Talk:List of MDPI academic journals

Request to remove the following

"[..] a publisher listed on Jeffrey Beall's list of predatory open access publishing companies in 2014[1][2] but which was removed in 2015." People can read all about it on MDPI's own page. This page simply serves to list MDPI journals.Kenji1987 (talk) 15:11, 1 September 2019 (UTC)

History of Sockpuppetry

Reviewers: Please see Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/MiCocx/Archive and Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/MiCocx when reviewing a draft on one of these journals. Robert McClenon (talk) 23:20, 2 November 2020 (UTC)

Expansion proposal

I've been considering an expansion of this page, to contain more information than just the name. I don't imagine that it would reach the Wikipedia:Featured list criteria, but it might be a step in the right direction. I've been working on a draft in a sandbox. What do you think? WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:44, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

As no one objected, I have done this. Please feel free to fill in the blanks. Editing tables is much easier in the visual editor. Click here to try it out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_MDPI_academic_journals?veaction=edit You can select a table cell by clicking on it once (e.g., to italicize the contents of the whole cell), and you can edit the words in a cell by double-clicking the cell. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:20, 25 September 2022 (UTC)

Diversity (journal)

@Headbomb: What is the problem here? There is nothing wrong with the previous version. Invasive Spices (talk) 12 April 2022 (UTC)

• All 400+ journals redirect to the relevant section, rather than the individual entry. Why is Diversity special that it should go against that convention? Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 20:00, 12 April 2022 (UTC)

Because this is not Wikidata. This is not structured data. This is an editable article. If one journal has a more understandable redirect that is not harmful and is mildly helpful. Invasive Spices (talk) 15 April 2022 (UTC)

Removal of Impact Factor and Scopus index percentile ranks

Per WP:PROMOTION concerns, I removed these columns. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_medical_journals as an independent page that shows these data are not included. I would say including such data would simply serve as advertisement to the journal, in violation of WP:ADVERTISING. -- Crawdaunt (talk) 14:28, 30 December 2022 (UTC)

@Crawdaunt, I think this information should be included. Factual information that happens, in some cases, to be positive is not advertising. WP:NOT says that "Information about companies and products must be written in an objective and unbiased style, free of puffery." Let's consider this:

• Are the numbers objective? Yes: There is nothing subjective about an impact factor or a Scopus rating.
• Is it an unbiased style? Yes: Every single item is included according to exactly what the reliable source says, without trying to twist it into either a positive or negative POV.
• Is there any puffery involved? No: There are no adjectives at all, much less any attempt to describe them as "famous", "notable", "best known", "award-winning", "acclaimed", or "influential" (to quote WP:PUFFERY). A plain, objective number cannot be said to "promote the subject of an article, while neither imparting nor plainly summarizing verifiable information" or to use any sort of "positively loaded language" (to quote MOS:PUFFERY).

Also, this is standard information to include when we write about journals. {{Infobox journal}} includes the impact factor. I would be hard pressed to explain why it's promotional and advertising for this objective fact to be included in a list of journals but not promotional and advertising for the same objective fact to be included in Applied Sciences (journal), Atmosphere (journal), Axioms (journal), Biology (journal), etc.

(WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS is not a good argument for making this list be just as uninformative as the other, but I think it's less relevant, as most of the journals in that other list have existing articles, and therefore a different place to record objective data about the journal's relative popularity/performance.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:56, 29 January 2023 (UTC)

I particularly wanted to address your claim in the edit summary that It serves no purpose to Wikipedia to have, on this page, an advertisement of constantly-updating lists of hundreds of MDPI journal ranks according to 3rd party databases.

