense seems to be done by Karol, another chemist, who has deleted entries that were clearly inappropriate. This is not the place for everyone with a POV about their favorite journal to add it. Let us have some criteria? What about:-

Delete any entry that does not have an edit comment that clearly explains why it has been included.
Delete any entry that puts the number of journals in any category over 10 in number.
Force a debate on the talk page about every new entry as we do on List of publications in chemistry.
Or perhaps we should just put the article up for deletion as being hopelessly POV.

--Bduke 23:05, 22 April 2006 (UTC)

I'd advise first to define clearly the relevant terms. I am still waiting for a signle comment to the related question I asked at Talk:Scientific_journal#Academic_vs._scientific.--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus ^Talk 01:04, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

Not sure what your problem is or whether it is relevant. Scientific journals are a sub-set of academic journals. Journals have peer reviewed articles. Magazines do not. I have not got into those articles. I'm worried about the lists. Here, I think it is quite clear what the term scientific journals means. The question is whether the entries are notable and not just someone's favorite. There is no question that the entries are scientific journals, but this article is not to list all scientific journals. --Bduke 01:32, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

Well, are there any journals that are not notable? Perhaps you will find some useful guidelines at Wikipedia:Notability (specifically, note Wikipedia:Naming_conventions_(books)#Note_on_notability_criteria and Wikipedia:Notability (academics).--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus ^Talk 02:30, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

Look at the heading of this article. It says:-

The following is a partial list of scientific journals. There are thousands of scientific journals in publication, and many more have been published at various points in the past. The list given here is far from exhaustive, and contains the most influential, currently publishing journals in each field. As a rule of thumb, each field should be represented by more or less ten positions, chosen by their impact factors and other ratings.

It is'nt for all but the 10 most influential. Some journals are clearly more notable than others. The place for all journals is articles like List of scientific journals in chemistry. That one, we are trying to make comprehensive. I am well aware of criteria for notability and I helped to fix the concerns about the entries under chemistry here in the general list. Why do'nt you address the criteria for other disciplines? --Bduke 02:47, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

I think it's pretty clear when someone adds "their favorite journal" here, and in those cases I always take the time to revert, or move the entry to the respective more specific list. As to the content here, I think the best way to decide which ten journals stay is voting. On the other hand, I'm not sure we have enough interested people editing this page (two voters makes no sense), and until we do this problem isn't really a problem. Two or three people can talk things out easily. On a related note (re Bduke), I'm actually a physicist and not a chemist, just doing my PhD at a chemistry departmet... well, at least I don't feel like one yet :D Karol 08:50, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

Sorry, mate. If you are in a chemistry department you are a chemist. Not allowed to escape, ever! -:). Yes, you are right. Most "favorite journal" additions are easy to spot, and there are indeed too few people here. Nevertheless, there are POV issues here and I think the chemistry part reached a good conclusion. We can but just try to make it better. --Bduke 09:00, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Missing sections

I have noticed that currently we don't have a category for journals concerned primarily with a region in terms of social sciences, not geography (i.e. publishing articles about politics, history, culture, etc. of a given region). Examples: Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Sarmatian Review, Electronic journal of contemporary japanese studies (lowercase on purpose), Abbia: Cameroon Cultural Review, Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt (currently in Category:Cultural journals) and Iranian Studies Journal (Category:History journals). I'd like to create a section for area studies and corresponding Category:Area studies journals (not happy with that name, though).

The problem with "Area studies" in this article is how do you limit the number of entries to around ten? You are going to be specifically POV by selecting ten areas. I do not think that section of this article should exist but I agree about the category and maybe a separate article listing all the journals in area studies. For the others I think there will be debate about whether some of them should count as "Science journals". Why not have a new article on "List of social science journals", leaving this one to the natural sciences with a clear indication of this and a link to the other list at the top? --Bduke 22:49, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

Well, if so then natural science journals should be moved to 'list of natural science journals'. And I agree that 10 for each area study would clog the article - but at least they should be links to List of area studies journals, where they could be listed.--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus ^Talk 02:05, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

