Talk:International Journal of Mormon Studies

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Per wp:EDIT esp its wp:PRESERVE section[edit]

...WP contributors are stongly encouraged to leave in pertinent information. If bored, a template:Fact tag or the like has been been made available for use to alert interested parties to the need to google up the info. Eg in the case of city where the IJMS might be published, a quick google search brings one quickly to any number of hits...one of the [[1] first of which], in the present case, for example, is to WolrdCat...and that contributor can put in the pertinent detail into the article. Thanks for all editors' contributions to the project.--Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 18:27, 7 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

  • Thank you for these helpful links. Here's another: WP:V. As for the city where this journal is published, I have a few questions and one remark. To start with the latter, while WorldCat is a reliable source to identify a journal's OCLC number, the rest of the information that it contains (publisher and such) is often outdated and incorrect. As for the questions: what does it mean that the journal is published in Staffordshire? Is that where the articles are readied for publication and put online? Is that where the editors reside? Is this, then, indeed an international journal or is it one of those journals that are actually quite local but just call themselves "international" to appear more attractive? I know of an Indian publisher trying to set up several journals "international journal of" or even 'British journal of" just to seem respectable). For most international journals, it's very difficult if not impossible to say exactly where they are published. Sure, they'll have a legal seat (and with some luck, that may be the place mentioned in WorldCat), but chances are that at that place nothing related to the journal actually happens. The publishing company has its legal seat in one country, their office actually handling the journal is localized in another country, the editor of the journal is in a third country, the people proofreading and typesetting are in a fourth country, and the actual publication happens in a fifth country with the servers based in a sixth (and if the journal also has a printed version, presto, there comes country number seven). So is this a Staffordshire-based journal or an international one? And do we have anything more reliable than WorldCat to base ourselves upon? The journal's website itself does not mention any physical address, far as I can see. --Randykitty (talk) 21:17, 7 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Let me give you an example of what I mean. This weekend I created an article for the journal Pharmacology, Biochemistry and Behavior (PBB). WorldCat says that it is published in New York, by Pergamon Press. This publisher was bought by Elsevier more than 20 years ago. The Library of Congress correctly indicates the publisher and also says that it is published in Amsterdam, where Elsevier is based. Elsevier, in turn, is part of Reed Elsevier, based in London and Amsterdam. The editor-in-chief of PBB works in La Jolla, CA. His associate editor works in Bagneux, France. Pergamon is still used by Elsevier as an imprint and they do have offices in New York, so chances are that the Elsevier people handling this journal are still based there (although it might be difficult to find sources for this: as customers generally don't care about these details of internal functioning, publishers don't feel a need to display this information either). Now where should we say that this journal is published? And I have to add that I haven't even tried to find out where it is typeset and printed (that is mostly done in Asia nowadays, especially India, Malaysia, and Singapore). Whatever may be the case, I think it does show that WorldCat is not a reliable source for this kind of details. Nor is the Library of Congress, in this case they got it right, but they generally suffer from the same problems of not being up to date. --Randykitty (talk) 12:53, 9 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Appears Morris's 2010 PhD diss. at the University of Southampton was titled, "The Emergence and Development of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Staffordshire, 1839-1870." abstract LINK, byu library.

The addr on the title pg of the journal's first vol. (see LINK, U. of Georgetown lib) has its editorial mailing addr as "David M. Morris, University of Chichester, [street addr], Tunstall, Stoke on Trent, Staffordshire, [postal code, U.K]."--Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 18:44, 10 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

As for England[edit]

...At one time there were more English Mormons than American ones:[...B]y 1850 the Church had 30,747 members in England, compared with 21,092 in North America and the rest of the world. Estimates from Mormon Church historians suggest that almost 100,000 British followers of the Mormon faith emigrated to Utah, the Mormon state in the 19th Century--and the industrial city of Shiefield (a center for pottery) was the locus of a certain number of these (LD)"Saints":

Remie Bell, who has been collating evidence of the emigration from Sheffield, estimates that the Memmott family were among several hundred of the city's converts who made the journey to Salt Lake City in the 19th Century.

