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This is a collection of discussions on the deletion of articles related to Academic journals. It is one of many deletion lists coordinated by WikiProject Deletion sorting. Anyone can help maintain the list on this page.

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Academic journals

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Ancient TL

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Ancient TL (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View AfD | edits since nomination)
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Article PRODded with reason "Non-notable journal. Not indexed in any selective databases, no independent sources. Does not meet WP:NJournals or WP:GNG." Article dePRODded with reason "Remove deletion tag, I explain the reasoning a separate message. It does not mean that the article cannot be improved". PROD reason still stands, hence: delete. Randykitty (talk) 17:26, 12 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I guess I am a little bit lost here, what does PROD reason means? Why citations do not count or is there something I overlooked? Sorry, I just try to provide sufficient evidence to retain the journal, but I need to know what is actually required. Besides, I suggest putting this at least on hold because the journal has currently got a new editor (this is not me) and will move to a new publication platform (https://www.soap2.ch/) with all the old articles properly tagged with DOI. GeoGammaMorphologe (talk) 18:10, 12 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
To avoid the deletion of the entry for Ancient TL (ATL) from Wikipedia.com, I am providing evidence of the journal's relevance. First, a little bit of background: Ancient TL is the open-source and free-of-charge luminescence and electron-spin resonance dating community journal. The journal is run by volunteers from the academic community. The few articles published yearly are mainly of technical (such as conversion factors) nature of relevance to the experts in the field. Beyond, the journal publishes abstracts about completed theses in the field (source: http://ancienttl.org). The publications have no DOI (yet), and the journal needs to be indexed, which is related to the low number of publications yearly. Given the following evidence, The journal is of utmost relevance to the scientific community.
@RandyKitty if this is not enough evidence, I may ask to provide actual arguments why the given evidence is not sufficient. Thank you! GeoGammaMorphologe (talk) 21:01, 12 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep. I did a Google scholar search on "Ancient TL" and it shows quite a few papers with > 50 citations, some more than 100. I think this is enough to demonstrate that it is not fluff. Ldm1954 (talk) 14:14, 14 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment: nobody says that this is "fluff", but that is not enough to make a journal notable in the WP sense. That articles from the journal have racked up some citations is nothing out of the ordinary and certainly not enough to pass NJournals (and GNG even less). --Randykitty (talk) 15:24, 14 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    @Randykitty I understand and see your point, but citations are the currency in academia. Why should authors, alleged experts in their field, cite a journal in peer-reviewed papers (and reviewers and editors agree) in journals such as Nature (communications) or Science regularly if what is published in this journal has no significance to the field? At least the high-impact journals are somewhat sensitive to non-essential references and frequently request their removal during the review process. Where do you draw the line then? Or differently formulated: What do you accept as evidence of the significance of a journal? The numbers I quoted are high in our field, but of course, compared to author disciplines such as medicine or chemistry, they are of little relevance. GeoGammaMorphologe (talk) 15:41, 14 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    My understanding is that this is the threshold for notability: 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.
    I'm not sure how one would demonstrate this for every article published in the journal, but perhaps some examples help. Take the following article: "Huntley, D.J., Baril, M.R., 1997. The K content of the K-feldspars being measured in optical dating or in thermoluminescence dating. Ancient TL, v.15, n.1, 1997." Google Scholar registers 716 citations of this article. Looking at the first page of results, citing articles come from reputable sources (Quaternary Geochronology, Quaternary Science Reviews, Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences, Boreas, Science, Radiation Measurements, Science, Nature) and citing articles are themselves highly cited (cited by 662, 25, 63, 1189, 762, 546, 843, 169, 54, 683). Another example: "Kreutzer, S., et al., 2012. Introducing an R package for luminescence dating analysis. Ancient TL, v.30, n.1, 2012" This registers 345 citations. The first page of results show citing articles that are published in Nature Reviews, Science, Ancient TL, Science, Nature, Science Nature Ecology & Evolution, Nature, Quaternary Geochronology, and Quaternary Science Reviews. These citing articles are cited 169, 142, 158, 169, 341, 22, 26, 4 (published this year), 116, and 25 times.
