[Web4lib] Revisionist history: journal title changes

[tomkeays at gmail.com]

On 6/13/07, Shirley Ainsworth <shirley at ibt.unam.mx> wrote:
> The growing number of digitized journal backfiles seems to be producing
> new problems (as well as solving others!)

Wiley's my pet peeve in this regard. They are famously careless about
how they categorize title changes and related titles. Mostly, this
manifests as incorrectly assigned ISSNs.

For example, they publish two titles for the American College of
Rheumatology, "Arthritis Care & Research" and "Arthritis &
Rheumatism". They also have combined backfiles for the two titles
going back to 1958.

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/jhome/77005015
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/jhome/76509746
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/jhome/112142621

Now, the thing is, if you hunt around for ISSN information for these
titles on their website, you eventually discover that they all tie
back to the same one, 0004-3591.

However, if you check Ulrich's, you'll see that "Arthritis Care &
Research" is 0004-3591 and "Arthritis & Rheumatism" is 0893-7524. The
electronic backfiles probably deserve their own separate ISSN as well,
but I haven't seen that that is the case.

Since the titles and the backfiles have separate urls, you might think
that this isn't so bad -- patrons can get to the content ok.

However, the incorrect assignment of ISSNs carries down to their
statistics module and that's where the unwary can get caught out. When
I look at Wiley COUNTER stats, I have to manually edit the ISSNs
assigned to "Arthritis & Rheumatism" and the backfiles before they can
be added to our usage database.
Tom