Wikipedia:Scholarly journal
 | This is an essay on notability. 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 places to find reliable sources on Wikipedia, particularly for new concepts or cutting-edge research that may not yet appear in textbooks. There is serious disagreement among scholars about the validity and/or applicability of measurements such as the Science Citation Index (SCIdex) and Impact Factor which are bibliometrics calculated for academic journals to gauge how often a journal's articles are independently cited. The journal's Impact Factor should not be considered as a decisive factor on whether it should be the subject of a standalone article in Wikipedia.
Sometimes an article about a scholarly journal or specialist trade magazine will appear at Articles for Deletion. Users citing this essay believe there should be a presumption to keep such articles provided they 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 behavioural standards set in WP:COI.
Editors should be able to establish notability of these journals based on adequate citations in reliable sources from articles published in the journal as well as references to the journal in other independent journals, or as citations are found by the usual searches, particularly JSTOR, Google Books or Scholar.
Wikipedia articles are largely built on inline references that cite to journals, etc. In the Wikipedia citation, the name of the journal often is internally wikilinked (e.g., doubled square brackets [[ ]] are put around the journal name). If the scholarly journal is widely used within Wikipedia as a source in articles, then for utilitarian reasons that should be taken into account in determining whether Wikipedia should have at least a stub article on the journal in order to provide more information to users about the cited reference. Even a low-quality publication, such as Homeopathy (journal), may be notable if it has attracted sufficient notoriety. High quality scholarly journals are rarely controversial, and so may be boring as subjects for Wikipedia articles, yet they are important for their publication of reliable sources. Helping users locate journal metadata (information about the journal) is part of helping them to make their own assessment of the reliability of content in those journals and hence to verify statements for which our articles cite them in support.