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The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was no consensus. Opinion is divided about the issue of notability.  Sandstein  19:26, 30 January 2014 (UTC) reply

International Journal of e-Collaboration

International Journal of e-Collaboration (  | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – ( View log · Stats)
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Non-notable journal. No evidence of "significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject" as per WP:GNG. I'm aware of the WP:ESSAY at WP:NJournals, but it's exactly that, an essay not a guideline or policy. Note: I removed some unsourced claims of indexing and abstracting from the article, because I checked the ACM Portal and there was neither indexing nor abstracting of this journal in a meaningful sense. Stuartyeates ( talk) 19:24, 22 January 2014 (UTC) reply

Delete possible journal-mill BlueSalix ( talk) 19:47, 22 January 2014 (UTC) reply
  • Keep Stuart, I think you were a bit too fast deleting the indexing info from the article. Looking at the journal website, they don't claim to be in the ACM Portal, so that error must have been introduced on our side. In contrast, they are included in Scopus and we generally accept such journals as being notable. I'll re-add Scopus to the article (with a reference) and check the other deleted databases as soon as I have time. But really, Scopus suffices. -- Randykitty ( talk) 21:15, 22 January 2014 (UTC) reply
Apparently there has been confusion between the ACM Portal and the ACM Digital Library: the journal is included in the latter. -- Randykitty ( talk) 21:30, 22 January 2014 (UTC) reply
There was no confusion on my part. All volumes 2005-2009 are missing, mangled or unusable. Note that neither of the references you've just added to the article are WP:RS. Stuartyeates ( talk) 21:40, 22 January 2014 (UTC) reply
Why are they not RS???? The ACM Digital Library and Scopus are definitely reliable sources. And I didn't say the confusion was on your part: the article said "ACM Portal" and that was indeed incorrect. -- Randykitty ( talk) 21:47, 22 January 2014 (UTC) reply
BTW, the journal is also in Inspec (another selective database), but I haven't yet figured out how to provide a reference, because you and only see this if you have access and in addition they use dynamic URLs that are session specific... -- Randykitty ( talk) 21:51, 22 January 2014 (UTC) reply
(edit conflict) Both the ACM portal and Scopus (via it's owner Elsevier) are in financial relationships with IGI Global regarding reselling the content (and/or deep linking back to IGI to sell the content directly, with the ACM some things appear to differ depending on what part of the world you're in). This makes them non-independent in this matter, see WP:RS. Stuartyeates ( talk) 21:59, 22 January 2014 (UTC) reply
Scopus is operated in such a way that journal selection is independent of Elsevier's other activities. In any case, the journal is also in PsycINFO. Far as I can see, the APA has no financial interest in IGI. -- Randykitty ( talk) 22:02, 22 January 2014 (UTC) reply
  • Keep The journal is indexed in INSPEC (behind a paywall, I verified the journal was on the old 2012 list), PsychINFO [1] and SCOPUS (sourcerecord id 12000154321 in the April 2013 title list), all selective indexes. The journal thus satisfies notability criteria according to WP:NJournals criterion 1. While WP:NJournals is still technically an essay, in AfD discussions about journals, it has been treated as a de facto guideline for notability for at least the last 15 months I have been at WP. That WP:NJournals hasn't yet been adopted as a guideline seems more a symptom of the increasing difficulty in changing policy at WP than inadequacies in the proposed guidelines themselves. To build a good encyclopedia, we occasionally need to treat bureaucracy as damage and route around it. -- Mark viking ( talk) 22:30, 22 January 2014 (UTC) reply
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Literature-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k ( talk) 17:52, 24 January 2014 (UTC) reply
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Computing-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k ( talk) 17:52, 24 January 2014 (UTC) reply
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Academics and educators-related deletion discussions. Randykitty ( talk) 17:59, 24 January 2014 (UTC) reply
  • Comment: I have just investigated SCOPUS systems whose listing of the journal is claimed above to make it notable. There appears to be no indication that SCOPUS is different in these regards from any of the others above, but it's the one I had easiest access to.
