Comparative Analysis of Professional Journals

For this assignment, I chose to compare the professional journals College & Research Libraries and Library Journal.

College & Research Libraries is a scholarly journal is an online-only publication that comes out bimonthly. The journal is a refereed journal that uses a double-blind review process. The editor first reviews the prepared manuscript to ensure it's relevancy to the journal. After the manuscript has been approved, it is reviewed at least twice, and then either accepted, accepted with revisions, or rejected. The overall process, the website notes, can take ten to twelve weeks. Authors who intend to publish in C&RL must submit manuscripts that are original and unpublished elsewhere. Furthermore, while the manuscript is under review, the author cannot submit it to other publications. After the article has been published in C&RL, however, the author may publish their work on an institutional or personal web page. Article topics include anything relevant to the scope of academic and research libraries. This includes not only original research, but commentary on issues academic librarians may face. The journal also publishes letters to the editor on a "space-provided" basis, as well as reviews on publications related to the college and research library field. C&RL is published with the academic librarian in mind. All of the articles are pertinent to that area of librarianship.

Library Journal is a professional journal that, as far as my research goes, is not a reviewed publication. LJ is, according to Ulrich (via Wikipedia), the library journal with the highest circulation. It is both online and in print, but the online forum has a wider array of topics and articles. The journal accepts both queries and finished articles regarding to any topic related to libraries of all types. The journal publishes a number of opinion pieces from librarians or about librarianship. Announcements, feedback to the editor, photos, and other tid-bits are all considered for publication. LJ is also known for it's extensive collection of reviews on LIS related material.

The Library Journal website is broken down into a number of different pages that each contain subcategories of their own. For instance, there is a page dedicated to "News," which has news relating to the topics of "Libraries & Librarians," "Research and Reference," "Archives," and "Publishing". There are pages on "Tech," "Opinion," and "Events". The "Reviews" page is one of the most popular offerings of the Library Journal, and it has resources for "Books," "Reference," "Media," as well as "Prepub Alert," which talking about what's going on in publishing, often discussing titles before publication.

While both of these journals are grounded in the realm of LIS, they are quite different from one another. C&RL is strict with its content, whereas the LJ publishes content covering the entire spectrum of librarianship. Opinion articles are regularly published on LJ, which is not something C&RL does, unless the opinion is found in a letter to the editor. For my personal interest in data and information, I would probably find LJ more relevant, although I would probably focus any primary research elsewhere. Or rather, I would use the content of LJ as a starting point for my research. There may be relevant articles in C&RL that would appeal to me during the course of my studies and career, but this would not be a journal I would reference frequently. The two journals, but LJ in particular, reinforce the diversity of the field of LIS. The LJ website is packed with articles, opinions, and reviews that are on a wide range of topics, which just shows how the modern librarian must be a jack of many trades.