Template talk:Infobox Journal

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Contents

[edit] Introduction

I looked around in WikiProjects, the list of Infobox Templates, and in Templates in general and did not find something that would suitably cover the salient bits of information that describe an academic journal. Therefore, I created this.

[edit] Suggested usage

Utilize the tag {{Infobox Journal}}, and fill in the parameters (see empty syntax below), then save the article. For academic journals, but I think it is suitable for many magazine types. This template might also be suitable for trade newspapers, but this is debatable; see {{Infobox Newspaper}}.

[edit] Empty syntax

provided for cut-and-paste usage

{{Infobox_Journal |
| title = 
| cover = 
| discipline = 
| language = 
| abbreviation = 
| publisher = 
| country = 
| history = 
| website = 
| ISSN =  
}}

[edit] Description of fields

  • Title. This is the current official journal title.
  • Cover. A journal cover can be added to Wikipedia as an image file under the supposition that the usage constitutes "fair use". Such covers should not generally be uploaded to Wikimedia Commons.
  • Discipline. I've provided a link to the List of academic disciplines which I think should be the source for values in this field. The value in this field should be wikilinked.
  • Language. I am not assuming that all academic journals that are of encyclopedic interest are English, even though I can only read those in English.
  • Abbreviated title. More accurately "abbreviated titles"; these are both official abbreviations (such as those found via the NCBI; example entry) but also colloquial titles. For instance, for the Journal of Biological Chemistry the official abbreviation is J. Biol. Chem. but the colloquial abbreviation is JBC. The abbreviations should probably appear in Wikipedia as redirects.
  • Publisher (country). The publisher of record and the country from which publication takes place or in which the publisher is based. The publisher value should be wikilinked internally.
  • Publication history. Many journals that have existed for more than a couple of decades have changed their name. This space can be used to indicate those changes, as well as any interruptions in publication that might have occurred. If there has been continuous publication under the same name since 1974, then an appropriate value might be "1974-present" or "1974 forward" or some other statement of the type.
  • Website. There are often two websites for a journal: the publisher site and the homepage for the journal itself. Typically this link should be to the journal itself.
  • ISSN. This is an international registry code for serial publications and is a useful key for identification and tracking of serials; not all serials have associated ISSN codes; therefore, this should be an optional field. Further, unless the ISSN appears on the journal's website, some mention about the source of the information should be provided in a References or Notes section as the validity of the information cannot be otherwise verified.


[edit] Additional fields for consideration

  • editor
  • volume span
  • peer-review status
  • type (original research, reviews, news, etc.)
  • impact factor (see below)
  • organizational affiliation (for those that are, such as JACS and the American Chemical Society)
  • indexed in ... (for instance, medline, science citations, etc.)
  • representation in JSTOR using the {{JSTOR}} template (see Science (journal) for an example case) it might be true that template-in-template won't work and that the addition of the template would only be possible if this infobox were subst'd ... comments? Courtland 10:29, July 26, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Impact factor

I did find sufficient information to compose a chart for Genome Research. The Image link from that article for the chart leads to information on the source of information for each of the years 1999 through 2003. It should be possible to use these information sources to describe the IF trend for that period, but I'm still not including this in the template as it is a controversial measure.

Courtland 02:25, July 13, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Degree of openness

With all the discussion about open access these days, it may be interesting to specify for each journal how much they are open-access. Given Wikipedia open nature, I think it would be of particular interest. Hard work, especially given that the number of open-access policy probably rivals the number of licence for open-source software, but probably worth doing. Having the relevant field in the infobox would be a start. Schutz 22:17, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Major changes (template evolution)

  • 10:39, August 11, 2005 (UTC): updated to use toccolours class and other tweaks. Use as a parameterized template throughout, so that all style changes are synchronized. Lexor|Talk 10:39, August 11, 2005 (UTC)
  • July 17, 2005: addition of ISSN field Courtland 02:19, July 17, 2005 (UTC)
  • July 17, 2005: addition of country subfield by placing it parenthetically behind the publisher Courtland 02:34, July 17, 2005 (UTC)
  • July 17, 2005: addition of wikilink and href/url guides Courtland 02:34, July 17, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Example cut'n'paste text broken?

I tried to cut-and-paste the example infobox from here, and found that it SEVERELY did not work. I had to:

  • change publisher(country) to separate paratmeters 'publisher' and 'country'
  • change abbrev_title to 'abbreviation'
  • change publication_history to 'history'

Check out Isis (journal) for the example; I left the old params in marked noeffect. I haven't ever tried to mess with templates before, but this seems like it SHOULD be a simple update to the guideline, not to the template itself? --Alvestrand 12:33, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Problem with ISSN part

Take a look at Journal of Physical Chemistry B, where the ISSN entry is:-

  • |ISSN=1520-6106 (print edition) and 1520-5215 (web edition)

It gives:-

  • (print edition) and 1520-5215 (web edition) 1520-6106 (print edition) and 1520-5215 (web edition)

Can this be fixed? I do not understand why it is doing what it is. We need to give 2 ISSNs in many cases. In some like Angewandte Chemie, we need to give four as there are German and English editions, each in print and online (Note: I edited this one so the template only has one ISSNs and the four are in the text of the article). --Bduke 02:55, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

I suggest the field be renamed to "id", as in WP:CITET, the citation templates. This allows both ISSN and OCLC (and possibly others) to be included. Bduke could try: {{ISSN|1520-6106}} (print edition), {{ISSN|1520-5215}} (web edition). I also suggest a new field "location". For U.S. publishers, it is standard to name the town and state of the publisher (not the country), e.g. Nashville, TN. -Colin MacLaurin 13:43, 8 November 2006 (UTC)
Thanks for the suggestion. This problem was fixed long ago, essentially by using {{ISSN|... as you suggest. --Bduke 20:09, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] New fields

I have added two fields to the template:

  • openaccess, which was suggested (by me) above, but that noone commented upon.
  • frequency, which seems quite logical to have.