(a) the only information available about the journal within SCOPUS not also available from the publishers website appears to be automatically parsed bibliographies in the articles use to generate 'this article cites these other articles' type links. It's obviously automatically parsed, due to the mistakes in parsing, that are of a kind a human would never make. There is no sign of human-intervention; there is no sign of editorial integrity to allow verifiable evaluation of notability
(b) all IGI Global journals, except very new ones appear to be in SCOPUS (I only tested about 2 dozen, all from before 2010 all from 2010 or before). Given that IGI Global is what might be called the bulk end of the market rather than the quality end of the market (see extensive coverage on Talk:IGI Global about their quality and business practises), it is safe to say that this 'selective list' is not being selective on quality.
(c) what was missing from SCOPUS was many open access journals (both old and new). So maybe the 'selective' in our 'selective list' comes down the the business model the journal is operating under.
(d) if the 'selective' in 'selective list' does relate more to business model than to journal quality, this draws into question both the suitability of these lists for determining wikipedia notability and the veracity of the claim (above) that commercial services can be run independently.
In short: I'm still looking for anything that meets WP:GNG. Stuartyeates ( talk) 01:14, 27 January 2014 (UTC) reply
  • Keep The GNG does not work well for everything,and academic journals are one of the things where it is least effective, either for inclusion or exclusion. Journals are notable when the community of scholars use and cite them, and the measure of this is inclusion in the selective indexes,. Scopus and ISI are probably the best ones to look at. WoS from ISI has for the fields it covers been the best measure in many cases, but because the nature of its measurement system requires at least two years of data it can not include new journals however important or notable. Scopus is possibly the best alternative. It has its defects, both of inclusion and exclusion, but so does everything else. (It is furthermore an open question to what extent it or any other conventional measure is fully applicable to pure e-journals.) Of course Scopus (and WoS) are prepared automatically-the human selection is in making the selection of journals to include, not preparing the index. But inclusion of the journal is exactly what we are dealing with here. Of course they include most or all of the journals from the major publishers--that's the nature of publishing in scientific subjects. The major publishers are in fact the ones that publish the important journals, and the nature of the publisher is one of the key ways in which lbraries select them. The universal applicability of the GNG is not policy; it is not even a guideline; it is in fact contradicted specifically by the notability guideline, which says it is the usual, not the universal measure. The relevant policy is NOT INDISCRIMINATE, In judging how to apply that. the general rule for how we apply policy says that We can include whatever we find helps the encyclopedia to include, and that is one of our core principles.
There is an alternative basis for inclusion: it is possibly the most use to our readers that we include articles for all journals which are used in articles. I am not yet prepared to adopt this, but there's a lot to be said for it--we are, after all, NOT PAPER . There's nothing preventing us, if we choose to. We're here to be useful, not to follow arbitrary guidelines as if they were divine regulations. DGG ( talk ) 16:52, 27 January 2014 (UTC) reply
  • Delete. I agree with the nominator that this journal is insufficiently indexed/cited to be covered by Wikipedia. The long post by DGG above is a general rant about GNG not being suitable for academic journals, but it does not refute the nominator's points about this particular journal being hardly notable even in academia itself. In particular, the whole frigging journal has a "Citation Count: 36" in ACM's Digital Library. That's ridiculously low. We wouldn't keep an article about an individual paper with that citation count and it is absurd to keep a whole journal that obscure. Someone not using his real name ( talk) 08:55, 29 January 2014 (UTC) reply
  • Comment The ACM Digital Library is very specialized and limited, so it is not surprising that you get low citation counts there. If you click the link to Google Scholar just above the nom, you will see that the second article listed by itself has almost double the number of citations than what ACM gives for the whole journal. -- Randykitty ( talk) 09:29, 29 January 2014 (UTC) reply
  • Not really. Many of the mid-level journals will have such citation counts (depending on the field). In this field, I don't find this exceptionally low. -- Randykitty ( talk) 11:53, 29 January 2014 (UTC) reply
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.
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