I disagree with this. I think it serves a very important purpose: Wikipedia editors need quick and easy access to this information. We routinely advise editors to avoid journals that fall into the bottom quintile. While it is probably not true for every low-ranked journal, the bottom 20% are known for having both weak peer review and serious problems with copyvios. Any claim sourced to Antibodies (journal), ranked 17th percentile, needs to be considered in that light. On the other hand, if WP:CITEWATCH flags Foods (journal), ranked 95th percentile, you can evaluate it like you would any other journal. (For technical reasons, CITEWATCH scripts are unable to differentiate between individual journals.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:17, 29 January 2023 (UTC)

• Question: are we going to make similar lists for other publishers, such as Elsevier and Springer Nature? And all these figures change yearly, do we have enough people with time to spend on updating this stuff? Or do we just do this now and then let entropy take care of the rest? In articles on journals we mention the impact factor, because like it or not, that's the metric that 99.9% of researchers look at. Ever heard somebody say "I submitted my manuscript to Journal of Foo because it's in the 73rd percentile on Scopus"? In short, I am against inclusion of these data for two reasons. The first is purely pragmatic: who is going to maintain such a page and are we going to make such lists for other publishers that have thousands of journals? The second is more fundamental. Nobody cares about Scopus rankings/scores, so I don't see any reason to include them. In addition to these percentiles, there are dozens of other journal metrics (varying from h-index to immediacy index to Eigenfactor and many more. And some of these metrics are calculated both by Scopus and the JCR, which have different coverage and therefore render different values, so are we going to list all those, too? The IF can be found in journal articles. I see no reason to include them into lists, too. --Randykitty (talk) 23:32, 29 January 2023 (UTC)

  Who cares whether WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS? I'd personally find this useful for MDPI, but I would not find the equivalent useful for Elsevier. If nobody cares about Scopus rankings, then you haven't been hanging out at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Medicine. Also, if nobody cares about Scopus rankings, how did we end up with more than 20,000 links to scopus.com on wiki?

  Note, again: I am not doing this for the tiny fraction of people who are trying to find the right journal to publish their research and who don't know enough about the journals in their own field to identify a suitable journal. I am doing this for the tiny fraction of people who are trying to keep garbage journals from being cited in the English Wikipedia, and who therefore need to know about all the journals published by MDPI – not just the small fraction that we've created separate articles for. Any one/two/three metrics that will help meet that goal, and someone volunteers to add, is okay with me. I've volunteered to add Scopus rankings because those are the ones that I find most useful to editors. If you want to add another, feel free.

  Just because the numbers change yearly doesn't mean that we have to update them yearly. We update population figures once a decade. Maybe we'll update these once a decade, or maybe once every five years. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:13, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

  I know that, for better or worse, Wikipedia:Impact factors are standard. That's why I started the column for it, despite my own lack of enthusiasm for it. For editors, I find that IF is mostly "for worse". We get rumors like "journals should have an impact factor of at least 1.0", and then editors discover that this rule of thumb excludes more than half of the journals in some fields (e.g., history, education) but includes nearly all journals in other fields (e.g., MCB), for no reason beyond a cultural difference in how many citations are "normal". Scopus rankings work for editors because they can see at a glance whether the journal is popular for its field. They can make an apples-to-apples comparison with this. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:21, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

  Hi @WhatamIdoing, @Randykitty:

  @WhatamIdoing, per your OP: I disagree that having IFs is positive. It's neither positive nor negative. It just is. The reason MDPI, or any journal, advertises these so aggressively is because of Goodhart's law: the notion of having an IF has somehow been conflated with reputation. Indeed, in your OP you just argued that "factual information that... happens to be positive...", which is basically a tacit admission that you view listing IFs as some positive reflection on a journal. That's why MDPI has this list, including IF and Cite Score on their own website: https://www.mdpi.com/about/journals

  The information is neutral, but advertising that information in a systematic list is, in my view, the very definition of WP:ADVERTISING. That's why MDPI has its own web page doing exactly what you're advocating for here. It is not Wikipedia's job to faithfully replicate the mdpi.com/about/journals page.

  Cheers

  -- Crawdaunt (talk) 11:04, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

  Okay, so, on the one hand, you believe "the information is neutral", but on the other hand, you removed this information because you believe it is PROMOTIONAL and ADVERTISING. However: neutral information is not promotional.

