Articles about medical journals

[David Goodman]

 
In medicine and other health sciences fields there are many journals with  articles  WP, most of them stubs
(and there is a long list of "redlinks"--journals without articles.

General thoughts for articles about journals:
(we only have 1 or 2 in CZ Live so far)
I don't think we'd want to get  more elaborate  than we could sustain, because there are about 9,000  journals to go, assuming we use a criterion of being in Web of Science (The Science Citation Index part has 6400) . We could of course use a narrower distinction, such as being used in a reference in CZ, or narrower yet.

I would also support not including any except the top one or two in the field of each CZ article--it would save quite a lot of work!

Some fields have all of them added as stubs in WP, some don't.  At first, I was surprised to see them in WP, because in general how much could be added to what is on the publisher's site, and they are all very easy to find with a web browser

details
The practice in WP is that thumbnails of the cover are fair use, & I think the same would apply here.
we can  add their status re Open access, but we would have to check every 6 months.
I'd suggest eliminating the "indexed in:" from all of them--concentration on that seems a little old-fashioned. Obviously all biomed journals are in PubMed, & chem in CAS, etc.
I'd suggest eliminating an historical list of all the editors,except the first and any famous ones thereafter.
I'd similarly suggest not including all the current editorial board.
**WP doesn't do this but we can  find the most cited articles with WebofScience, which won't be available to all our readers.
***Everything we do here in sciences is likely to be a precedent. There's only 1 editor in the Media group so far, and only 3 in library science, so I am not sure how much help we'll get. I'm going to cc. this part to the relevant groups, and see what all the sciences people want to do.   

[Thomas Simmons]

We could simply go with the Sci. Citation Index. with a brief on each one--very ambitious but it would look more to the capabilities of a 21st century encyclopaedia than current models. A  short, preliminary form could simply have an index abbreviation for each relevant entry in the respective fields with cross references (i.e. got to SCI list and then to the journal for example)

The real point is, in my opinion, what would the entry focus on? Merely mentioning it is a journal that carries research on X discipline will just be redundant. There could be historical footnotes, commentary on relative position and profile. What would be the real point?

For example, I know that most people I have spoken to over nearly half a century do not have any idea that there is a pecking order in scientific journals: One is as good (or bad) as another. Refereed journals and all that implies are hardly common knowledge. The exact nature and the history of the journal would be of help. As you say there are a lot but by stipulating only a select few make the grade we are asking for bigger problems and while the logistical nature of the scope of the matter is important let me illustrate something. There are some surprises out there. Years ago--I digress to illustrate--a friend interviewed with Texas Instruments for work in cutting edge research during the Clinton administration. TI were alluding to a number of things he had seen while doing an engineering degree at Kansas State Pittsburgh (so he was a bit of a hick in their eyes) but they danced around the subject till he got fed up with it and said, "You're talking about stealth technology?" They looked like guppies out of water and then said, 'That is highly classified. How did you know that?" His reply, "I read it in Popular Science." He went on to design and test stealth technology that was later used in the Med and elsewhere--he no longer goes into much detail when we speak for obvious reasons. My point, we become accustomed to certain acceptable venues and down the road a few years from now when the databank here has been well and truly developed we will find some clanging omissions. Would you include the in-house newsletters of say, the Mayo Clinic? It is an important venue.

And too, mentioning the less than reputable journals and making note of them is also important. So limit what we can do sure, but not what we want to accomplish.  I think that we need to keep our options open to outside chances. My two cents. Thomas Simmons 15:43 9 March, 2007 (EPT)