    These articles are receiving significant coverage (highly cited), in reliable sources (Science, Nature, Quaternary Geochronology, Nature Reviews, and so on), that are independent of the source (with one exception, these citations are coming from other journals). One could replicate this analysis on many highly cited articles published in Ancient TL.
    Perhaps some users may interpret this threshold differently, but I argue that one could reasonable argue that Ancient TL meets this definition. TroutbeckRise (talk) 16:08, 14 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep. As a faculty researcher within the field of luminescence dating, I confirm that this journal is notable within our community. If the benchmark for notability is that a journal is known for publishing scholarly research in the spirit of GNG, Ancient TL plainly fits that definition. As detailed in a previous reply, a significant majority of all peer-reviewed journal articles which employ luminescence dating rely upon and cite work that was published in Ancient TL. Ancient TL also has historical importance for our field in that it, along with Radiation Protection and Dosimetry, was one of the first publications dedicated to this subfield. The scope of this journal is more restricted than most (usually involving technological advances germane to dating specialists) but the review process and editorial oversight are robust, and many individual articles are foundational to our field and highly cited. Finally, it should be re-emphasized that this journal is not predatory by any metric, but is a publication run by the scientific community which it serves. It is run on a volunteer basis and is diamond open access: it charges no fees to authors or readers. TroutbeckRise (talk) 14:54, 14 October 2024 (UTC)— TroutbeckRise (talk • contribs) has made few or no other edits outside this topic. [reply]
  • Comment: I appreciate your dedication to this journal. However, one requirement of WP is that statements need to be supported by independent reliable sources. Statements from WP editors unfortunately don't count as such. Unless you can come up with such sources (again, independent of the subject), your !vote will likely be ignored by the closing admin. --Randykitty (talk) 15:34, 14 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • The point is that none of those articles is about the journal. If this journal is so crucial to its field, how come there are no sources about that? Why is the journal not indexed in Scopus or the Science Citation Index or, indeed, any other index (not even less selective ones)? I understand that you'd like your journal to have an article here, but so far you have not provided any hard evidence. If even you editors yourselves can't find such evidence, it likely doesn't exist. --Randykitty (talk) 16:17, 14 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    But perhaps the interpretation that inclusion within journal indices is the only viable metric of reputability is a narrow interpretation and one that is not codified into WP guidelines? Citation counts and the reputability of journals which cite Ancient TL articles are both independent of the source. Is there consensus that these metric do not count? If so, is this codified somewhere? I apologize for my ignorance here, but it strikes me that this singular reliance upon whether a journal is indexed is overly restrictive. TroutbeckRise (talk) 16:33, 14 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    Perhaps @GeoGammaMorphologe and I are demonstrating Criterion 2.b of the WP:Notability criteria: the journal is frequently cited by other reliable sources AND "the only reasonably accurate way of finding citations to journals are via bibliographic databases and citation indices, such as...Google Scholar." TroutbeckRise (talk) 17:02, 14 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    A little context might be useful here. The notability criterion used for academic journals are controversial e.g. see this discussion, or the tens of thousands of words spilled on the talk page of NJOURNALS. The fundamental criteria used to determine if a topic should have a standalone Wikipedia article is 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." 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 there is often a COI (i.e. the writer lacks independence, such as an editor summarizing a journal's publication history in a retrospective or a "meta" note published with a journal issue). Using GNG isn't necessarily a problem, but many editors want looser standards for journal notability, for example because journals publish the reliable sources we often cite on Wikipedia and it serves readers to have information about the publishers of those cited sources. For that reason, editors write essays (like WP:NJOURNALS) that attempt to formulate alternative criteria. I want to emphasize that the criteria in that essay (such as C1, about indexing in selective database indices) is a frequently-used guide but is itself contentious. Note that C1 and C2 are an attempt to lower the bar so that even academic journals that don't meet GNG might be accepted as standalone Wikipedia articles! If Ancient TL doesn't meet that lower bar (or WP:GNG itself), it may make sense to mention it on other Wikipedia articles where it is relevant... or to recreate the article in the future if it receives more attention from academics. You are likely correct to focus on C2 here. C2 is tricky because it's hard to tell what is a significant number of citations in a journal's particular subfield. Suriname0 (talk) 19:02, 14 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    Thanks for that clarification, @Suriname0. That is quite helpful and interesting. I suppose I would then only say that citation counts mentioned in my previous comment are generally considered high in geosciences and archaeometry. And then given the ambiguity involved, perhaps it would be best to err on the side of preserving the entry, especially given the broader context mentioned by @GeoGammaMorphologe. TroutbeckRise (talk) 20:35, 14 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    @Randykitty OK, now, I understand. Thank you for making this clear. In fact not having this listing was so far one of the major critics the journal received from its own community. But I also suggest looking up **how** such indices are generated and **how** a journal becomes listed.
