Wikipedia:Scholarly journal
 | This is an essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
Independent, peer-reviewed publications such as academic journals or specialist trade magazines are important reliable sources on Wikipedia, particularly for new concepts or cutting-edge research that may not yet appear in textbooks. Additionally, there is serious disagreement among scholars about the validity and/or applicability of measurements such as the Impact Factor (and such measurements only apply to academic journals anyway). The Impact Factor, we believe, should not be the sole or even a main determining factor in deciding on the notability of a journal for the purposes of Wikipedia.
Sometimes these publications appear as Articles for Deletion. Users citing this essay believe there should be a presumption to keep such academic journals and specialist trade magazines provided these can be established as verifiable and independent. In other words, we believe the notability standards for such publications should be relatively inclusive, even if the journal is a new startup, and even if the organisation or company responsible for the publication are the (main) writers and editors of the article, maintaining of course the usual standards set in WP:COI.
We also believe that for these journals, editors should be able to establish notability based on adequate citations in reliable sources from articles published in the journal as well as references to the journal on the usual Google searches, particularly Google Books, Scholar, and News.