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Original Article
Publishing trends of journals and articles in Journal Citation Reports during the COVID-19 pandemic: a descriptive study
Sang-Jun Kim1orcid, Kay Sook Park2orcid
Science Editing 2023;10(1):78-86.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.6087/kcse.300
Published online: February 16, 2023

1Korea Research Institute of Bioscience and Biotechnology, Daejeon, Korea

2Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, Daejeon, Korea

Correspondence to Sang-Jun Kim sjkim@kribb.re.kr
• Received: January 21, 2023   • Accepted: February 5, 2023

Copyright © 2023 Korean Council of Science Editors

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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  • Purpose
    This study aimed to investigate the changes that occurred in journal and article publishing during the noncontact period that started in 2020 due to COVID-19.
  • Methods
    The integrated journal list in Journal Citation Reports (JCR) 2017–2021 and the search results of Web of Science were analyzed using pivot tables in Microsoft Excel. The articles, citations, impact factor (IF), publishers, open access (OA) status, and compound annual growth rate (CAGR) were investigated using the data.
  • Results
    The CAGRs of articles, citations, and IFs in JCR journals increased throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, the increase in OA articles was accompanied by a decreasing share of subscription articles. The top 20 journals in JCR-SCIE (Science Citation Index Expanded), based on the number of articles, accepted OA policies and showed a strong influence, accounting for 7% to 9% of all articles. MDPI and Frontiers were OA publishers included among the top 10 publishers. Large publishers maintained their competitiveness through mergers and acquisitions with OA publishers. Due to the rapid distribution of OA and early access articles as part of the international response to overcome COVID-19, the CAGRs of citations and IFs increased more than that of articles, and the publication and use of journal articles have become more active.
  • Conclusion
    The publication and use trends in JCR journals analyzed herein will provide useful information for researchers’ selection of journals for article submission, analyses of research performance, and libraries’ journal subscription contracts.
Background/rationale
Understanding scholarly communication, including the publication, use, citation, and utilization of articles, is an important factor for journal publishing stakeholders. Analyzing journal publication status by year would make it possible to partially grasp changes in article publishing and publishers. However, analyzing all journals would be a difficult task in terms of data collection, and doing so might cause regional characteristics to be overreflected. Thus, Journal Citation Reports (JCR) is an appropriate tool for analyzing global journal publishing trends, since its journals are evaluated rigorously based on the Web of Science (WoS). Accordingly, the authors have presented articles [15] based on the JCR for Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) and Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI).
Until the 2019 version, JCR provided only SCIE and SSCI journal data in WoS. Since the 2020 version, the Arts & Humanities Citation Index (AHCI) and Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) began to be included, albeit without the immediacy index and impact factor (IF). Even if the final publication year has not yet been confirmed, the time when articles are first made available is important for their citation analysis. For early access (EA) articles, the year of online publication has been applied as the publication year since JCR 2020 [6]. During the noncontact period due to COVID-19, when all opportunities for face-to-face communications were closed, journals were the most appropriate means for information sharing, as the rapid distribution of reliable research information was more urgently needed than ever before. In addition, the open access (OA) movement, which began with the goal of sharing articles across borders, became a catalyst for information distribution during the COVID-19 pandemic and led to many changes in journal and article publishing [7]. Accordingly, the authors determined that it was necessary to investigate further the publication trends of journals and articles during the COVID-19 period following previous studies [15]. This study was conducted to expand previous research to JCR 2021 data.
Objectives
The COVID-19 pandemic, which has rapidly spread throughout the world since 2020, completely paralyzed not only international travel but also conferences for face-to-face information exchange among researchers. The efforts of researchers and countries to end this pandemic by developing new vaccines and treatments have stimulated intense competition for primacy and rapid distribution of research results. The purpose of this study was to investigate the changes that have occurred in the publication of articles in journals during the noncontact period caused by COVID-19.
Ethics statement
This was not a study with human subjects, so neither Institutional Review Board approval nor informed consent was required.
Study design
This was a literature database-based descriptive study.
Data collection
JCR 2021 data released in June 2022 was downloaded as a text file. The journal list [5] in JCR 2017 to 2020 and the new JCR 2021 data were combined by unique journal. The same journals were integrated into a single Microsoft Excel (Microsoft Corp) file using journal names and International Standard Serial Numbers, and affiliated publishers were classified by applying subsequent changes according to the holding company, as shown in Suppl. 1.