I agree with all these points, but I'm not not going to do anything about them until there appears to be more interest in this page and the various specific comprehensive lists. Apart from you, only chemists seem interested. --Bduke 02:33, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

Sad, but true. Since it is unlikely we will be faced with significant influx of entries, I'll add an area studies section, and a link to the only list I know that exists (and the field in area studies I am most interested in): Slavistics#Journals. I hope you'll have no objections? Once the list of area studies fields gets to big it can be moved off, but I'd not hold my breath :> --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus ^Talk 03:46, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

You all have made quite good points. Karol 06:50, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

Under biological sciences there should be a section for evolution. It is very strange that this section is missing.--Metatree 13:36, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

There is a section on Evolution, under "Life Sciences", like the "Biology" section". It needs a few more entries. Then of course there is the List of scientific journals in biology. --Bduke 22:35, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Yup I put it there, I'll add more journals when I get the chance.--Metatree 04:13, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Area studies

I really don't understand how this field is significant with respect to journal categories. AFAIK area studies journals can be categorized in sociology, history, or geagraphy. I don't think there's even such a category in the ISI database (although I can't check right now). As you can see, the Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt is already under List of scientific journals#History, and the article is categorized as an areas studies page. Similarly, Sarmatian Review can be easily placed in the List of scientific journals#Sociology section. I think those are the only two areas studies journals on Wikipedia. What is the incentive for such a section? Karol 06:50, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

There are more than two. The new section on area studies actually links to Category:Area studies journals, not a list of journals and there are about 6 in the category of which the two above are the last two. --Bduke 07:03, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

Because Sarmatian Review, for example, has articles dealing with sociology, but also history, political science and literature, just to name the few areas.--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus ^Talk 14:43, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

I understand that area studies are interdisciplinary, but that itself doesn't make them special. There are many analogical fields in the natural sciences that I wouldn't even dream of mentioning in a list that is supposed to outline all of science. This my personal opinion, however, so let it be. In any case, in addition to the "which 10 journals do we include in each section" dilema, we now have a "what sections do we include" problem. To put this discussion into perspective, I have now done some background research with ISI...

The ISI 2004 JCR Science Edition (meaning natural sciences) indexes over 7000 journals in 170 categories. The "worst" category, Marine Engineering, had a total of 652 cites in 6 journals. The "next worst" (169^th position), Medical Ethics, had 3000 cites in 6 journals (note that this journal is very interdisciplinary).

The ISI 2004 JCR Social Science Edition indexes 1712 journals in 54 categories. As it turns out, there is an "area studies" category. Area Studies are near the bottom of the social sciences list for any given criteria (sometimes before History, interestingly). The category had 5358 cites in 33 journals. These stats are comparable to those of Marine Engineering and much worse than those of Medical Ethics.

I gave all those numbers so that I can now promptly make my point: the category Area studies is no more relevant in social sciences than Marine Engineering or Medical Ethics in natural sciences, of course in terms of journal coverage. Therefore, none of these three should be on this list. If they were, we should include all of the more relevant interdisciplinary categories, which we won't do because that would just make this page entirely incomprehensible (200 categories with 10 journals each). Finally, some minor (journal-wise) categories, such as the aforementioned History, will be on this page for obvious reasons - but there is no such reason for Area Studies. Karol 16:39, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

Hmmm. I will admit I have not heard about this ISI 2004 JCR, but I never looked for such information. Is this the single most respectable source for such categories, or are there others we could also check? I am asking because it would seem to me like a good idea to have a list of such categories on Wiki. I wonder if it would be the same as List of academic disciplines?

