Wikipedia talk:Notability (academic journals)

So we could quickly (CTRL+F) see if being indexed in EBSCO or Medline or Copernicus or such is sufficient or not. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 01:35, 22 June 2024 (UTC)

Killed the RFC, premature. Let's just have a normal discussion. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 22:10, 11 November 2024 (UTC)

Criterion #2 states that notability is satisfied if The journal is frequently cited by other reliable sources. Does this mean that papers in the journal tend to be cited frequently? Or does it mean that the journal itself must be cited frequently? In other words, is it talking about citations that say "According to Smith (1979)..." or ones that say "According to The Journal of Underwater Basket Weaving..."?

Just to be clear, I am asking for comment about what the current text means. I understand that there is disagreement about what it should say, but that would be a different RfC. Botterweg (talk) 22:56, 9 November 2024 (UTC)

Does it even matter? So far this has only the status of an essay, not a notability guideline. Anyway, your second alternative makes little sense, because it is very rare to cite a journal as a whole, except maybe figuratively as a form of metonymy. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:05, 9 November 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for chiming in! When you say that citing a journal itself is "very rare", is it plausible that the cases where C2 applies are very rare in exactly that manner? Botterweg (talk) 23:31, 9 November 2024 (UTC)

It means that I don't know of any such cases and can't think why someone would do it but I don't want to say definitively that it doesn't happen because lots of unlikely things happen.

You can definitely find published material describing a journal, and saying that it supports a certain community of researchers, but I wouldn't call that "citing" the journal in the sense considered here, including the whole journal as an item in a bibliography. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:57, 9 November 2024 (UTC)

I will second David's comments/opinion. It is certainly rare to cite a journal in an academic article. They are cited in journal lists for different fields, for instance this. However, I would not want to use such lists to judge much on WP. In any case those are just collations of your first option "According to Smith". Ldm1954 (talk) 15:23, 11 November 2024 (UTC)

If you read the Remarks section for Criterion #2, it looks like either case is sufficient. Isn't it a bit premature to have started an RfC about this (see Before starting the process)? FactOrOpinion (talk) 00:07, 10 November 2024 (UTC)

An admin suggested I raise this as an RfC but it doesn't make a difference to me as long as there's sufficient discussion. Botterweg (talk) 00:08, 15 November 2024 (UTC)

"The journal is frequently cited by other reliable sources" means exactly that. This is normally shown through impact factors, CiteScores, h-indexes, etc... but it could be through PageRank and other things. For example, GoogleScholar's top 100 cited journals, according to h5-index is .

It could also be that research from a certain journal often make its way in popular press, like if a magazine like Popular Science often pulled stories from Journal of Foobar, then that would confer notability to Journal of Foobar. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 22:20, 11 November 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for this reply. Would it be fair to say that things like impact factor and citescore are statistics about the frequency of "According to Smith (1999)..."-type citations rather than "According to the Journal of Foobar"-type citations? Botterweg (talk) 00:08, 15 November 2024 (UTC)

.....yes. JoelleJay (talk) 01:10, 15 November 2024 (UTC)

Hello. I would be grateful for some advice on Building and Environment which I came across in new page patrol. It is the first time I have had to assess an article about an academic journal. The sources that are currently in the page do not seem to constitute WP:SIGCOV - they look like bibliographic database listings of the journal rather than anything more in depth - and the first is a primary source, which can't establish notability. Looking at WP:NJOURNAL, criterion 1 looks like it might apply, and specifically 1.c) For the purpose of C1, having an impact factor assigned by Journal Citation Reports usually qualifies, and I wanted to check that that seemed reasonable before I marked the article as reviewed. The claimed impact factor is 7.1 (I can't actually verify that because I don't have access to Scopus), but I don't know whether that's awesome, dreadful, or something in between! SunloungerFrog (talk) 10:21, 5 February 2025 (UTC)