From the JCR 2017–2021 data, articles, citations, and IFs of journals with one or more citable items (research and review articles in WoS) were analyzed. In order to supplement the OA status of articles according to Unpaywall’s OA classification, WoS was searched in December 2022. OA status, implying that articles are usable free of charge at any time, is important for users; therefore, only gold and hybrid OA articles in WoS were classified as OA articles in JCR, with the exclusion of tentative green OA. These collected research data from JCR and WoS were analyzed using pivot tables in Microsoft Excel.
Statistical methods
Data were tabulated based on descriptive statistics, and the proportions of the cells were calculated. The growth rate (%) was calculated annually, and the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) was used to compare the situation before and during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Publishing journals and articles in JCR
Table 1 shows journals, articles, citations, IFs, and publishers in JCR 2017–2021. As AHCI and ESCI journals were added since JCR 2020, the proportion of SCIE articles in JCR was 78.8% in 2021, reflecting a decrease from over 90% prior to the inclusion of those databases. Considering the high overlap of SSCI journals with SCIE (34.7% of SSCI articles), an analysis focusing on SCIE was sufficient to identify publishing trends of journals and articles in JCR. As can be seen in Table 1, a comparison of the CAGR for all journals and non-SCIE journals lost its meaning as JCR’s coverage changed since 2020. Considering the further decreases in the CAGRs of journals and publishers in SCIE, with little change in coverage, it is remarkable that articles, citations, and IFs showed an unusual increase of more than 20% in 2020, and the CAGRs through 2021 were higher than those observed until 2019. Although the rate of increase in articles returned to the previous year’s level in 2021, the citations and IFs still increased by rates of more than 10%. As the CAGRs of articles, citations, and IFs exceeded 10% over 5 years, all three CAGRs increased more than had been observed until 2019, and article publication and use were more active from 2020 onwards. As a result, the annual number of articles per SCIE journal increased significantly from an average of 166 in 2017 to 226 in 2021.
Large publishers and journals in JCR
Table 2 shows the top 10 publishers based on SCIE articles in JCR 2021. The share of articles, citations, and IFs of the top 10 publishers was about 70%, but the share of articles in 2021 revealed a concentration of over 75%, reflecting an increase of 7% from 2017. Elsevier showed the largest influence, with the highest share of articles, citations, and IFs over the past 5 years. Elsevier, Springer, and Wiley maintained their competitiveness, with a collective share of around 50%. Although their share of articles decreased in 2021 compared to 2017, citations and IFs increased rather more. MDPI and Frontiers, which specialize in OA publishing, entered the top 10 publishers within a short time. In particular, MDPI surpassed Wiley to rank third in the 2021 article share. There was little change in the number of publishers in JCR, but the OA publishing communities experienced fierce competition through mergers and acquisitions (M&As) [8,9] with large publishers; for instance, BioMed Central was acquired by Springer, and Hindawi was acquired by Wiley.
As shown in Table 3, the top 20 journals on the basis of articles were all classified as SCIE in JCR 2017–2021. Among them, 14 journals were OA-specialized journals and the remaining six were hybrid journals. OA journals that published a large amount of OA articles played an important role in the formation of large journals. The number of articles in the top 20 journals gradually increased by 7% to 9% in SCIE, and their CAGR increased from 14% in 2019 to 17% in 2021. The article proportion of eight MDPI journals in SCIE also increased gradually, from 1.1% in 2017 to 2.6% in 2019 and 3.9% in 2021. All seven journals publishing more than 10,000 articles annually in 2021 were OA journals. In the five journals excluding Scientific Reports and PLoS One, articles surged in 2021 compared to 2017, and their article CAGR was much higher than that of the other top 20 journals. As a result, the number of large journals in SCIE almost doubled from 2017 to 2021; specifically, the number of journals containing more than 1,000 articles per year increased from 145 to 335 and that of journals publishing more than 500 articles per year increased from 453 to 823.
Journals continuously included in JCR
As shown in Table 4, the journals that had been continuously included in JCR 2017–2021 accounted for more than 90% of the share of articles, citations, and IFs until 2019. After the addition of AHCI and ESCI data since JCR 2020, the article share of non-SCIE journals that had been continuously included in JCR decreased significantly, which contributed to a decrease in this proportion among all JCR journals. However, in an analysis limited to SCIE journals that had been continuously included in JCR, although their share of articles and IFs slightly decreased since 2020, their share of citations remained more than 97%. Continuously indexed SCIE journals ultimately accounted for 94.7% of the total JCR articles, and were a great boost to the stable growth of JCR.
OA and subscription articles in JCR