Area studies with 5000 cites in 33 journals seems to me larger then any of the two you mention - isn't it good? Anyway, it may be a good idea to adapt one of those lists and a number of cites/journales/etc. for our own little notability category. Still - I think that even the least notable category should be mentioned *somewhere*. How many entries do we want to keep in this article? Can we fit the '10 most notable from every single field' in List of scientific journals in natural sciences and List of scientific journals in social sciences? If not, how do you see hierarchy? Note also that the list of academic disciplines has 5 subcats: not only n. and s. sciences, but mathematics, humanities and arts, and professions/applied sciences.--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus ^Talk 01:10, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

Sorry for saying this, but everyone who contributes to a page like this should have heard about the Institute for Scientific Information and other commonly used journal databases. Karol 08:15, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

We live and learn - tnx for the info about this. It doesn't invalidate my above points, I think.--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus ^Talk 17:38, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

Well, I still think it's unfeasible to include all categories here (>200 with 10 entries per section is over 2000 entries in one page). Also, ISI's categories are rather arbitrary, I just gave the example and numbers, because I have wuick access to them. Karol 06:43, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

Agreed. But they are encyclopedic and notable. Perhaps the top level should be simply a list of categories? And we have to agree how many catetories with 10 entries can fit here and how will we chose those categories.--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus ^Talk 15:32, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

No. This is a list of of scientific journals, not a list of scientific journal categories. I have no problem with leaving Area Studies here, although it clearly is an overrepresentation, which kind of irritates me. For now it should be enough that individual editors just use common sense (would you add Medical Ethics?!?), but sooner or later someone else will come and add Marine Engineering, then Medical Ethics, then something else... and then this problem will become a real one. Karol 16:09, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

Yes, I'd add Medical Ethics IF I was interested in this. Unless we have clearly defined rules what is notable enough to go here and what is not, as long as this article is not too long (>100kb) I see no reason to deny existance to any section that is academic and notable. This is why I say that we should agree on those notability rules sooner then later.--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus ^Talk 16:22, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

Unfortunately, we are not going to agree on anything sensible if there are only three of us discussing. The real problem with this page that is nobody is interested. --Bduke 21:26, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

I agree with the problem, but I see no reason to assume we need more people to work something out. Small groups have their advantages, too. How many other people did you have to help you with your chemistry section? Btw, a good way to attract attention is WP:RFC.--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus ^Talk 21:38, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

If you look above in the "Inclusion criteria" section, it seems 7 people contributed, of whom two (you + 1) were not chemists. Apart from Karol, who counts as a Physicist, there has been virtually no interest from people in the natural sciences other than chemistry. Most new entries are from anon editors. I agree with Karol, let us just see how it goes. I think a higher priority for the chemists is to ensure that the list of 10 journals are all blue links (there are 5 missing articles there) and that they all have ISSN numbers. At some stage I think we will have to split into several articles - maybe natural sciences, social sciences, applied sciences, mathematical and computer sciences. --Bduke 22:00, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

Good point. No matter what field we look at, we are mostly dealing with lists of red links anyway.--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus ^Talk 22:46, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Materials science section

After recent additions, the section on Materials science is now too large. This page is not for all journals. It is for around 10 most important journals in the field. Perhaps List of scientific journals in materials science, similar to what other disciplines have done, should be started. Also no criteria for inclusion (i.e. importance) has been stated? About 6 entries should be deleted. Which are the least significant? --Bduke 23:02, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Medicine section

This seems a very odd list. It excludes Nature Medicine, probably the highest citation index of any preclinical medicine journal, as well as Annals of Internal Medicine & Archives of Internal Medicine, two highly respected and widely cited general clinical journals (and probably loads of others I'm blanking on at the moment), yet includes International Journal of Medical Sciences, which I'd never heard of (having worked in medical publishing for decades). Additionally, several of the journals here don't directly relate to medicine, either clinical or preclinical. Espresso Addict 07:32, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

As no-one commented, I've been bold. These journals are based on 1999 impact factors for general medical journals, plus a small selection of very highly cited biomedical journals. Espresso Addict 05:43, 26 August 2006 (UTC)

Good job. It might even have been me that wrote the medicine section, when I created this page. But it is totally not my area. Thanks. Karol 08:33, 27 August 2006 (UTC)

I'll see what I can do about converting the red links when get a moment. Espresso Addict 17:56, 27 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Remit of list

