Are journal requests on topic?

Question

Along the lines of this question and the links to others within, there is some acceptance amongst the community when it comes to paper reference requests on a specific topic.

Would questions related to good/representative journals in a given field also be on topic? In some instances, for broad fields, the answer of "What journals are good and why?" are easily determined by things like the impact factor and number of citations. But for sub-fields, there is often a different set of journals that are better representative but are harder to find in the noise of the superset field.

So would a question like "What are the highest quality journals in numerical weather/atmospheric simulation?" be on-topic? It would need to be more than just a list-of-journals question of course. Some analysis would need to be done and say "Well X is good at numerical methods, while Y is good for understanding physics and Z has papers on forecasting. In the area of hurricanes, journal A is cutting-edge..." and so on.

Answer 1

I think they they should be on topic. Googling does not give value judgements and somebody who answers should do that. Value judgements with high scores would be useful for future users looking for similar sources.

Answer 2

As I see it, journal requests are basically equivalent to book recommendations, for a different kind of "book".

The official position of SEI is that such recommendation questions are not appropriate for Stack Exchange sites, and I kind of agree, because they can easily get out of hand. Right now, we do allow some book recommendations on the site, which hasn't caused problems because they are tightly controlled - we aggressively close those that don't fit into a particular pattern, or those that duplicate existing book recommendation questions. But having the book recommendations at all is really meant to be a temporary measure until we can transfer the information to the corresponding tag wikis, which is the best place for book lists. With that in mind, I think the tag wikis would also be the ideal place for listing journals. In the long term, each subfield tag could have sections for a list of books and a list of relevant journals within the field, and we can direct anyone looking for recommendations there.

So basically, my proposed answer is to not allow journal request questions, and just put the relevant information directly in the tag wikis from the start.

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To be clear, I'm talking about requests of the form "What journals are good for [topic]?" Other, more specific forms of questions asking about journals, like "Is [journal] a reliable source on [topic]?" seem OK to me with the soft-question tag, as long as we don't get swamped with them (which seems unlikely).