Bad form to reply to one's own post: sorry. Having just skimmed through the Talk page archives, I guess the bibliographic database listings of the journal may not be analogous to Soccerway for football players as I had initially assumed, so what I wrote initially looks rather more dismissive than I now intend! So I am probably minded to mark the article as reviewed, unless anyone violently objects. I would like to ask a follow up question, though: when would a journal that has an IF assigned by JCR not qualify under C1? Cheers, SunloungerFrog (talk) 10:48, 5 February 2025 (UTC)

@SunloungerFrog, as this page is only an essay it should not be used to establish notability—you are correct to look for IRS SIGCOV. And bibliographic database listings definitely are analogous to Soccerway profiles (and even more directly to the Scopus profiles that exist for everyone who has ever published in an indexed journal; we certainly wouldn't consider those to count toward GNG). JoelleJay (talk) 20:43, 5 February 2025 (UTC)

Ah, many thanks for pointing out that this is an essay rather than a guideline, which I had missed. That's very helpful. I will review the article in that light. Cheers, SunloungerFrog (talk) 11:57, 6 February 2025 (UTC)

• SunloungerFrog, JoelleJay goes a bit fast here. It is true that NJournals is an essay and not policy. However, like many other essays, it is nevertheless often used in WP:AFD discussions. And like it or not, journals that are included in selective databases almost always get kept at AfD. (Heck, I regularly take journals that don't meet NJournals to AfD and quite often those are kept anyway, because there's a sizeable group of editors who feel that every academic journal should have an article.) There is namely a very important difference between automatically-generated database entries for "everyone who has ever published in an indexed journal" and entries for those indexed journals: the latter are not at all automatically included. Instead, for a journal to be included in databases like the Science Citation Index Expanded, ((Scopus]], or MEDLINE, to mention some of the most important databases, they have to pass a rather stringent evaluation by a commission of specialists who decide whether a journal is important enough and of sufficient quality to be included in their database. This is the reason why many editors take indexing in such a database as evidence that a journal is notable. I've reworked Building and Environment and am quite confident that with an impact factor of more than 7, it will survive any hypothetical AfD. Hope this provides some more perspective. --Randykitty (talk) 16:34, 10 February 2025 (UTC)

  They used to almost always get kept because much of the same editors !vote in every AfD, and other editors would be misled into thinking something called "NJOURNALS" was an actual guideline...
  The selectivity of a database does not correspond whatsoever to how much secondary independent coverage it has received, which is what a topic ultimately requires for NPOV. JoelleJay (talk) 17:07, 10 February 2025 (UTC)

• see Wikipedia:WikiProject Academic Journals/Article alerts/Archive 2#AfD and Wikipedia:WikiProject Academic Journals/Article alerts/Archive 1#AfD. --Randykitty (talk) 17:30, 10 February 2025 (UTC)

"database does not correspond whatsoever to how much secondary independent coverage it has received, which is what a topic ultimately requires for NPOV"

Which is again, not an opinion shared by everyone. To me, and several others, being indexed in a highly selective database is significant coverage for the purpose of notability. NPOV is orthogonal to notability, and is met by written neutrally about the topic. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 17:41, 10 February 2025 (UTC)

The amount and depth of coverage of a journal by an indexing database is the same as what any given author of an indexed paper receives in their profile on the same database: a handful of auto-calculated primary metrics. That's routine and not SIGCOV. And when the only or majority of prose material we can write on a topic comes directly from the topic itself, especially for decidedly commercial subjects, we can't achieve NPOV. JoelleJay (talk) 23:33, 10 February 2025 (UTC)

Nutshell mentions this term as a key concept, but it is not mentioned in the body at all. This needs fixing. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 04:25, 30 August 2025 (UTC)

The entire page is about this. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 19:54, 30 August 2025 (UTC)

The point is, the body should use the same term as the nutshell, otherwise it looks chaotic/unprofessional. It's like an abstract of a paper that mentions what appears to be a key term, then the paper itself does not. If I was the reviewer, I'd obviously tell the author this needs revising (minor but crucial revision required :P). _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 01:34, 31 August 2025 (UTC)

As WP:NJOURNAL has been dismissed in toto as an essay, comments would be welcome at Wikipedia:Requested moves/Technical requests § Quantitative Biology. Paradoctor (talk) 13:07, 15 December 2025 (UTC)