The recent addition of a set of Area studies journals has made me query the focus of this list. I'm not sure why a list of 'scientific journals' includes examples from, say, history, law & geography. I think it would make sense to move some or even all of the journals currently listed under social sciences to a separate list. Espresso Addict 22:11, 23 September 2006 (UTC)

Some of those fields mentioned are social sciences, others are humanities. Is it time for new list? Neutrality^talk 22:27, 23 September 2006 (UTC)

I believe so. This one is pretty unmaintainable as it is. Espresso Addict 22:29, 23 September 2006 (UTC)

It seems to be morphing into a list of academic journals – which of course wouldn't be an unreasonable change if the article were retitled. Though it's not clear a) how one could ensure that all entries have the desired 'impact' (however that is defined), rather than becoming a random potpourri of favorite journals; and b) whether such a non-exhaustive list, even if representative and well maintained, would be very useful. Trevor Hanson 01:38, 19 December 2006 (UTC)

There has to be some reason for deciding on the journals included, such as the chemistry list which states they have the top impact fact for journals that publish papers on all areas of chemistry. Maybe we need to be tough on the other areas until they do something similar. --Bduke 03:13, 19 December 2006 (UTC)

I translate be tough to mean suggest. Look at what happed to the Wikipedia:WikiProject_Extra-Long_Article_Committee They chopped apart List of States in the Holy Roman Empire without consent from any of the people there, & almost without notice, and that is about to cause the end of the project altogether. I think no existing list is really overly inclusive as a whole, though most of them have a few eccentric titles. Chemistry, furthermore, has a very well defined literature and relatively few really bad journals, so they can do it. I wouldn't dare restrict similarly in biology. For one there, there is very strong feeling about the use of Impact Factors across broad areas or at all--see the page & its discussion.

It seems the best course will be adding List of social science & List of humanities journals, and putting the links into the existing List of academic journals. I think it will bother people less to put in the new more specific pages, & move the journals. Fortunately, all the red links are titles where there is no link to change, & we can worry later if they are all notable. I ask for volunteers to do either the humanities or the social sciences. I will start them tomorrow, but I surely can't do it all.DGG 04:11, 21 December 2006 (UTC)DGG 05:03, 21 December 2006 (UTC)

Update--I started both pages, but I did not yet adjust the links, or make the new categories needed, let alone adjust the entries to go to the right categories.DGG 05:34, 21 December 2006 (UTC)

There are two debates going on together here. Let me pick up the comment about Chemistry against Biology raised above. I take the point about uniformity and impact statements, but consider these points:- (1) there are 10 journals (or should be 10) listed in biology out of hundreds all of which can be listed on List of scientific journals in biology which currently lists about 60. How do you decide which 10? No criteria is given. Will any random 10 from the other list do? I'm not asking you to have the same criteria as chemistry. I'm asking you to debate this and have a criteria. The same applies to all other areas. (2) If no criteria is given, we might as well give up, because this list will go if it is ever put to AfD. --Bduke 06:49, 21 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] economics, social science generally, and humanities

These sections have been moved to List of social science journals and List of humanities journals. A broader list has been added, List of academic journals meant to contain ONE most-important title from each subject, and refer to the other lists. I hope this will give a little more flexibility. For the three large lists, some of the subject sections are well populated. Some are not. Please add if you see a lack. In each of the three, the section has been limited to 10 in each field, to avoid accusations to listcruf. and provide a rationale for removing the obviously unimportant. Looking at what is there, I see some combination of importance and representedness, which seems appropriate to me. Then it is not just a finding list, for which the more specific list of journals in X are more suitable, but a list designed to encourage the user to see the variety of both journals and specialties in the field, and encourage following the links to the detailed lists. Obiously a few of the sections in some of the areas have very unimportant ones added, but I think it would be very impolitic to actually remove journals without asking on the talk page.

