Employing “Issue” and “Number” in the enumeration of scientific journal releases: A brief analysis of foreign practice

Introduction. Publishers of scientific journals use the terms “Issue” and “Number” to denote individual issues of their publications. There are discussions within the professional community of scientific editors about the legitimacy of using one term over the other.

Purpose. To analyse the practice of foreign journals regarding the marking of their issues with the terms Issue (Iss.) and Number (No.) to justify a strategy for the correct use of these terms in Russian scientific journals that have English-language or parallel bilingual titles.

Materials and Methods. Policies of 130 foreign scientific journals indexed in the international scientometric database Scopus were analysed. All journals are distributed as open-access, are published in different countries, and cover various subject fields. An examination was carried out on the Archive section found on the official websites of the chosen journals, along with their covers and layouts available on these sites, to monitor the practices used in marking the issues.

Results and Discussion. It has been found that there is no unification of issue numbering in the global scientific periodical press. The term Issue is frequently used on the websites of scientific journals, while the term Number, or no letter designation at all, is more often used on covers and other layout elements. This trend is characteristic both for the entire sample and for groups of journals grouped by individual features of belonging: to one country, to one language group of countries, to one scientific specialty. The exception is publications of major publishing houses, which use one publishing platform and / or uniform requirements for the journal format (House Style Guide) for all their journals, and thus regulate the numbering of issues.

Conclusion. The accumulated international experience can contribute to the development of a unified approach to the presentation of issue numbering in Russian scientific journals and, as a result, to changes in normative documents and methodological recommendations.

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