Working on a term paper with WikiProject Academic Journals
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We're pulling an all-nighter in the university library with WikiProject Academic Journals. Started in February 2007, the project has grown to include a long list of participants maintaining over 9,000 pages covering academic journals, publishers, societies, conferences, prizes, and monographs. To help fill holes in Wikipedia's coverage, the project keeps lists of missing journals and missing journals that have been cited in Wikipedia articles. In addition to creating and improving articles, the project tries to promote the use of citations, particularly the {{cite journal}} template. We interviewed Headbomb and DGG.
What motivated you to join WikiProject Academic Journals? Do you specialize in a specific academic field?
- Headbomb: I honestly don't remember. I think I was doing some citation tidying up and noticed that journal wikilinks tended to be red. So I decided to be pro-active about the issues, and started creating journal stubs and joined the project around the middle of 2009. I tend to keep around physics-related fields, as I am a physicist, but my personal interests include pretty much all of academia, so I end up touching a little bit of everything. I wrote and rewrote several hundred articles on journals such as Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Journal of the National Cancer Institute, and Nuovo Cimento.
- DGG: It's the main thing I worked on during my career as a librarian. At Wikipedia, I started writing some missing academic bios and noticed the journals were missing also. In my first year or so many very notable journals were deleted at AfD through lack of understanding, which led to the present informal guidelines. They're more or less accepted, because almost all the people who care about the subject agree with them. Getting formal guidelines adopted in Wikipedia is a generally futile endeavor, because in practice it can be stonewalled by one stubborn individual.
What are some of the difficulties of improving articles about academic journals? Has the project struggled with promoting articles to FA and GA status? Are some academic disciplines better covered on Wikipedia?
- Headbomb: The main difficulties is mostly finding out something to write about journals. It's quite the endeavour to find out the history of a journal such as e.g. Naturwissenschaften (especially if you don't speak German), but things get incredibly hard with newer or lesser-known journals. There is very often not a lot to say about the journal, so most of our articles tend to peak at a certain length which other projects would consider "start"-class. Luckily, over the years, we developed WP:JWG (Journals Writing Guide), which gives great guidance on how to make the most of what little there is available.
In terms of coverage, I would say that Math, Physics, and Astronomy are ahead of the curve, but Medicine, Psychology, and Biology are severely lacking. I haven't paid attention much to Law journals, but I suspect they get "average-ish" coverage.
- DGG: Very few articles on journals will ever reach FA or GA, except those famous ones with very long and complicated histories. My own guide is here; I think it's still accurate. As with all other articles on academic subjects, the humanities are the worst covered. Even the sciences mentioned by Headbomb as being poorly covered are covered very well relative to the traditional humanities.
How frequently does the project deal with issues about notability and conflict of interest? How easy is it to show that an academic journal has received substantial coverage in other publications?
- Headbomb: We run into that fairly often. Unlike other fields on Wikipedia, COI (Conflict of Interest) editors are rather easily converted into productive editors. "COI editors", in my experience, tend to be interns hired by publishers to create Wikipedia entries on their journals. The undesirable behaviour is usually curbed by familiarizing the editor with our Journal Writing Guide and notability guidelines for journals. Most of the newcomers are happy to hear the advice, and adjust accordingly. We'll often babysit them through one article so they get the hang of it, and then they can create articles on a series of (notable) journals. Those who don't listen usually end being blocked rather quickly.
Also unlike in several other areas on Wikipedia, I think WikiProject Journals is more welcoming of those "COI editors" because several of them end up saving us massive amounts of work with article creation, updating articles with the latest information (impact factors, editors, etc.), and so on. So if we have an intern from e.g. Cell Press taking care of Category:Cell Press academic journals, then that's 11 journals we don't need to monitor for vandalism, outdatedness, etc.
- DGG: Conflict of Interest is a continuing problem, as everywhere else in Wikipedia. However, a proper journal article according to our guideline is purely objective and can be written by anyone, so Conflict of Interest should make no difference—but in practice almost nobody from a publisher has gotten it right initially. Some can be taught. There's one frequent copyright problem: the promotional statement of purpose and coverage on the journal website, but it is usually so meaningless – saying, in essence, we cover everything that might possibly be in our subject, that there's no reason to rewrite or get permission – it isn't needed at all; I don't know why public relations people bother. The concept of notability according to the general notability guidelines (GNG) does not apply easily to academic journals. The only ones normally written about in a substantial way are the dozen or so most famous. We've been getting the GNG to fit by saying that the listings in the major selective databases are third party statements of importance.