I suggest that in adding new journals you consider adding the articles fror them after the model of the other journals in the subject or related subjects. But please don't hesitate, because there are projects to add the articles for them. Does every journal deserve an article? I think the only way of avoiding fights over deletion is to say, yes. DGG 19:20, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

Wow, I have to say that choosing ONE journal to represent an entire science seems hopeless to me. In chemistry, which is my field, there are bound to be fistfights over whether the most representative journal is the Journal of the American Chemical Society, Angewandte Chemie, Chemical Communications, or something else. Itub 01:28, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Journals in (Country)

There will be approximately 8,000 journals now in WP., Half of them are published by major international publishers, which typically have headquarters in the Us, and also England, and also either the Netherlands or German, as well as also elsewhere. Many of them are in addition published for societies located in any one of these or other countries. There is no real way of assigning them unequivocally to any of the countries.

There are about 500 journals published by European societies, that can not be specifically assigned to any one country, most are published by a group of national societies. There are about 2,000 journals published by US national societies. A list that long is not useful. (and some of them are published by international publishers) (etc). At some point, this becomes unworkable, and results in multiply large categories. Suggestion for how to handle this are welcome.

A list of journals by publisher is also dubious, because of the predominance of the 3 major scientific publishers with more than 1000 titles each. I again ask for suggestions on how to deal with this. There is furthermore no need for such a list, as each company lists all of its journals very clearly on its web site.

There might be some point in a list of scientific publishers by country--but I need to look at that some more. DGG 06:48, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

The German Wikipedia has articles on many important publishers which the English wikipedia lacks, such as Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht (in German: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, a pretty good little article). These could be translated. It also has better articles for some publishers, ranging from almost decent to really good. (The Verlag Walter de Gruyter article isn't great but more complete than Walter de Gruyter, for instance). Is there a project for articles on publishing houses? Pharamond 09:03, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

The English Wikipedia now has an article on Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. As it turns out, it shows red links for several other article topics, such as Göttingische Gelehrte Anzeigen, the oldest academic journal in the German-language area. Pharamond 13:37, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

Such lists are better served by categories instead, indeed (Category:Journals by country). Moosts 'list of...' are simply evil and unnecessary :) --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus | talk} 15:55, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

Agree about categories. Now we have to set them up consistently. I think publishers would be the place to start before we tackle journals.

But by all means let us get in every active academic title; but it means doing a real article, as those who dont understand about them will delete a stub, "Internationally known" might work, documented by listing an indexing service or two. I'd love to do the 19th and 118th century titles also, but I think the active ones first. DGG 06:56, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] ISSNs

So few ISSNs are listed on this page, I'm wondering if it'd be more appropriate to untag this page as needing an ISSN and tag the individual pages on publications that could have an ISSN listed but do not. Thoughts? --Keesiewonder ^talk 13:02, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Objection to the concatenation of Biology

I do not agree with the removal of evolution as a sub-category, or with it's squished inclusion in in biology. Biology is a HUGE subject and there are a number of sub-categories that do not have a large amount of cross-talk. Most Universities nowadays divide Biology departments into Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, which is fairly cohesive and Molecular, Cell & Developmental Biology which is a little less so, but enough to be lumped together. Journals also divide fairly evenly along these lines. I also object to the fact that several journals were edited out when the evolution section was removed. The journals that were listed there are fairly high profile, and at the very least should have been moved into the larger biology section. When I have a little more time I'll pull those back into the fold. But in general, while I think it's appropriate to discuss organization, I don't think that deleting content simply becasue it doesn't fit into a certain organizational order is the way to go.--Metatree 19:55, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

The real problem with this list is that there are two many journals. Most have to be put in the sub-lists such as List of scientific journals in biology. For this article to be manageable, there needs to be a relatively small number of headings and a limited number of journals under each heading. That was my thinking last year, when we selected the 10 journals in chemistry with the highest impact factor that accepted papers on all areas of the subject. The rest go in List of scientific journals in chemistry which can include every journal. I recommend this strategy to other areas of science. Without something like it, there are no criteria for inclusion or removal of journals from the list. Keeping this list for very important, very general journals is, I am sure, the way to go. However, I am not disagreeing (or agreeing) in splitting biology to a small number of sub-disciplines, but it has to be small, otherwise chemistry, say, will want to have 10 journals in each of organic, physical, inorganic and analytical chemistry and perhaps other sub-disciplines. --Bduke 23:46, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

