"And whosoever believeth in me, shall not die..."

The title that refuses to die is back. It returned to life last year after being officially "suspended" by its last publisher. Now, it purports to publish quarterly, but arrives at irregular intervals. Another unwanted surprise is the issue of it that just landed on my desk this morning -- Fall 2008 v. 58 no. 5!


I checked the publication information which reads "...is published quarterly (Winter, Spring/Summer, September/October, November/December)..." Ok. Let's look at this logically. Not only is there no sensible and consistent chronology or publication schedule -- but the one that landed on my desk does not meet any of those odd criteria...!

Statement of purpose

The Statement of purpose is a bit of a misnomer. It is akin to a mission statement, but some of them are not pithy. I just browsed one in a science journal and it is 80 words long. A mission statement or statement of purpose should be able to be conveyed in 1-2 short sentences. Otherwise the scope of the journal becomes too large.


I think there should be some truth put into these statements. I would like to see something like : "This journal exists to give credibility to the professors of an esoteric field. It is, of course, an international journal that is devoted to the highest form of research and timely knowledge dissemination of esoteric field X."


And then for the publication information they could use something like "This journal is published in a timely manner." (And leave off when it is actually published or its publishing regularity which do not often coincide with the real world.)