A math journal

"Journal of _______ __________" used to be fairly on track with publishing and it even used some creative chronology to get caught up. It appears that they have given up, though, and just are going to publish at their leisure. I just received v. 35 no. 3 2006. No note from the publisher inside or any sort of explanation saying something along the lines of "we are going to do ___X___ and hope to be back on track in the next __x___ months" or anything like that.

I feel badly for any professor awaiting publication of this one....! Can you imagine the CVs and resumes that say "forthcoming publication(s)" and having this journal on your list? A professor might have to wait *years* before being able to change it to the "published article(s)" category.

So, what happens to the next 4 years of chronology? I just sent a query email to the publisher. Stay tuned for further developments...!

Creative chronology and bibliographies?

Ok. Just got one in the mail that has 2005 on the cover. However, the copyright on the inside says "2010"....If I was still teaching and I put a limit on the last several years of research, how would I know if the student was being diligent or not with that journal? Technically, the 2005 issue would be the last published and it came out in 2010, but...

I also enjoy prepub articles online....since with a lot of them there is no numbering if it is just full text, how do you cite that thing? Especially with the internal citation which requires author name and page number? I have seen quite a few that have the entire page span put at the beginning of the article, but then no pagination is given.

I think I prefer JSTOR, MUSE or other sites that faithly reprint or create pdf images of the articles. And JSTOR used to provide citation help on how to list a JSTOR article in a bibliography.

Scavenger hunt and searching for a page

Professors are interesting creatures to deal with. If you do not work in academia, please read "The Edge Chronicles" to see what academics can be like with the professors of Sanctaphrax.

My second year working in serials (I work at my alma mater BA '96, MS-ITM '04), one of my former professors sent a non-English speaking student over to my office with a copied page from a journal. All that was on the copied page was part of a first paragraph. At the bottom of the page was part of the title of the serial, but no year or any other information. From what I could gather from the student, his assignment was to find the whole article and copy it.


I took the student to where we had the print serial and tried to convey to him that he now had 12 years of that serial to look through if he wanted to find it. And, of course, this was a serial that started numbering over with each issue. This meant that he would have had to go through 48 issues and look at each page number "45" to try and come across it. Well, the student did not speak enough English for this point to sink in and he kept looking at me blankly.


I took him down to the reference department and explained the problem. Fortunately, they were able to pull enough key words out of the paragraph and find the citation in a database. Whereupon he came back to me and I copied the article for the student to take to the professor.


An amusing p.s. to this story is that the professor had written the article originally. He was glad that we could help provide him with another copy of his article and the correct citation, because he wanted to reference it in another article he was writing!