Help! My journal publications do not appear to be indexed!

[niwon88]

Dear Fora

I am preparing for mid-tenure review right now and did a quick search using my university library catalog and was dismayed to see that fewer than 1/3 of my journal publications appear under an author search.

I confirmed that my library does subscribe to those journals but when I search the title of my articles nothing appears. When I do an author search it shows I have 3 publications when it should be 12. I tried searching using another university catalog from my alma mater and the results were similar.

Does anyone know how to fix this? Is the problem my library or the journal?

Also, I have noticed that sometimes book chapters are indexed? How do you get your book chapters indexed under your name?

Thanks

[research_prof]

Publication indexing is a very sad and complicated story. If you can see your publication on google search or on google scholar, I guess the problem is with your university library catalog. I am not sure if you need your papers to show up on the university library catalog for tenure purposes. Some universities I know of are ok with going over your google scholar and looking at your papers. They might also require you to submit evidence that your papers where indeed accepted to the venues that you claim (e.g., a letter from an editor, or conference proceedings).

[Wahoo Redux]

How many individual databases have you checked?

Check Academic Search Complete, JStore, and Gale if you can.  For reasons I assume have to do with proprietary relationships, our works are often stored in different cyberspaces. 

[niwon88]

Thanks for your replies. I had no idea publication indexing was so complicated and bizarre. I have tried different databases and show different results each time.

At our institution, our colleagues must support our tenure process by reviewing our publications so I am worried that if my peers search online they will only find 3 articles when there should be 12. They are given access to a shared folder with our publications but most admit they do not have time to login to access them. They would just google me and come up with 3 publications!

[Parasaurolophus]

If it were me and I were googling you, I'd be looking for your CV. And if I wanted to check/read your pubs, I'd do the easiest thing--which isn't to individually find them all through the library, but rather to access the shared folder.

You could address your worries to some extent by making sure your website is up to date, however, and posting drafts and links to the relevant indices (if you can). I'm a little skeptical that your colleagues will think the best way to find out about your pubs is to search the university library's databases (which, for all they know, may not carry all of your publications, or maybe it will eventually, but there's a 1- or 2-year delay on some of their journal subscriptions, etc.).

[Hibush]

Indexing is very important if your scholarship is to be found.  Much of literature discovery these days is through searches and active linking among similar articles. If your work is not well linked there, you are really hidden from the scholars in your field. Not just the tenure committee.

When you list your publications, make sure that you include a hyperlink to the official journal version of your work. Also include the DOI as part of the citation. Those two measures will be expected by readers. They also make your discoverability independent of the search engines and indices.  For extra measure of accessibility, you can put copies of your own work on a server at your institutions, and provide a link to that copy. This practice is comparable to the old mailing of reprints.

If your papers are not discoverable because they were published in journals that are not considered worthy of indexing, you have a different problem. If you are publishing in journals that don't provide easy access to the indexing services, you should change venues or bug the journals until they update their policies.

For faculty going up for tenure, or otherwise needing to demonstrate current scholarship, emphasize well-indexed open-access journals that have a competitive time from submission to publication. They will serve your career better now and in the future.

[polly_mer]

If your papers are not discoverable because they were published in journals that are not considered worthy of indexing, you have a different problem. If you are publishing in journals that don't provide easy access to the indexing services, you should change venues or bug the journals until they update their policies.

This.  Why are you publishing extensively in journals that aren't indexed in the standard data bases that "everyone" uses?

I'm old enough that I laugh when told to consult Google scholar instead of a real index like JSTOR or Web of Science.  I don't care all that much about journal impact factor, but I question quality of outlets that are more than a year old and not indexed.

[mamselle]

Just a reminder for balance: This is more true in the sciences than in the humanities:

If your papers are not discoverable because they were published in journals that are not considered worthy of indexing, you have a different problem. If you are publishing in journals that don't provide easy access to the indexing services, you should change venues or bug the journals until they update their policies.

For faculty going up for tenure, or otherwise needing to demonstrate current scholarship, emphasize well-indexed open-access journals that have a competitive time from submission to publication. They will serve your career better now and in the future.