---quote from a page at SheffieldForum.co.uk LINK

--Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 19:30, 9 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

  1. It appears that international Mormonism often gets rather shortshrift w/in M.Studies. This I gather from such comments as the following (quoted from a comment by co-author Ardis Parshall of the Mormonism: A Historical Encyclopedia (2010)):

    I wish we could have given greater (any?) coverage to international Mormonism – but with the dictated space limitations, we had to focus on the “firsts” and on the points that set the patterns and exerted the influences, and in too many instances that meant overlooking the world wide Mormonism that came relatively late in time. LINK

    (...Of course, in the case of England and some other places (Switzerland, etc.), there were a number of people who were converted there and either remained or else immigrated to the designated gathering place in Deseret Territory in the U.S. (viz., "Zion") in the 19th century, so in this respect their history was parallel, and not "relatively late in time," w concern the history of the U.S. Saints. But I quibble.)--Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 19:44, 9 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  1. "What often gets overlooked, however, is Mormonism’s international presence."--Heidi Harris, "An International Snapshot of Mormonism," Patheos, Sep. 3, 2012--Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 19:49, 9 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • This is all very interesting (fascinating, for example, to see that the LDS church had more members in England at some point than in Utah), but I fail to see what all this has to do with discussing ways of improving the current article, which is what talk pages are for, after all. --Randykitty (talk) 21:17, 9 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Reply - Hey! thank you so much for your interest in the subject matter of this journal! IAC the present section's discussion seems to pertain to the possible bonefides that might be due to this (supposed?) sub-(sub-sub-)discipline of internationalM.studies--and, futher, a section below seems to address the premise it lacked any journal concentrating on this sub-area until the IJMS (which till 2009 had been focused merely on the yet further "sub-" of Brit. M.Studies, after all...).--Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 17:26, 10 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Cmt - (Subject of this talkpage section, continued)

Um, OK----

  1. Looking over the titles of the various courses taught in M.studies at various universities recently, no one course seems to address international Mormonism, either. (See [http://timesandseasons.org/index.php/2011/09/mormon-studies-courses/ LINK.)
  2. Hmm, to be fair, the Reeve and Parshall - edited Mormonism: A Historical Encyclopedia DOES incl. an article about "the [so-called] Ungathered," so that aspect was covered in some small way. (Perhaps I'll try and google the chapter up and see if the IJMS was cited in the Christopher C. Jones-authored piece?)
  3. Mauss's chapter on the development of M.studies w/in the soc.sciences has a section that is devoted to Int'l M.studies, just prior to its section devoted to under-studied aspects w/in the field. See here.--Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 16:14, 11 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Focus of journal[edit]

Per its first issue under the new name, the Int'l M.studies journal is one intending to be "European based [and] internationally focused" LINK--Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 17:45, 10 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

This redefined focus come to the fore in 2009 (and was applied retroactively to the first volume, apparently?) In any case, the original version of the first volume stated,

The British Journal of Mormon Studies is an online and limited print, multi-, academic journal that adheres to the highest standards of peer review and engages established and emerging scholars from anywhere in the world. The British Journal of Mormon Studies is an interdisciplinary journal that is centred on Mormon studies and is open and welcoming to contributions from the many disciplines.

We are interested in scholarship that crosses disciplinary lines and speaks to readers from a range of theoretical and methodological perspectives. In other words, the British Journal of Mormon Studies will be a forum for scholars when they address the wider audiences of our many sub-fields and specialties, rather than the location for the narrower conversations more appropriately conducted within more specialised journals.

LINK, U. of Georgetown lib--Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 18:40, 10 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Notability[edit]

Journal's host indexes it.[2]--Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 18:42, 7 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

  • Many libraries will link to any OA journal around. Such listings are not selective and with all due respect for the German Social Science Center in Berlin, their library-listings are not what is meant with a "major database" in WP:NJournals. Nor are EBSCO databases particularly selective. Hence, notability still needs to be established. --Randykitty (talk) 21:21, 7 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  1. Google scholar search yields (along with all of IJMS's published articles) quite a few citations to various IJMS articles. As just one of many examples, this is a hit to an extract hosted at JSTOR of an IJMS that happened to have been authored by Morris.--Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 20:41, 9 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Trying to work from 2008 forward (until I get tired/bored today):