Although JCR has some OA information for each journal, it is difficult to check the current status of all journals. The search results from 2017 to 2021 in WoS, which displays OA status and type for each article, are shown in Table 5. The JCR data are based on WoS, and the two data sources are quite similar. Therefore, the current status of OA articles in JCR was estimated using WoS data. In WoS, the increase in OA articles continued over the past 5 years, with gold and hybrid OA articles showing much higher CAGRs than subscription articles. The CAGR of gold OA was higher than that of hybrid OA in SCIE journals, but the opposite was true for non-SCIE journals. The percentage of gold and hybrid OA articles in WoS was 38.3% in 2021, after entering the 30% range in 2020 for SCIE journals and in 2019 for non-SCIE journals, respectively. As the percentage of OA articles showed a high increase (around 10%) in the 5-year CAGR, the proportion of subscription articles is expected to decrease further.
Contribution of OA and EA articles to rapid information exchange during the COVID-19 pandemic
As presented in Table 1, the CAGR of JCR-SCIE articles was over 10%, showing an exceptional surge of over 20% in 2020. Although the number of articles changed slightly by search time, the share of OA articles was about 38% in WoS, while their CAGR remained around 20% (Table 5). To understand the status of articles during the COVID-19 pandemic, articles related to COVID-19 (i.e., using terms such as “COVID-19” OR “SARS-CoV-2” OR “Corona virus 2” OR “post covid” OR “chronic covid” in WoS) were searched in December 2022, as shown in Table 6. The percentage of OA articles related to COVID-19 was nearly 50%. In order to end the pandemic, publishers endeavored in several ways to help academics rapidly develop vaccines and treatments, including expanding OA publishing, rapid peer review of articles (most COVID-19 articles were published faster than the journals’ average [10]), and article processing charge (APC) discounts for some journals. These collaborative international responses between the publishing industry and academia contributed to the rapid distribution of research information. In this situation, publication and research activities in SCIE journals, including research on COVID-19, were steady even during the noncontact period. In contrast, in non-SCIE journals, which were likely to have been less strongly affected by the pandemic, research activities were reduced, with a lower increase rate of articles than in the past. However, the number of COVID-19–related articles in those journals increased considerably.
Some articles published online may have a difference between the official publication year and the EA year. For EA articles published online in 2020, if their final publication was not confirmed, JCR started to classify them as 2020 articles since JCR 2020. When the final issue of an EA article is announced, the EA year is changed to the publication year in WoS. As shown in Tables 1 and 5, there was a large difference in the proportional increase of articles in 2020 between JCR and WoS. The introduction of EA articles in JCR 2020 is likely to have had some impact on this difference. As shown in Table 6, WoS was searched in December 2022 to estimate the magnitude of EA articles in JCR. As the search time became more recent, the number of EA articles in WoS decreased. The expansion of online publishing expedited users’ access to new research articles. Therefore, OA and EA articles are judged to have influenced the rapid increase of articles, along with the journals continuously included in JCR, large publishers, and large journals. Taking into account the sudden increase of OA articles and CAGRs in citations and IFs since 2020, as shown in Table 1, the increase in OA and EA articles may have contributed to the rapid exchange of research information during the COVID-19 pandemic.
OA journals having both competitiveness and a fast review policy
Driven by researchers’ demands for the rapid presentation and sharing of research results despite the burden imposed by APCs, OA-specialized journals with fast review policies have grown rapidly since COVID-19 in JCR, as shown in Table 3. Compared to the journals listed in JCR 2014–2019, which published 128 articles per year [4], some OA-specialized journals have recently been publishing thousands of articles per year. The review quality of some OA journals has even been questioned due to the very rapid screening of articles and frequent publishing of special issues [11]. MDPI, which publishes articles within an average review period of 38 days [12], has more than 205 OA journals in JCR. As presented in Table 2, MDPI quickly became one of the top three publishers and accounted for 9.7% of articles in 2021, but its share of citations and IFs, which are correlated with articles’ quality, was still not comparable to those of other large publishers. Table 7 shows the time required for articles from submission to publication according to data from the Korea Research Institute of Bioscience and Biotechnology. MDPI (39 days) completed publication within one-third of the average time for non-MDPI journals (141 days).
Conclusion
The higher growth rate observed for citations and IFs than for journals and articles in JCR shows that there have been changes in article use. The increasing publication of OA and EA articles contributed to the rapid distribution of research information during the noncontact pandemic period. OA articles played a role in the surge of articles, while the proportion of subscription articles decreased. As OA publishing became more active during the COVID-19 pandemic, rapidly growing MDPI became one of the top three publishers, and fierce competition for M&As with OA publishers ensued. The journal industry is predicted to continue changing faster than before. All journal stakeholders need to recognize recent trends in journal publishing and the use of articles. This study provides useful information for tasks such as journal selection for article submission, analyses of article performance, and journal subscription contracts.