  Would you please click on your link to WP:ADVERTISING? I know you haven't read it, because it's a disambiguation page. Please find "the very definition" on one of the linked pages, and quote it here, so we can make sure we're talking about the same thing.

  Wikipedia's job is to provide typical types of neutral information. Whether MDPI happens to have done the same is irrelevant. By your argument, we should also remove the ISSNs and founding years from this article, because MDPI also supplies that information. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:04, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

The fact that IFs exist is in and of itself neutral. A systematic advertisement of those IFs on Wikipedia is not. Were this an article listing all journals in a certain research field, and the article contained an element of journal ranking, that would be A-ok. However as it stands here, this is a list of only MDPI journals, and the IFs are presented independent of context - the only utility of advertising them is puffery. They are meaningless without context, and there is a well-established issue surrounding the use of IFs as a proxy for journal quality (see below).

For relevant sections, WP:NOTADVERT: "Wikipedia articles about a person, company or organization are not an extension of their website..."

I would further recommend the Wikipedia article on Impact Factors for the point that use of IFs as a proxy for journal quality has been criticized for distorting good scientific practices. And I would follow up with the Criticisms section of that article pointing out longstanding critiques regarding its use.

Lastly, the listing of a ranking metric used by journals to claim legitimacy or stature is very different from listing a journal's catalogue number or ISSN. One is a regularly-criticized statistic journals use for puffery, and the other is a reference number that is akin to a name/ID. One is a controversial value judgement journals advertise to lay claim to importance in a field, the other is a barcode.

Happy for others to chime in. -- Crawdaunt (talk) 19:29, 1 February 2023 (UTC)

Why do you think that reporting neutral, factual information is "advertisement"? There is nothing in NOTADVERT that says neutral, factual information is advertising. NOTADVERT says "Information about companies and products must be written in an objective and unbiased style, free of puffery." You have already admitted that this information is objective, unbiased and free of puffery.

Your sole argument seems to be that if a hated publisher says something about their journals, then we should go out of our way to avoid including that information.

Furthermore, you seem to be extending this to oppose inclusion of information that is not AFAIK anywhere on the MDPI website.

Why is that? WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:18, 2 February 2023 (UTC)

I'd like to request this conversation remain civil. This is about Wiki editing standards, not about a given publisher. Per WP:DUE:

"Undue weight can be given in several ways, including but not limited to the depth of detail, the quantity of text, prominence of placement, ..."

The inclusion of information itself is a form of WP:VOICE. Thus the reasoning above that including systematic ranking details here, in an article that presents only MDPI journals, is essentially advertising a third party metric used by that journal for puffery (per uses of IF, and the criticisms of those uses noted above).

Were this an article listing some subset of SCOPUS Indexed journals (imagining such an article... ex: "Life Science journals indexed by Scopus"), I think listing Scopus Index percentile rank would be fine: all relevant journals for that ranking metric would be included in the list and so full context would be provided. I wouldn't include IFs in that list, since that's Clarivate's purview. Vice versa applies. Not to mention other major third party ranking metrics (ex: SciMago Journal Rank).

It's about making sure that the information presented in the article doesn't serve as advertising to the interests of the article topic, that the information in the article isn't an extension of that topic's personal website etc... (per WP:NOTADVERT). -- Crawdaunt (talk) 20:07, 3 February 2023 (UTC)

I disagree. A strictly encyclopedic understanding of a subject involves knowing something about how that subject compares to others. If it happens that this information also (at least in the opinion of a Wikipedia editor) "serves as advertising to the interests of the article topic", then that is irrelevant. We don't hide the fact that iPhones are commercially available mobile phones just because that might "serve Apple's advertising interests". We shouldn't hide information about MDPI either. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:50, 4 February 2023 (UTC)

Nomination for page deletion

The whole conversation above regarding the deletion of IFs from the list has made me realize something: this wikipedia page simply shouldn't exist. Per WP:NOTMIRROR this page is just a carbon copy of https://www.mdpi.com/about/journals .

