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.

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