When I was reading the Luker readings this week (particularly the discussions on journals), a previous assignment from INF1300 Foundations in Library & Information Science immediately came to mind. For this previous assignment, we were to select two peer-reviewed LIS journals for comparison, and examine the latest complete volume of the journal (depending on the journal one volume could be comprised of 4-12 issues). For each journal we had to identify general information, including: publisher, location of editorial office, editor, year of establishment, number of articles in each issue of the volume, etc. Then for the specific volume we were examining for each journal we were to identify for every article: author, title, general topic of the article, author's professional position, suspected primary audience (researchers/students, practitioners, or both); and present this data in a spreadsheet.
While that assignment did require a lot of work to go through one volume of two different journals for comparison, after the assignment was finished, I felt that I had completed a valuable professional learning experience. I became familiar with two professional LIS journals, including some of the topics each journal published on and their selection process. As Luker discussed, knowing the relevant journals that pertain to our research is important and very useful overall in the entire research process, and can guide us to journals that we might be interested in submitting our research for publication. But it can also be time consuming, especially if one is to go back five years, as Luker suggests. Luker makes excellent points in articulating how this process would be valuable, but as Claire stated, I think for myself at this point becoming more knowledgeable in the professional journals is a good starting point, and only after I have done this will I really consider practicing Luker's suggested five year journal reading process.
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