Journal Title changes as in Citation Tool

[jpowell]

Hi. I just realized that back issues we have digitized and uploaded to OJS don't have the correct journal title in the "How to Cite an Item" article tool - if the title has changed over the years. They all say whatever the current title is...I don't suppose there is anything we can do about that short of having a different OJS installation for each iteration of the journal? One journal that has been in existence for over 40 years has changed its title and ISSN 3 times.
Thanks for any advice you may have...or is this something that could be worked on in the future?
Judy

[mgregson]

I've just come across this same issue with a journal I am migrating to OJS. Currently, the only options are to put an explanation on the Journal History page in the About section, or have separate journals.

The Journal History page was a response to this issue arising, see http://pkp.sfu.ca/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=4242. However, as Judy notes, this leaves OJS reporting erroneous citations and metadata. A quick scan shows a few places where the journal title is incorrect for back issues with different titles:

How to cite RT Tool
Indexing Metadata RT Tool
Article metadata in HTML source, and
Metadata in the OAI-PMH feed

It seems likely that this will lead to incorrectly cited articles. This may cause complications for bibliometrics but I predict that a reader possessing an incorrect citation would find their way to the website of the current incarnation of the journal (i.e., the one named in the reference) and from there find the correct article. Still, it would be nice to see this dealt with in a more comprehensive fashion.

Cheers
Mark

[asmecher]

Hi Mark,

If you're handy with PHP, I can suggest a modification that can accommodate this with minimal coding -- though of course you'll have to maintain it when it comes time e.g. to upgrade.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

[mgregson]

Hi Alex

Yes, please. If you can guide me along the path of least resistance, I'll be able to make a decision about implementing and maintaining it.

I take it there is no interest in addressing this in a future version?

Cheers
Mark

[asmecher]

Hi Mark,

I know of one user that created two separate journals in their OJS installation to represent each title. (This might be desirable for archival purposes, because then all the associated metadata e.g. ISSNs can be preserved separately as well.)

A simple modification could work like this:

• Modify Journal::getLocalizedTitle() to take a $article object as a parameter (classes/journal/Journal.inc.php); when an $article is supplied, use $article->getDatePublished() or similar to determine which title to return. If no $article is supplied (i.e. use a default of null for the parameter), behave as usual.
• In calling code that you want to behave according to this modification, pass in the $article object to Journal::getLocalizedTitle(). For citation formats, look in plugins/citationFormats/*/citation.tpl for {$journal->getLocalizedTitle()|escape} and change to e.g. {$journal->getLocalizedTitle($article)|escape}.

In itself, this feature is a little too fringe for me at the moment -- but we do have some upcoming metadata considerations that would make this kind of change easier to incorporate without a lot of coding, and in that case, we might well tackle it in a more structural way.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

[mgregson]

Thanks for the guidance, Alec. We are not going to implement this at the moment. We'll have a look at it again in the future but currently I favour splitting the prior journal incarnations off into separate journal sites.

Cheers
Mark