Wikipedia:Notability (academic journals)

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.

Shortcut WP:NJOURNALS

This page in a nutshell: Articles on academic journals are required to be notable; that is significant, interesting, or unusual enough to be worthy of notice, as established by reliable sources. If an academic journal can be demonstrated to be impactful via reliable sources, we should probably have a dedicated article on it. If an academic journal cannot be demonstrated to be impactful via reliable sources, we should probably not have a dedicated article on it. Articles on non-notable academic journals may be deleted or merged (usually to their parent publisher, or affiliated society), depending on consensus.

This essay provides guidance about the notability of academic journals, conference proceedings, monographic series, and other scholarly serial publications (including grey literature) devoted to reporting the results of scholarly research. For the sake of simplicity, all such publications will be referred as 'journals' in this essay, unless otherwise noted. Non-scholarly publications, such as trade magazines and professional society newsletters are instead covered by WP:NMAG.

A notable journal thus refers to a publication being known for its publishing of scholarly research in the spirit of WP:GNG. These criteria are independent from the other subject-specific notability guidelines, such as WP:NBIO, WP:NORG, etc. Journals found to be notable under these criteria are likely to be reliable sources, but are not necessarily so. Journals could be known for being historically influential in an area of research now considered obsolete, or even in influential in a pseudo-scientific field. It is possible for a journal not to be notable under this guidance but still meet WP:GNG for other reasons.

Note that this page provides guidance, not rules; exceptions may well exist. Most journals nowadays have home pages which may be used as sources for uncontroversial information. If the journal can be considered a reliable source, this will be often be sufficient to create a stub on a particular journal. However, this does not exempt the journal from meeting notability requirements.