Talk:Distill (journal)

Notability

Hello. I'm one of Distill's editors. I'm commenting here because someone pointed me at this page and asked me to comment. I have no view as to whether Distill should have a wikipedia article.

Facts that may be relevant to this discussion:

• Several Distill articles have received media coverage (eg. this article in the New York Times)
• Distill is indexed in various moderately selective bibliographic databases (eg. Elsevier's [EI Compendex])
• Based on Google Scholar the average Distill has been cited 49 time at the moment.

Looking at the notability criterea for journals it seems like these may be evidence of C1 or C2. Being the only academic journal making wide use of interactive diagrams may meet C3.

On the flip side, the present article is pretty unsubstantive and it's not clear that it adds a lot of value relative to someone just finding Distill's about page. --Chrisolah (talk) 02:18, 6 July 2019 (UTC)

• Hi, welcome to Wikipedia. Please have a look at our conflict of interest policy, you indeed did well to come to the talk page and not edit the article directly. The NYT article doesn't even mention Distill and therefore this does not indicate any pass of C1. A grand total of 49 citations is woefully insufficient to meet C2. In a high-citation density field like this, you'd need a bunch of articles each cited at least a hundred times. Individual researchers are rarely considered notable if they have fewer citations than that and a complete journal obviously should be held to a higher bar than just one person. As for the interactive diagrams, unless you have an independent reliable source that confirms that this is indeed the only journal doing this, it should not even be mentioned in the article. Even if it could be confirmed that way, I doubt that such a gimmick is sufficient to meet C3. --Randykitty (talk) 07:52, 6 July 2019 (UTC)

I find there is certainly some independent coverage of Distill for it's interactive diagrams thing. I don't find that it meets WP:NJOURNALS just yet (there is a case for WP:NJOURNALS#C3, although it's not that strong.) One of the main 'issues' that is Distill seems to be edited by big wigs at big organizations, which means a lot of coverage come from those organizations or their affiliates. None of this means that Distill is a bad journal, but it is a bit early in the journal's life to 'know for sure'. It's a bit incestuous, but The Scholarly Kitchen is that thing that brings it over the line for me, since it's in depth coverage discussion the interactive diagram thing as a substantial innovation in the field. Whether or not Distill succeeds, that, to me, will be a point in academic journal history for trying something new. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 19:44, 6 July 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for your comments all! As stated, I take no position as to whether Distill should have an article and am fine with it being deleted.

Randykitty: Just to clarify, Distill's average citation count is 49. I agree that if that was the total that would be very low. Average citations is roughly equivalent to an impact factor (for which even 10 would is in the top 2% of journals). Of course, this isn't a fully fair comparison because Distill has low publication volume which makes it easier to have a high average. Distill does indeed have multiple papers with hundreds of citations. Chrisolah (talk) 22:14, 6 July 2019 (UTC)

Given that's in ~two years, that's a pretty incredible citation rate at face value. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 22:20, 6 July 2019 (UTC)

I share Headbomb's bafflement. Of course, GScholar is known to overestimate citation rates, but this is quite extraordinary. I checked the Web of Science and get some quite different results. Five articles (5) get cited more than 10 times, highest cited has 32. The rest has only single digits, most having just 1 cite. In total, 39 articles got cited by WoS-indexed journals. This reminds me of the curious case of Ike Antkare... --Randykitty (talk) 08:39, 7 July 2019 (UTC)

Randykitty: I'm not sure how to continue productively engaging in this conversation. It feels like you're inclined to interpret things I say in extremely unchartiable ways.

With regards to differences between Google Scholar and Web of Science, a major driver is probably that ML is primarily a conference rather than journal based field, and many of the conferences don't bother integrating with traditional bibliographic tracking systems. (This is especially true for conference workshops, which often just handle their proceedings by posting a list of links to arxiv.) Google Scholar finds these citations because everyone posts all their papers to arxiv. Conveniently, you can look at each citation via a link under the paper on scholar, and try to check if there's something untoward, before leveling accusations of academic misconduct.

Again, I take no position as to whether Distill should have an article; you're welcome to delete it. But I do think this is a pretty poor way to welcome someone who's engaging on a talk page they're affiliated with. Chrisolah (talk) 15:48, 7 July 2019 (UTC)

I actually feel quite seriously uncomfortable with the suggestion that I'm engaged in some kind of citation manipulation scheme. I realize it may have only been intended in an off-hand way, but it's an extremely serious accusation -- the kind of thing which, if validated, would end my career. I feel like it was pretty inappropriate to suggest without substantiation. It makes me really regret engaging on this page. -- Chrisolah (talk) 16:06, 7 July 2019 (UTC)