Which academic journals should have articles on Wikipedia? This turns out to be a surprisingly complex question!

Why would we want to exclude any academic journals from having articles? Fundamentally, Wikipedia is an encylopedia, and encyclopedias are discriminative by definition. The page “What Wikipedia is not” explains that “Information should not be included solely because it is true or useful. An article should not be a complete presentation of all possible details, but a summary of accepted knowledge regarding its subject. …. To provide encyclopedic value, data should be put in context with explanations referenced to independent sources. Merely being true, or even verifiable, does not automatically make something suitable for inclusion in the encyclopedia.” For many academic journals, we simply lack the available documentation in independent sources to provide a summary of accepted knowledge.

Even if we think academic journals are useful enough that we should have articles for nearly all of them, we still have lots of hard decisions to make. Should we have an article for…

  • A predatory journal?
  • A journal that hasn’t yet published its first issue?
  • A defunct journal that only published a single issue?
  • A “journal” (blog published by a random professor)?
  • A journal that has no (or very few) citations to its articles in other journals?
  • A journal that has never been discussed in any other published source?

To think through these issues, we can look at the criteria Wikipedia currently uses. The fundamental criteria normally used to determine if a topic should have a standalone Wikipedia article is the general notability guideline (WP:GNG): “A topic is presumed to be suitable for a stand-alone article or list when it has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject.” Informally, we call a topic “notable” if it meets this guideline.

However, using the general notability guideline for journals is contentious because very, very few journals meet these criteria. Academics generally spend little time writing about their journals in depth (which would comprise significant coverage), and when they do they often lack independence (e.g. an editor summarizing a journal’s publication history in a retrospective, or a board publishing a “meta” note in a journal issue’s front matter).

So we could use the general notability guideline to determine which academic journals should have stand-alone Wikipedia articles, but many editors want looser standards for journal notability. In my opinion, the most compelling reason to want looser standards is because journals publish the reliable sources often cited on Wikipedia… and it serves readers to have information about the publishers of those cited sources. For that reason, editors write informal essays that attempt to establish alternative criteria.

The most prominent of these alternative perspectives on journal notability is WP:NJOURNALS. The essay has gone through many revisions over the years, but at a high level it proposes three criteria for determining if a journal should have a standalone Wikipedia article.

  • Criterion 1: The journal is considered by reliable sources to be influential in its subject area.
  • Criterion 2: The journal is frequently cited by other reliable sources.
  • Criterion 3: The journal is historically important in its subject area.

These criteria are frequently used as a guide to determine if an article about an academic journal should be deleted. These criteria are an attempt to lower the bar so that even academic journals that don’t meet the general notability guideline can have their own articles.

As you can imagine, these proposed guidelines are contentious. By my count, this essay has produced more than a novel’s worth (100,000+ words!) of commentary on its Talk page (including years of discussion archives and many revision attempts).

Look at the criteria used on WP:NJOURNALS and think about your answers to the questions above: are there journals that you think should have articles but that are still excluded by these guidelines? Are these guidelines implicitly biased against journals in particular subject areas e.g. the humanities vs STEM? Take a gander at the hundreds of past deletion discussions about academic journals, leave a comment on the WP:NJOURNALS Talk page, and you too might find yourself with a strong opinion on a simple question: which academic journals should have articles on Wikipedia?

Further reading: