Journal Tables of Contents Update

I posted just a couple of weeks ago about ways to keep track of journal tables of contents online.  I quickly got a very helpful comment from Roddy McLeod directing me to JournalTOCs, a resource similar to TicTOCs.  It lists 108 journals under Classical Studies, and 65 under Archaeology.  It also has an API, for you programmers out there.

I also, as a followup to my post about academia.edu, discovered that one can “follow” journals at that site, and in so doing, get links to newly published articles at the journal’s home page.  There are browseable lists of journals for specific disciplines, though they aren’t easy to find from the basic journals page.  Here are journals in Archaeology (91), Classical Archaeology (29) and Classics (10) – note there is overlap.  The journal following interface allows searching by keyword (including truncated keywords, like “librar” for library, librarian, etc.) as well as presenting journals in alphabetical order by title.  Another way to find journals of interest, especially if your research does not fall neatly into one discipline, is to look for a scholar who shares your research interests and see what journals she is following.

I couldn’t find any description of how journals are added and what digital tool is being used to get the tables of contents, but I did find that some journals that don’t make their tables of contents available by RSS do show up on the list (one example is the American Journal of Archaeology).  If a journal you’re interested in isn’t listed, there is a button to “suggest a new journal,” (on the right here) which asks for the title, home page, and description, and states that submissions will be reviewed (maybe even by a human!?!).  In general, Journals looks as though it is one of the newer features of the site (it’s not mentioned in the FAQ or their blog, and there’s no direct link from the header of the site), but it has a lot of potential.  They have a nice clean interface; they just need a librarian to help make sure ISSNs are included for all titles, work on searchability for article titles, and so much more…