  1. Here a BYU Studies article references one in the British Journal of M.Studies, IJMS's forebear
  2. Here Africa New Journal does so.
  3. Here Religioscope does so (Fr. language)
  4. Here is an article written by Armand Mauss in the BJMS (retroactively renamed the IJMS) hosted at BYU's online collection of important scholarly writings in M.studies.
  5. Here a paper at Dialogue: a journal of Mormon Thought references a IJMS article.
  6. Here's one from the Journal of Media and Religion.
  7. Here is one from Oxford's Daniel Moulin pub'lshd by the Jubilee Center for Character and Values at the U. of Birmingham.
  8. Here Jeffrey M. Bradshaw references a paper in the IJMS in the sectarian/devotional (independent/LDS-themed) Meridian magazine.
  9. Another Bradshaw/Meridian link
  10. Another
  11. Here is a master's thesis from Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch's Balamand University.
  12. ...I'm getting tired but may come back later to cont.--Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 18:20, 10 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Per wp:JOURNAL being cited by peers over and over again establishes notability. However, from merely a regular wp:N persepctive, note the following-linked sources:
  1. the Deseret News links to a historical article found in the 2nd volume of the journal. The IJMS is found in the article's headline as well as the left-column side bar of the online version. Citations need not have working online versions so the reference to the journal in the paper's online and print versions (if was published in the Deseret New's national print edition, which at the time went by the monicker Mormon Times) would be sufficient per WP policies (however forwhateveritmightbeworth the link to the IJMS article in the online piece is broken, unfort.ly). 'LINKED coverage by Emily M. Jensen in national edition of sectarian newspaper
  2. Dialogue, the granddaddy of objective M.studies journals
  3. ByCommonConsent.com, the no. 1 group weblog in the intellectual Mormon bloggosphere (which weblog is officially affiliated with Dialogue journal and whose editors invited DMMorris to post about the IJMS there)
  4. likewise a guest post by DMMorris about the journal at Juvenile Instructor, the no. 1 group LDS history weblog (all of whose staff writers are professional historians and/or M.studies scholars)--Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 15:44, 11 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Mere citations of articles are to be expected and just a handful of them are asbolutely insufficient to establish notability per WP:NJournals. When establishing notability of an academic, generally hundreds of citations are needed (unless there is other evidence of notability, but we're talking citations here). It should be clear that if we need this amount of citations to establish notability for a single person, then a dozen or so if citations to a whole journal is far from establishing any notability at all. Neither do in-passing mention in one-paragraph "articles" or postings to blogs and bulleting boards by the journal's editor contribute anything to establish notability. --Randykitty (talk) 15:51, 11 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
reply - Perhaps you will end up filing an actual afd? In any case, I'll let the tag stand. (However, it's my understanding that wp:JOURNAL, as a WP essay, does not trump wp:GNG; and, per the latter, such facts as that Mauss published an important piece in the IJMS--and that other important pieces have been published there, and that the journal is listed as important at the programs offering M.studies and in syllabuses at various Univ.s giving whatever class w/in the field of M.studies--all give what WP editors needs to know w concern to the notability or stature of this scholarly publishing venture, IMO.) Thanks. Hv a nice day! '~) signed: Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 16:22, 11 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
GNG trumps everything. But at this point, nothing has been presented that shows this meets GNG either. Sure, universities may have classes on the subject, but the fact that "history" is notable as a subject doesn't mean that any journal on history is notable, too. And whether or not notable persons publish in the journal is irrelevant either: notability is not inherited. --Randykitty (talk) 16:37, 11 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
<sighs> A strawman argument is to say that a journal can't be dedicated to a review of an academic discipline simply because it has the word review in its title--when no-one has argued any such thing. Likewise no-one has argued that Mauss et al's association with the journal, in a vacuum, establishes wp:N. Thus--what can be argued is that a journal with review in its title can also happen to reviews developments in a field - namely can be a "review journal". Likewise, in the current case, what is actually being argued is the fact that Mauss's and others' pieces therein can be demonstrated, with no controversy whatsoever, to be notable and thereby to give notability in turn to their publisher, the journal IJMS.--Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 20:40, 11 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I'm afraid you're losing me completely. The journal does not have the word "review" in its title? And didn't you say "per the latter, such facts as that Mauss published an important piece in the IJMS"? If that wasn't meant as saying that you thought this helped establishing notability, then why bring it up? Can we for once try to keep this discussion rational and on the subject instead of dropping huge walls of text with irrelevant musings? --Randykitty (talk) 21:38, 11 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Reply - I was referencing the "ad naseum" @ talk:Mormon Studies Review that it wasn't a review journal simply cos it's title had review in it. (& cf. talk:Review journal).--Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 21:44, 11 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Notable articles make a notable publisher of the same.--Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 21:45, 11 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
You refuse to get a grip on the details provided. "Walls of text" is an aspersion that can be interpreted to mean the reader making such an accusation had merely been scanning them for certain words or word strings instead of reading them for meaning? Pls pls pls see wp:AGF. Thanks!--Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 21:47, 11 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
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