Or, maybe better to say, it's more possible.

The arts and humanities aren't quite so citation-obsessed, so the mechanisms for delivering all the related stats and the levels of pressure, while not inconsiderable, are a lot less competitive in the ways you describe.

M.

[niwon88]

If your papers are not discoverable because they were published in journals that are not considered worthy of indexing, you have a different problem. If you are publishing in journals that don't provide easy access to the indexing services, you should change venues or bug the journals until they update their policies.

For faculty going up for tenure, or otherwise needing to demonstrate current scholarship, emphasize well-indexed open-access journals that have a competitive time from submission to publication. They will serve your career better now and in the future.

Thank you for the good advice. The journal titles themselves are in the database, but when I searched my name I could not find the link to my articles. In two cases, the journals reversed my first and last name. If I look up the journal issue I could find my article. The journals are mostly Taylor and Francis or Springer. 

[Hibush]

If your papers are not discoverable because they were published in journals that are not considered worthy of indexing, you have a different problem. If you are publishing in journals that don't provide easy access to the indexing services, you should change venues or bug the journals until they update their policies.

For faculty going up for tenure, or otherwise needing to demonstrate current scholarship, emphasize well-indexed open-access journals that have a competitive time from submission to publication. They will serve your career better now and in the future.

Thank you for the good advice. The journal titles themselves are in the database, but when I searched my name I could not find the link to my articles. In two cases, the journals reversed my first and last name. If I look up the journal issue I could find my article. The journals are mostly Taylor and Francis or Springer.

Those publishers are excellent at proper indexing and database discovery. I suspect that they would be as alarmed as you are that your articles are not being found. I would contact the editorial office to see if they can correct whatever is wrong.

There is often concern expressed about pestering volunteer editors too much. This is a different situation. Both of those publishers have professionally staffed editorial offices, so you should not be hesitant to contact them and to expect a prompt response.

[Myword]

The databases like JSTOR have not always reliable  search functions. I am very good at searching, but their system can be erratic, unpredictable, timeconsuming, at least for me.
My guess is this is a journal database problem and each one is different with its peculiarities and incompleteness. Try a less general database, one for your discipline, if there is one. Remember to use parentheses or quotation marks around the words. If you look up Tom Jones, you might get every Tom and every Jones. Searchers are smarter than computers in this regard.  Very new journals are unlikely to be indexed, too soon. Also check WorldCat.

[darkstarrynight]

If you do not already, I suggest created an ORCID. This funnels your work into indexes and sites like Google Scholar. Many journals ask for the ORCID when submitting manuscripts. https://orcid.org/

[Ruralguy]

My discipline specific one is quite good. It finds me papers I forgot I wrote!

[Vkw10]

Library catalogs traditionally include information at the book/journal level, not at the article/chapter level. This goes back to card catalogs, when the book had to be described on a 3x5 inch card. With online catalogs, more information may be provided, but it depends on the system your library uses. For journal articles, disciplinary databases are a better bet. Your library might have a discovery system, which pulls in information from catalog and databases, but a librarian friend tells me that some databases don't work with discovery systems, including one that I use regularly for legal information.

Darkstarrynight and Hibush gave you good advice about ORCID, asking journal publisher to correct reversed names, and including DOI and URL in citations.

I'd suggest you also contact library and ask if they have an institutional repository, where they can create a page for you with either copies of your papers or links to them. Most of those systems are clunky to search, but if library can put your papers up without violating copyright, people who don't have journal subscriptions can find and cite them.

[youllneverwalkalone]

I'm old enough that I laugh when told to consult Google scholar instead of a real index like JSTOR or Web of Science.  I don't care all that much about journal impact factor, but I question quality of outlets that are more than a year old and not indexed.

Slightly OT but what's your beef with Google Scholar? As an experienced scientist, I assume you can very easily evaluate the quality of the sources. Plus, Google Scholar indexes papers way faster than WOS does, can be accessed from anywhere, etc.