Obviously, I have made these two fields optional so that no article containing this infobox should break. As an example, I have just added the infobox, including these two fields, to the article Cell (journal). Schutz 23:42, 16 December 2006 (UTC)

Hi, openaccess is a great idea. I'm just reading up on open access now. I think it would be more beneficial if we used keywords rather than, or as well as, free form text. e.g. openaccess = gold, or openaccess = green. Are there other open classifications ? John Vandenberg 00:05, 17 December 2006 (UTC)
I've added openaccess=After 6 months to Biochemical Journal, using the information from the list at PubMed Central. John Vandenberg 00:28, 17 December 2006 (UTC)
I am not sure how many models are around; the ones I can think of right now are:
  • No open access
  • Open access if paid for by the authors
  • Open access after a given time
  • Full open access
I like the idea of using keywords, but they should be self-explanatory, unlike colour codes (although these could possibly be added in addition). Schutz 00:32, 17 December 2006 (UTC)
Would it were this simple. The terminology has been getting a little more consistent in the last two or three months, and I have added articles explaining
  • Open access journal - -what has been conventionally known as gold
  • Delayed open access journal -- such as most of the US society biomed journals, corresponds to after a given time
  • Hybrid open access journal --also known by publisher-specific names, such as "open choice" , OA if paid by the author/sponsor
    • There's also those journals that are both delayed and hybrid, such as PNAS-- OA immediately if paid, otherwise 6 months. no std term yet.
    • There is a good list of the first, and no available lists whatsoever of delayed and hybrid!--if we make them, they will be the only ones.
  • Green is complicated--there are too many types, there's a partial directory of policy for many journals, but the variation is immense, including the ones that are green, but only after X months. There are two incompatible sets of detailed color names, which implies to me that we should stay away from colors. From a readers point of view, all green means is that you must check each article, & there's good evidence that a lot of people post even if prohibited, by Kristin Antelman —The preceding unsigned comment was added by DGG (talk • contribs) 01:25, 17 December 2006 (UTC).
The use of keywords was the extent of my thinking; something along the lines of openaccess=gold being transformed by the template into "Open access | gold", whereas openaccess=green would become "Open access | green" (see BMC Nursing). Those keywords are only selected because they are mentioned on the open access page; other keywords would work equally well, however colour coding is an interesting avenue I hadnt realised/considered. In the light of the background that DGG has provided, I think keyword should only be for the non-ambiguous types of open access, and the template needs to fall back to displaying the free form text if it isnt entirely comprised of known keywords (I've never tried this with templates yet, but it should be do-able). John Vandenberg 01:44, 17 December 2006 (UTC)
Problem is, the color code only helps if the journal is true open access. It could also be done for delayed open access, but the periods keep changing, and now vary from 1 to 36 months, depending on publisher. This could be coded, but at this point not even services like Google Scholar have figured out how to do it. My guess is third quarter of '07 for them. And everything else is article by article, and this too is being worked on, by them and a lot of other people--my guess is 4th quarter '07.
But, as a strong proponent of open access, I think it reasonable to reward the true OA journals. The best database of them, DOAJ, does not quite keep up with them, but they try to cover even the smallest. has only 35. We could certainly keep up with the top ones--there are only about 150 in Web of Science so far,. I have just written a WP article, open access journal, which explains some of this a little more--the Open access article is written by a strong proponent of self-archiving, and I just wanted to balance it (I have nothing about self-archiving, I do it myself). I am about to write a WP article outlining how to find everything findable, but this is WP and it can't be called "how to", and suggestions for a title are welcome.DGG 05:50, 17 December 2006 (UTC)
It sounds like colour coding is stretching too far, too fast. A few questions:
  • For delayed OA, Is the delay usually constant for all articles within a journal?
  • For hybrid OA, is the cost usually fixed for all articles within a journal?
  • Does a journal usually nominate one archival repository for its deposits; is this useful to know?
  • British Medical Journal OA data found on PubMed indicates Immediate [non-research: after 12 months]; can someone explain what non-research means?
  • For the non-OA journals, are there different levels of closed-ness that we should also cater for (i.e. {half-jokingly} grey vs black).
As an aside, there are now 273 journals that use this template.
John Vandenberg 22:11, 18 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] ISI listing

I think ISI listed should be added to indicate that the journal does or does not appear among the over 14,000 journals listed by the Institute for Scientific Information. The list includes over 1100 arts and humanities journals as well as scientific journals. This is an important indicator of journal quality and would be of interest to our readers (Master Journal List. Thomson Scientific. Retrieved on February 18, 2007.). Walter Siegmund (talk) 16:39, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

I agree. --Bduke 21:40, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Microformat for citations

Please be aware of the proposal for a microformat for marking citations (which pages about journals are, in effect) in (X)HTML. See also Wikipedia:WikiProject Microformats. Andy Mabbett 16:56, 24 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Without CSS

With CSS disabled, this appears as:

British Birds
Discipline Ornithology
Language English

and so on. I think there would be some value in prepending the word "Title" to the first entry, then hiding it with CSS. Andy Mabbett 14:33, 24 March 2007 (UTC)

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../i/n/f/Template_talk%7EInfobox_Journal_77b6.html"