![\"\"](\"/assets/images/ia_ijc_abstract.png\")
The Internet Journal of Chemistry (IJC, issn:1099-8292) was one of the first scientific journals to get\npublished on the world wide web (part of the Internet), see doi:10.1080/00987913.2000.10764578.\nIssues were published from 1998 to 2004. But because it predates\nsystematic archiving of webpages by libraries, a lot is lost. The nature of the journal, however, makes it unique, and quite\na number of articles are cited a lot, and should be part of the scientific record.\nBut I soon realized it actually is quite hard to track down content of the journal. I knew some articles have been\nauthor accepted manuscripts online. One of that was my own first (and single) author-article, self-archived on\nZenodo (doi:10.5281/zenodo.1495470), green open access style.
\n\nI wanted to see what I could recover, and here I describe what I did and what could be done next.
\n\nThe first step is actually to create a list of all articles published in the IJC and collect as much metadata about\nthem as possible. With just over 100 articles, I decided to use Wikidata, as a machine-readable database, supporting the curation and reporting. I wanted at least\ntwo independent sources, and for Wikidata, use public resources. That means, while Web of Science does have a list of\nall articles, I only used this for validation, and not as information source. Instead, I used citations to IJC\narticles and, of course, the Internet Archive (IA). It turns out a query like this\ndoes wonders (well, for the abstracts; I did not find full-texts archived on IA):
\n\nhttps://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.ijc.com/abstracts/*\nI found that all but one article had the abstract archived in the IA. Here’s an example:
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This gave my a lot of information to add to Wikidata. Title, publication date, volume, article number, keywords, an absstract,\nand, of course, the list of authors. Some authors I know personally, many I did not. But it did allow me to enter all\narticles to Wikidata along with the authors and “author” (P50) or\n“author name string” (P2093).
\n\nIt also turned out that multiple authors listed their IJC article on their public ORCID profile.\nThat greatly helped identification. I managed to link many authors to mostly existing Wikidata items:
\n\n![\"\"](\"/assets/images/ijc_authors.png\")
I already mentioned that I used Wikidata to collect this information. Besides the interactive visualization with Scholia,\nit also gave me the option to track my progress with SPARQL queries. For example, this query helped\nme do that author FAIR-ification:
\n\n![\"\"](\"/assets/images/ijc_sparql1.png\")
You can see here two columns with author information, one for P50 and the other for P2093. There is quite some\nidentification left to be done, and additional information is welcome:
\n\n![\"\"](\"/assets/images/ijc_sparql2.png\")
So, that brings us to this list of sources:
\n\nBecause there is plenty of work left to be done and I hope the collected information will further spread\nin library collections, I added sources as much as possible. This query lists for all\narticles the Web of Science identifier (recorded so that everyone can check the consistency), the link\nto the Internet Archive-d abstract page, and a link to a known full text (five).
\n\nIf you wonder, neither OpenAlex\nor Europe PMC have a full list.
\n\nI do not have a formal training in archiving, but I am happy with the minimal viable metadata collection.\nI know more can be done (and love to hear your pointers and suggestions): more author identies,\nbetter coverage of keyword annotation, etc. But I think an important addition is adding citations\nto and from the IJC articles are important. The journal predates efforts like the I4OC and\nOpen Citations, so I may have to manually recover citations from Google Scholar.\nI will have to report on that later. But you can enjoy the citations that are\nalready there. And now that we have sufficient metadata,\nI can use this to find more full texts.
\n\nBtw, I have made contact with Prof. Steven Bachrach,\nwho founded the journal and was the Editor-in-Chief.
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