49 Volumes of Nihon Reoroji Gakkaishi (the Journal of the Society of Rheology, Japan)

Abstract

Nihon Reoroji Gakkaishi, the Journal of the Society of Rheology, Japan, has reached the milestone, the 50 th volume. We wish to rejoice with all the current and past members of the society in this memorable event. The first issue of our journal appeared in 1973 in conjunction with the founding of the society. In the greeting for the first issue, Professor Masao Horio , the founding president, expressed his pleasure at the launch of the journal. He described the role that the journal should play: to disseminate Japanese rheological research both domestically and internationally, introduce the situation overseas to the members, and enlighten knowledge through review articles and commentaries. These missions naturally came from the success of the 5 th International Congress on Rheology in Kyoto. (Remarkably, the Japanese rheologists organized the event before the foundation of the Japanese Society of Rheology.) Although the second one has been somewhat diminishing in recent years with the development of the internet and online publishing, the missions have been fulfilled by significant efforts by society members. In this article, let us retrospect the journal’s history according to some records to express our respect for the accumulated contributions. In our journal, we combine the bulletin and the scientific articles, and the latter part is available on-line . As seen in the table of contents on the web, one volume has been published each year, and each volume contains four issues before volume 30. The later volumes consist of 5 issues with a few exceptions. The total number of published articles is more than 1500 in 210 issues up to the volume 49, as seen in Fig. 1. However, only a part of the accumulated papers is listed in the scholarly article databases like Web of Science (WOS) and Scopus. For instance, in WOS, we can find less than 900 papers from our journal. The main reason of the discrepancy between the number of published papers and the number of listed papers in the database is that the databases are not complete, and they are still working to accommodate old documents. Apart from this external one, we have two issues: the journal name and the writing language of published papers. Concerning the journal name, “Nihon Reoroji Gakkaishi (日本レオロジー学会誌)” is unmistakable for Japanese speakers, meaning the Journal of the Society of Rheology, Japan. However, the spelling would be somewhat complicated for people who are not familiar with the Japanese language. Indeed, in the database, we can find some variations like Reoroji Aakkai, Reoroji Bakkai, Reoroji Gskkai, Reoroji Kakkai, etc. Besides, around 100 papers are seen in the database with the journal name in English: Journal of the Society of Rheology Japan. The citations with these variations are not correctly accumulated. This problem