I entirely agree with Bduke, the way to go is getting good coverage on more specific lists. By the way, I am the one who removed the evolution section. To be clear, evolution was not the only one - I also removed geography and psychology among others, usually in the spirit of what Bduke wrote above. Karol 12:26, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

I understand the reasoning behind putting a few journals in general categories, but I don't agree with it. I actually think it makes the list more useful if we have high impact journals for specific sub-disciplines as well. I don't think it makes the list too large to do so. In any case, the specifics of Biology are such that very few high impact general journals exist, because most of the high impact journals are for specific areas. The list that is currently up there is a pretty much a hodge-podge of general and specific journals, without much rhyme or reason to it. I think it would make much more sense if just allowed sub-disciplines to exist, so that judgement calls could be made much more explicitly. It's easier to compare one journal on evolutionary biology with another on evolutionary biology than it is to compare a journal on evolutionary biology with one on cellular biology. The two fields are very different. And a general argument, biology is currently the fastest growing science in terms of new scientists entering the field, and it is already one of if not the largest scientific disciplines in the world, so I think some acknowledgement of that fact is in order. Anyway, I am coming from the perspective of someone who's getting a PhD in Biology, so I see the biological issues fairly clearly and may have a a bias. But I would personally, like to see more sub-disciplines in other fields as well, because, as I see it, the list is pretty useless at the moment. But again, I'm not coming from a lay persons perspective, so maybe general journals is to give the lay audience a crude (and I do mean crude) feel for the scientific journals out there.--Metatree 22:04, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

I don't think the list becomes useless just because some meso-specific subject fields are missing. I, for one, am aware of and do appreciate the separateness of the various fields of biology. You must imagine, however, that most people don't know what "evolutionary biology" is. Adding more subsections will make this list more structured, but it will also make it less comprehendable for most non-scientists. I wasn't really thinking along these lines when I removed evolution, though, as I was just trying to clean up the list a bit as I do every so often. If we let biology split here into a few subsections, chemists will be urged to also split chemistry into a few subsections since they are very separate fields. Physicists will add subsections to physics, because those fields are also so different. In the end the list will be quite chaotic, as it already has been a few times in the past. Karol 15:35, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

Perhaps this list is pretty useless. The useful lists are the ones for disciplines. We really need to get consensus on the purpose of this list; what we mean by useful. It has to be something about giving people an introduction to science journals. It can not be more. However, you are probably correct that there are few general biology journals in the way there are general chemistry journals. Perhaps the answer is to have sub-sections for biology, but only have 3 or 4 journals in each sub-section. Having 10 would make it too long and too biased to biology. --Bduke 00:42, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

Good idea. But there just are not that many first rate general bio journals. I can think of only one, BMC Biology. The other good general ones are the more general journals Nature and PNAS. Listing only 3 or 4 will make it clearer there are only examples. But then we need good lists by disciplines, collected in a category List of scientific journals by discipline. DGG 08:15, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

List of scientific journals in biology, List of scientific journals in chemistry etc., are in categories such as Category:Biology journals and Category:Chemistry journals which are sub-categories of Category:Scientific journals and Category:Journals by subject area. I do not think we need more categories. Indeed we might have too many here. For the article I was suggesting adding back the sub-sections for "Evolution" and others, plus keeping "Ecology", but only having 3 or 4 in each. If general biology does not even have that, then fine and have less. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B should be listed under biology and not just merged in with PRS A. --Bduke 08:31, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Criteria for inclusion

There has been 46 edits of this list in 2007. Journals are added and journals are removed. Yet, apart from a good discussion and consensus about a year ago by the chemists, there has been little or NO discussion of criteria for inclusion. Only the discussion above touches on criteria. There are hundreds of journals in each discipline area listed in headers here. We are adding just 10. There must be criteria for inclusion. If not, it is original research and this list should not exist. Please discuss criteria. I have given my idea that the criteria used by chemistry should apply generally, but people disagree that these criteria work for other disciplines. OK, fine. Develop some other criteria. --Bduke 21:26, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

Each subject basically has to do as it pleases, for can can we dictate to them all. We can try to set up a framework, which they will follow if it suits them. Personally, I think the chemists should have done it differently, and included the top one or two in each specialized field as well. But they can decide on their own, by their own consensus.

