Wednesday, March 9, 2011

An Elusive Journal in My Field

I requested a fairly recent article (it was published in 2001) on the subject I'm working on right now through our university's Interlibrary Loan. Our library is pretty sucky but our library services (including ILL) are outstanding. They always deliver everything I request extremely fast. This article, however, they have not been able to locate in any of the collaborating libraries. They say they are "unable to find any libraries owning this journal that participate in Worldcat Resource Sharing."

I wrote to the article's author to see if he'd be willing to send me the text of the article. Its title sounds very interesting, and I don't want to submit my own article without consulting this previous study. Now my question is: does the difficulty in locating this journal mean the journal is not good? I was actually planning to submit my own article there but now I'm wondering whether it makes any sense to publish in a journal that nobody can find or consult later on.

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

If you want, I can scan/download it from my awesome library (I study at a UC).

Stringer

Clarissa said...

Thank you friend! Does your library have a journal called "Siglo diecinueve"? Year 2001?

Anonymous said...

Looks like I may have overpromised and underdelivered. Can't find this journal in my library, or in any other uc libraries. I hope that's because I don't know how to search for non-english terms effectively. Give this a try. If you can locate it, I'll get it for you.

http://melvyl.cdlib.org/F/?func=file&file_name=find-b&maleph=yes

(that's the entire UC libraries catalog)

Stringer

Clarissa said...

I don't think it's you at all. I think something is worng with the journal. Thank you for trying anyways!

Anonymous said...

One more try. In advanced search I searched for all journal titles beginning with the word 'Siglo'. I got 26 results. Can you find your journal in this list?

http://melvyl.cdlib.org/F/RCKYBBBVVUQIH78KP8J4F9NQKURRPKAS75HRPHLDQ6JTHHLBA6-01630?func=short-0&set_number=019429

Stringer

Clarissa said...

That is, indeed, a good library. :-) But the journal isn't there. I'm now seriously doubting whether to submit to that journal at all.

This is too weird.

But thank you anyways!

Anonymous said...

PQ6001. S54

I can request it at my library (which also has an awesome Interlibrary Loan Service) and scan the article to you.

Ol.

Clarissa said...

Really? It's called "El abuelo galdosiano o la redencion de Edipo" by Andres-Gil, carlos M. Siglo diecinueve 6 (2000): 59-67.

I'd be very grateful!

Jonathan said...

I wouldn't publish there. I'm married to someone in the field and she's never published there (in a long career with many publications.)

Clarissa said...

That's good to know. I saw that somebody who has a great record of publications published there several times. Now, however, I realize that there is something wrong with this journal.