In addition to improving articles about journals, the project supports and recommends that Wikipedians use the {{cite journal}} template. How widespread have these citations become? What kinds of citation mistakes do you find yourself correcting most frequently?
- Headbomb: Well the answer to that is pretty much "look at the usage stats". That template is used 271,000+ times apparently. So it's pretty widespread, especially in sciences. As for citation mistakes, it's usually typos, bad formatting, or someone simply not filling them properly (like using
|volume=33 p.58rather than|volume=33|page=58). Luckily AWB and bots such as CitationCleanerBot help a lot with those tasks. - DGG: The way I suggest to use the template is with the Cite gadget, which greatly simplifies problems with citations, though it cannot deal with all cases.
The project maintains a massive list of red links for missing journals. Have you had any success reducing this list? What kind of resources does the project need to tackle a task of this magnitude?
- Headbomb: Most definitely. Back when the list started in 2009, we had journals (or abbreviations) cited several thousand times without corresponding articles or redirects. That list (and WP:JCW in general) has been one of the biggest drives behind article creation at the project. Now our most-cited "missing" journal is cited 100 times (as of writing). So we've improved things by two orders of magnitude over two years. It is by all measures a resounding success.
- DGG: The idea behind the list is that if a journal is used as a Wikipedia reference, there should be some information about the journal so readers can check the nature and standing of the journal.
Is there substantial crossover membership with other academic or literary projects? Does WikiProject Academic Journals collaborate with any other projects?
- Headbomb: We do collaborate with other projects, usually in the form of compiling lists of missing journals for individual WikiProjects. Some projects are very responsive to this (especially Astronomy, Physics, and Math in my experience); others seem to completely ignore them (Biology, Psychology, and Medicine come to mind). This is a real shame because right now, most of our highly-cited missing journals tend to be in those fields (especially medicine). So WP:MEDICINE people et al., get to work! But really anyone that wants such lists for their project (or even for themselves) just needs to drop us a note at WT:JOURNALS, and I (or someone else) will compile a list of missing journals for that project.
- DGG: Since being an editor of a major journal is one of the criteria that meets WP:PROF, the notability guideline for researchers, there's an overlap with WikiProject Biography, especially the Science and Academia Work Group. If a journal article can include all the names of the editors-in-chief, past and present, the names should be linked—if there are not articles already, the red links will be an indication that they should be written. (This doesn't include assistant editors, or members of the editorial board—that's much less of a distinction.) Inversely, if this information is added to biographical articles, it should be linked to the journals; if there's no entry, it's reason for one to be written.
What are the project's most pressing needs? How can a new member help today?
- Headbomb: We really need more people from the medicine fields to get involved in writing articles on their big journals (all fields of medicine, neurology, virology, pediatrics, oncology, etc...). We have a great guide at WP:JWG to make things easy for you! Of course other non-medicine fields journals need attention too, so really whatever your interest there is always something to do. But medicine is really the field with the worse coverage as far as journals are concerned.
- DGG: They're really easy to do. The project suggests starting with an infobox, and then transcribing the information, which is really all there is to it. You don't even need actual access to the text of the journal, except for a few titles. The only problem is Journal Citation Reports, which is needed in the sciences and social sciences, and which only people in large universities can access—but the people at the project will gladly look up the numbers. These articles are usually so mechanical, actually, that the work isn't necessarily very interesting all by itself, certainly not in large numbers, and most of us do it as an auxiliary to other things. If more people filled in a few when they noticed them missing, we would get there quickly.
Anything else you'd like to add?
- Headbomb: It's all summed up in our journal writing guide. And if you like numbers and tables, you really need to check out Journals Cited by Wikipedia.
- DGG: The principle of having articles for the journals used as references should be extended to newspapers and popular magazines, and then, probably to books and other sources also—either in articles about the books, or about their authors, or their sponsors.
Next week, we'll toot the horn of a military publication. In the meantime, get some R&R in the archive.
Discuss this story
Great writeup. An oft-overlooked aspect of Wikipedia's coverage I'm glad has some dedicated attention! Der Wohltemperierte Fuchs(talk) 03:34, 22 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]