    Here are a few examples regarding ATL:
    • ATL articles do not have a DOI simply because the membership in the Web of Science, for instance, has a (low) price tag. In the past, readers had to pay for the print version of ATL; this was abolished in 2014 (I think) in favour of an online-only version. However, with funds, there was no money for the DOI registration. This situation will now change with the new publication platform, and the affiliation of the new editor will cover the costs.
    • To get indexed and receive an impact factor, you have to fulfil a certain number of criteria, for instance, a certain number of publications per year. ATL was consistently below that threshold, but this is related to the journal's nature and purely non-profit nature not its significance in the field. Even for professional publishers with all their resources, it takes years to get a journal indexed. For instance, Geochronology (https://www.geochronology.net/index.html) was launched in 2019, it received in IF in 2024.
    Bottom line, for diamond open-access journal it is not so super easy to achieve a listing, it needs resources. Still, I may add more examples that are somewhat independent (so far examples from academia are counted as independent; of course, no one explicitly writes about Ancient TL but uses the source).
    * To calculate luminescence (and electron spin resonance) ages, a few online calculators exist,
    **all**
    use data published in Acient TL
    because it contains important values agreed by the community and is used a reference:
    • DRAC caculator [(Durcan et al., 2015, Quaternary Geochronology)](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quageo.2015.03.012); website:
    https://www.aber.ac.uk/en/dges/research/quaternary/luminescence-research-laboratory/dose-rate-calculator/?show=references
    • µRate [Tudyka et al., 2022, Archeometry](https://doi.org/10.1111/arcm.12828), website: https://miu-rate.polsl.pl/miu-rate/login
    • DRc [Taskalos et al., 2015, Archeometry](https://doi.org/10.1111/arcm.12162)
    • eM-Age program: https://github.com/yomismovk/eM-Age-program (the article itself is published in Ancient TL)
    • DIN 44808-1:2024-06 (https://www.dinmedia.de/en/draft-standard/din-44808-1/380077566) referes explicitly to five articles published in Ancient TL (18 references in total). Unfortunately, the norm is behind a paywall, as most of the norms are. Cited in this norm (available in German and currently as a draft in English) are the following articles from Ancient TL: Aitken (1992, ATL 10, 15-16); Duller (2011; ATL 29, 1-3); Duval et al. (2017, ATL 35, 11-39); Grün (1992; ATL, 10, 58); Mauz and Lang (2004, ATL 22, 1-8).