The link to https://www.mdpi.com/about/journals should just be in the "See Also" section of the main MDPI page. Indeed, the only references on this page are to MDPI's own website, making this page an extension of the publisher's website (against WP:NOTADVERT).

I am therefore nominating this page for deletion.

@Banedon: @RandyKitty: just tagging you both to see if you agree? -- Crawdaunt (talk) 20:35, 3 February 2023 (UTC)

I'm against it, because the title is "List of MDPI academic journals", which is more less exactly what the article is. But I don't see it as a big deal. If anyone is looking for a list of MDPI journals, they'd probably prefer to search https://www.mdpi.com/about/journals, which is more likely to be up-to-date. Banedon (talk) 11:53, 4 February 2023 (UTC)

• I agree with Banedon. After the extensive cleanup that you (i.e., Crawdaunt) did, I think this can stay as it is now. It contains a little bit more info than, say, List of Elsevier periodicals, but that's fine with me. This info will not become stale every year. --Randykitty (talk) 14:52, 4 February 2023 (UTC)

  Seems good @Banedon:@RandyKitty:. @Headbomb: also said "this has zero chances of being deleted per every other publisher's journals lists out there." That also got me to look at the the Wikiproject "lists of academic journals", which covers the WP:NOTMIRROR concern. Although looking at various lists of journals, I do think this page could benefit from some unique content. It still remains an exact mirror of the mdpi.com/journals page.

  A nice example template could be: List of American Medical Association journals. The page does a solid job giving encyclopedic information on the AMA publishing network. Something like that could fit well here.

  Many of the "lists of academic journals" lists also specify "this is a list of noteworthy journals" etc... and each one I clicked on had a full itemized list with linkouts to individual journal pages. That makes sense, since "noteworthy" ought to imply a journal is noteable enough to have its own Wiki page. That's not the case here. I think the spirit of lists of academic journals and WP:NOTMIRROR aren't in direct conflict though... would like to see this page mature somehow so it's not just a carbon copy of the publisher's own website. -- Crawdaunt (talk) 11:29, 5 February 2023 (UTC)

Step 1: Remove all independent, third-party sources from an article. In this case, there were previously 154(!) of them.

Step 2: Nominate the article for deletion because there are no longer any independent, third-party sources already cited in the article…because you just removed all of them.

Maybe if you really want independent sources on this subject, you should just put them back? Or if you really wanted an article that wasn't a partial duplication of MDPI's website, you could put back the information that isn't on MDPI's website? WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:15, 5 February 2023 (UTC)

Per page edit history: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_MDPI_academic_journals&diff=prev&oldid=1126580059

There were only ever two references cited on this page, one of which was https://www.mdpi.com/about/journals, which lists IFs and Scopus Cite Scores. Crawdaunt (talk) 11:33, 5 February 2023 (UTC)

• There were 154 links to scopus.com on the page before you removed them, and they're reliable sources supporting article content no matter how they're formatted.
• Please click on https://www.mdpi.com/about/journals and then provide a copy-and-paste copy here on this talk page about what MDPI's page says about IFs and Scopus's Cite Scores. I'll give you a hint: the headings in the table that I'm seeing say "Journal Name – ISSN – Launched – Total Articles".

WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:26, 5 February 2023 (UTC)

• That's weird: the headings that I am seeing are: # - journal name - ISSN - Launched - IF - Cite Score - current issue - upcoming articles - total articles - RSS. --Randykitty (talk) 08:31, 6 February 2023 (UTC)

  If you'll send me a note at Special:EmailUser/WhatamIdoing, I'll send you a screenshot. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:35, 6 February 2023 (UTC)

What if we only included "notable" journals on this page (the ones that have Wikipedia pages) and also gave a link to MDPI's website for a link to a complete list? Qflib, aka KeeYou Flib (talk) 21:54, 15 February 2023 (UTC)

It would cheapen the list by being incomplete. This is a collection of a hundred or so journals, each of those without full articles redirecting here. They are not a mega publisher with a portfolio of thousands that needs to be pared down to only notable entries. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 23:08, 15 February 2023 (UTC)

I agree that there is no practical need to shorten the list, and Wikipedia editors need to be able to find this information.