I am not sure Web of Science categories and rankings would be acceptable in all the subject it covers, and general biology, zoology, and botany, are among the categories where its relevance is disputed, because they mix lab journals with high impact factors, and field-based ones, with lower. In many of the experimental fields, 8 of the top 10 journals by impact factor will be review journals, & I doubt its the general intention here. Ouside of science+hard social science, I doubt there is anything objective at all. If the people in those fields have something they want to use, great. . I don't think a little inconsistency is harmful. Part of the previous problems have been the lack of subject-specific lists, and the solution is to make them. By chemistry standards, all the rest of science is disorganized. (smile)

There is one real reason to keep this list, which is as a guide to the other lists. I've been told in AfD that it would not be a good idea to have a category: "Lists of scientific journals by discipline"--that this would be against the practice for naming categories. We could ignore that, but I think it would be challenged.

The only part that would still be needed is general science, and I think there would be agreement about what to list--although I just now checked, and removed one non-peer-reviewed journal (at least its not peer-reviewed in the conventional sense). If necessary the article could be retitled List of general science journals. But if people in various fields want to use this list, I do not want to try to stop them. I see nothing wrong with the 47 changes in a year. There hasn't really been edit warring that can't be accommodated by compromise, so we could say the journals are included by consensus. DGG 00:59, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

I do not basically disagree. The disciplines can do it differently, but do it they must, otherwise this list is OR and will be deleted. There must be some criteria. I just want to see the different areas actually thinking and discussing it. Other points:

The chemistry criteria were deliberately chosen, in part to exclude reviews. There would be no agreement about what the specialized fields are. "Organic", "Inorganic" and "Physical" do not cut it anymore. There would be arguments to add "Analytical" and "Polymers" at least. Fitting all that into 10 is difficult.

You have two reviews in the 10: Chemical Reviews and ACR. Qy--should these be differentiated here as well? (But I've been meaning to do a separate list of review journals) I understand about subfields; Physics was handled by listing Phys Rev & J Phys as groups.(DGG)

I was forgetting those. What we wanted, I think, was a broad spread. Soem criteria give the top 10 as all reviews. I, at least, are happy for 2 reviews to remain. They both cover all areas of chemistry. (BD)

The criteria used was total number of citations instead of impact factor, precisely because the impact factor is heavily biased towards reviews, and sometimes there are odd journals that publish very few articles that luckily got a high impact factor, but are not "high impact" journals in the common-sense meaning of the word. --Itub 08:26, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

There has been no bitter edit warring, but journals have been added, with no reason, and then deleted as "not notable", but again no real reason.:

don't see much harm here--lots of articles change more than that over a year, some quite radically. I suppose the solution is to just keep asking each field to refine their part of the list and state their criteria. Nothing much really gets settled here once and for all. (DGG)

I keep asking them and nobody answers. I have no idea what anyone, except the chemists, use as criteria. (BD)

Agree about "General science". --Bduke 01:44, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

DGG 02:48, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

--Bduke 03:19, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

I don't think a list is original research just because it is incomplete and unrefined. Wikipedia articles are clearly allowed to exist in incomplete form. While it would be nice if others defined criteria as suggested here, I don't think it as urgent as it is being made to sound. There is no deadline. This encyclopedia has been written faster than any other, ever. Just keep making good contributions and it will get there. ike9898 21:05, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

I do not understand your point about incomplete. There is no intention that this article should list all scientific journals. That is the role of the sub-lists. The idea here is to have around the most important 10 journals in each discipline. We need criteria for "important". Editors need guidance on what to include and what to remove. Without them, it is original research. --Bduke 22:30, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