    • Equipment manufacturers refer to articles published in Ancient TL: https://www.lexsyg.com/applications/geology/radiofluorescence.html and publish technical notes in this journal: https://www.freiberginstruments.com/fileadmin/data/publications/12_Richter_et_al_2012_BetaQuelle_AncientTL.pdf; https://orbit.dtu.dk/en/publications/temperature-calibration-and-minisys-temperature-upgrade-for-the-r GeoGammaMorphologe (talk) 16:44, 14 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Genuinely, thank you for creating an account to participate in this discussion! Testimonials from researchers in a field can be very useful. I want to quickly point you toward Wikipedia's WP:COI policies; if you have any COI (such as being a current or former editor for Ancient TL), you would need to mention that in a reply or in an edit summary. Cheers, Suriname0 (talk) 15:04, 14 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Suriname0 Sorry, you are right; I should disclose that I am not unbiased because I am an editorial board member (not the editor) of the journal (the new website is not online yet, though). Two things are, however, important: When I created the original entry on Wikipedia in 2015 and made modifications in the past, I had no such affiliation. Coincidentally, I was just appointed, and we had the first meeting literally a day before ATL was flagged for removal from Wikipedia (which, admittedly, was a little bit odd). My term on the board is limited to a maximum of two years, but I hope that you see that, besides this conflict of interest, the arguments I have given are based on facts and should speak for themselves. GeoGammaMorphologe (talk) 15:17, 14 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, this kind of thing is not generally a problem (and quite common for academia-related articles which have lots of gray area). Just needs to be disclosed. Thanks! Suriname0 (talk) 18:36, 14 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you for letting me know. Yes, I am also currently an editor for Ancient TL. TroutbeckRise (talk) 15:26, 14 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Randykitty and @Suriname0, I may raise two more asepcts, and then I will rest my case and wait for the final decision.
I argue that understanding how knowledge is derived is crucial but has been underrepresented in the discussion so far. Imagine I were to write a new Wikipedia article about the timing of the last glacial ice shield retreat in Europe. Because I have a little bit of an understanding of the subject, I would use luminescence data from loess deposits in Europe. Of course, I would cite only sources with a high reputation in the field, such as Quaternary Science Reviews, Nature Geoscience, Science, Quaternary Geochronology, etc. Assuming that I do not screw up the writing, there would be little doubt about the validity of the content, given that it uses highly acceptable sources. But here is the catch: all those articles and their discovery likely sit on parameters published in a journal, eventually not considered worth being listed in the first place. This is a severe problem because it changes how knowledge is generated and reiterated, and it gives more credit to secondary sources than the basis they are using to infer their discovery. I cannot see how this is in Wikipedia's genuine interest. Still, I acknowledge that this is a tricky matter, given the lengthy discussions linked by @Suriname0.
The other point I may raise is that we live in a time where the dissemination of knowledge is a very successful business model. So, instead of giving society free access to knowledge, researchers (paid by taxpayer money) summarise their findings. Then, the taxpayer pays again in one way or another for every article published. And yet, still, large parts of our societies will never have access to that knowledge for pure business reasons. My understanding of Wikipedia is that it tries to provide free access to knowledge to everyone, and this is, on a very different level, of course, the same idea as a community journal where volunteers do everything, apply the same ethical standards as other, listed, journals but distribute free under CC BY licence conditions do not charge the author. To me, this is the original idea of Wikipedia, and I find it daunting to realise that Wikipedia itself is a little bit reluctant to support the engagement of others in that regard.
I did not even blink when a large part of the content from the article was removed in 2022 because this was likely indeed overly promotional. But what is on the vote here is the deletion of mainly technical information. Is it really that essential to have it removed?
Well, I guess that's all I have. Thanks for reading and for considering my arguments!
GeoGammaMorphologe (talk) 20:13, 14 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep. Independent sources are sufficient to demonstrate that this journal has a meaningful presence in the professional world of a legitimate scientific field. Given that, I am satisfied that this article provides a home for useful information about a topic which readers would have reason to want to know. In my own experience, these sorts of articles can be quite useful for vetting sources of information, both in my professional life and while editing Wikipedia (and even while just reading the news). So I think this article is a net positive for the encyclopedia and common sense would suggest that it should be kept. Given the limitations of the WP:GNG guideline and the lack of consensus around the WP:NJOURNALS essay, I think common sense is the best thing we have to go on. Hence, keep. Botterweg (talk) 22:05, 16 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment: Thanks for addiing some sources to this article. Unfortunately, in-passing mentions in obituaries of the founding editor do not contribute to notability. And an editorial published in the journal itself is not independent and does not contribute to notability either. So basically your motivation for your "keep" !vote is WP:ILIKEIT. --Randykitty (talk) 17:49, 17 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

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