(The "blue links only" rule is normally used only for seriously long lists. I believe that the List of people from New York City have been given as the canonical example. There are tens of millions of people who could be on that list.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:56, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

So non-notable journals can be included in lists, as long as they aren’t long lists? How long is too long? Because this looks like a pretty long list to me. Qflib, aka KeeYou Flib (talk) 05:20, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

First of all, there's a difference between "notable" and "the ones that have Wikipedia pages". It's likely that all of the older journals in this list are notable, even if nobody's volunteered to write the article yet.

Second, yes, absolutely, it is possible to have a list of non-notable items. In fact, "Every entry in the list fails the notability criteria" is one of the common list-selection criteria. That guideline gives List of paracetamol brand names, which has more than 100 entries, as an example of what editors can/should do. As for how long a list of non-notable items could be, consider List of Gunsmoke television episodes#Season 2 (1956–57) (a featured list). WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:00, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

I agree now with keeping all MDPI journals in this list. Think my only outstanding request from this topic in the Talk page is to have more info in the article header to give this article some context and info that isn't just a mirror of the mdpi web page. Crawdaunt (talk) 13:23, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

I agree that this article would benefit from a good introduction. Would you like to find some sources and write it? WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:39, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

Requested move 14 September 2023

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: page not moved. (non-admin closure) Seawolf35 (talk) 05:58, 21 September 2023 (UTC)

---

List of MDPI academic journals → List of Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute journals – Alternative title: List of Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute academic journals. The parent article MDPI is correctly titled per WP:COMMONNAME. However, this list of its journals should have "m.d.p.i." spelled out per WP:PRECISE. Iterresise (talk) 03:32, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

• Oppose: confusing. While anybody interested in academic journals knows what MDPI is,the same cannot be said for "Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute". --Randykitty (talk) 12:01, 14 September 2023 (UTC)
• Oppose. If the initialism is recognizable enough to be used as the title for the parent article (per WP:NCA), why wouldn't it also be used in a list article or other subtopic article about the topic? e.g. we have NASA and List of NASA missions, not List of National Aeronautics and Space Administration missions. Mdewman6 (talk) 16:11, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

  Several reasons make "MDPI" confusing and ambiguous:

  • "Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute" does business as "MDPI".
  • It isn't widely known what "MDPI" is outside of academic journals.
  • It isn't widely reported in mainstream media. Iterresise (talk) 00:51, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

It isn't widely known what "MDPI" is outside of academic journals. Well given that this page has "academic journals" in its title, even if MDPI could refer to other things, wouldn't it be unambiguous as to what MDPI the title refers to here? If you believe MDPI is ambiguous, then an RM at MDPI would seem appropriate. I'm confused as to why you argue MDPI by itself is fine but the title here is ambiguous. Mdewman6 (talk) 16:22, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

• Oppose. I'm not sure how this article's title isn't precise; the only usage of "MDPI" in titles here refers to this publisher. What do we need to disambiguate from? I don't even know if we have anything else notable that is ever referred to as "MDPI". As Mdewman6 mentions, almost always subtopics use the same name as their parent topic, which is described in WP:CONSUB Where a title has been determined to be the common name of a term, then subtopics of that topic should generally follow the same common name determination. I don't see a reason to vary from normal practice in this instance. Skynxnex (talk) 02:30, 15 September 2023 (UTC)
• Oppose, the publisher is universally known as MDPI. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 03:25, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

Oppose. As others have said above, "MDPI" = common, unique, clear. Heck, they even incorporate/license their journals under either their full name or "MDPI AG," so it's maybe even most accurate to say list of "MDPI" journals for a subset of the journals in this list.

-- Crawdaunt (talk) 06:12, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.