This argument would seem to imply that inclusion by consensus constitutes original research. One could also argue that the act of setting criteria, as opposed to adopting some published criteria, constitutes original research. This is a trip down the rabbit hole. Surely a good measure of notability and importance would be agreement among editors with subject matter expertise. (Though this begs the question of how we get such editors to participate in discussion and selection.) Trevor Hanson 02:36, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

I do not see consensus, except for chemistry, where a year or so ago several chemists debated the criteria for inclusion. That was "agreement among editors with subject matter expertise". What I see is people adding journals and some being removed. I do not think that is consensus, because reasons are rarely given for either. I do know something of journals in fields other than chemistry, having served on Science Faculty committees that decided on library purchases of journals. I do not think that any of these sections, again except for chemistry, could be said to be the most important journals in the discipline, by any useful criteria. But since nobody else seems to want to address this issue, we will wait with the blind faith that this process of adding and removing journals will lead to the 10 or so most important journals in the discipline, or, more likely, someone will successfully bring this list to AfD. --Bduke 04:41, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

since you mention experience I've been arbitrating faculty disputes on this all my career, & I would say that about 80% are right for at least Astro, Math, Phys, Bio, Biophys, Ecol, Med, Comp Sci, & Material sci. And 80% is in my experience remarkably good for this sort of thing. I call that approximate consensus. -Some of the others have too many placed there only for individual interests, but that is because not enough people are interested to get a fair representation. I am concerned more about the fields which arent listed at all. DGG 05:01, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

I might add that I (naturally) think that discussing criteria is a good idea – as is discussing non-obvious changes before making them, and soliciting knowledgeable participation. My argument was with the position that anything other than explicit criteria would constitute original research. I doubt there is a single metric that would select every key journal in a given field (let alone across fields). For example, a prestigious journal, publishing important but relatively few papers, could easily fail a "number of citations" test. One must fall back, at times, on "science is what scientists do" and trust practitioners to recognize what they consider trusted sources. If not enough practitioners are involved in this particular article, then the choice would seem to be between: patience, or article deletion. But since this list seems somewhat useful as it stands, I couldn't vote for deleting it. I do think that a Wiki project for coordinating the lists of scientific journals might be helpful, in which each sublist would manage a "top ten" list to be transcluded into the master list here. Discussions about relative importance could then occur within the milieu of a larger list of field-specific publications. Perhaps one of the participants here feels strongly enough about the need for such an effort, and could take on the organizational and consensus-building tasks to make it a reality. Trevor Hanson 18:19, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

I think that is the best idea for this list that has been proposed in some time. Karol 10:35, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

I was going to say something similar to what Karol has said, but then I thought two things: who is going to organise this Project and who is going to support it. The real point is that not enough people are interested in these lists to ensure they develop sensibly. I concluded that a Project would not succeed, so I did not comment earlier. I could be wrong. Does anyone want to organise it. I'll support it, but I will not organise it unless I see more support than I see now. --Bduke 11:31, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

Very true. Although it doesn't have to be a project right away... the transcluded "top ten" list could just be a subpage of a specific list, such as List of scientific journals in chemistry/top ten. Perhaps this is something we can throw at Wikipedia:WikiProject Science? Karol 14:28, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

I agree. This is why I didn't "propose" the launching of such a project, but merely wished aloud that one would spring into being! (This was like wanting somebody – else – to bell the cat.) As you say, there isn't a huge pool of editors working on this article. On the other hand, perhaps an easy starting place would be to create one or more example 'top ten lists' for transclusion, based on the lists currently in place here, and put the necessary links and explanations into place on all the relevant pages. This could either be done for a) one of the specialty list on which one of you is active, e.g. List of scientific journals in chemistry, or b) one of the fields that doesn't currently have a separate journal list article, e.g. Ecology. Once instantiated, it will be easy to hold this implementation up as an example for other lists. I expect that active editors in each field would be more comfortable making contributions to lists that are clearly focused on their own disciplines, rather than this less-useful trans-discipline summary, especially if the mechanics of transclusion can be taken care of first by somebody else. Somebody should be bold and make it happen. Trevor Hanson 20:55, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

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