Conflict of Interest

No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for this article.

Data Availability

Most of the raw data in this paper are various indicators of Journal Citation Reports, which is sold as a paid commercial database; therefore, sharing is not available. Please contact the corresponding author for raw data availability.

Supplementary file is available from https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/5ROUM8.
Suppl. 1.
Top publishers’ imprints referenced by Scopus’s classification and the authors’ research.
kcse-300-Supplementary-1.xlsx
Table 1.
Journals and articles in JCR
JCR 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 CAGR to 2019 CAGR to 2021
All
Item
Journal 11,559 11,776 12,075 20,418 20,916 2.2 16.0
Article 1,597,875 1,705,575 1,802,408 2,557,584 2,729,153 6.2 14.3
Citation 64,180,698 70,294,170 75,509,184 97,285,376 110,730,545 8.5 14.6
IF 26,960 29,348 31,872 41,247 48,298 8.7 15.7
Publisher 1,824 1,814 1,822 4,293 4,267 –0.1 23.7
Growth (%)
Journal - 1.9 2.5 69.1 2.4 - -
Article - 6.7 5.7 41.9 6.7 - -
Citation - 9.5 7.4 28.8 13.8 - -
IF - 8.9 8.6 29.4 17.1 - -
Publisher - –0.5 0.4 135.6 –0.6 - -
SCIE
Item
Journal 8,831 9,028 9,273 9,523 9,524 2.5 1.9
Article 1,463,785 1,568,118 1,661,422 2,017,881 2,150,241 6.5 10.1
Citation 59,258,465 64,821,289 69,669,593 87,051,731 99,045,970 8.4 13.7
IF 22,867 24,850 27,019 34,338 40,543 8.7 15.4
Publisher 1,467 1,474 1,486 1,509 1,484 0.6 0.3
Growth (%)
Journal - 2.2 2.7 2.7 0.0 - -
Article - 7.1 6.0 21.5 6.6 - -
Citation - 9.4 7.5 24.9 13.8 - -
IF - 8.7 8.7 27.1 18.1 - -
Publisher - 0.5 0.8 1.5 –1.7 - -
Non-SCIE
Item
Journal 2,728 2,748 2,802 10,895 11,392 1.3 43.0
Article 134,090 137,457 140,986 539,703 578,912 2.5 44.1
Citation 4,922,233 5,472,881 5,839,591 10,233,645 11,684,575 8.9 24.1
IF 4,093 4,498 4,853 6,909 7,755 8.9 17.3
Publisher 357 340 336 2,784 2,783 –3.0 67.1
Growth (%)
Journal - 0.7 2.0 288.8 4.6 - -
Article - 2.5 2.6 282.8 7.3 - -
Citation - 11.2 6.7 75.2 14.2 - -
IF - 9.9 7.9 42.4 12.2 - -
Publisher - –4.8 –1.2 728.6 0.0 - -

JCR, Journal Citation Reports; CAGR, compound annual growth rate; IF, impact factor; SCIE, Science Citation Index Expanded.

Table 2.
Top 10 publishers in JCR-SCIE
Publisher Article share (%)
Citation share (%)
IF share (%)
2017 2021 2017 2021 2017 2021
Elsevier 25.7 26.3 28.1 29.6 23.3 25.1
Springer 15.2 13.6 12.2 13.4 18.3 20.0
MDPI 1.9 9.7 0.4 2.0 0.5 0.9
Wiley 10.2 9.0 11.0 10.4 12.8 11.1
Taylor & Francis 4.0 3.7 2.3 2.5 5.4 5.3
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers 2.5 3.2 2.3 2.5 2.4 2.3
Frontiers 1.0 3.2 0.3 1.0 0.4 0.6
American Chemical Society 3.1 2.8 5.4 4.7 1.6 1.2
Oxford University Press 2.3 2.0 3.8 3.4 2.9 2.7
Royal Society of Chemistry 2.3 1.8 2.1 2.1 1.1 0.9
Total 68.2 75.3 67.9 71.6 68.7 70.1

JCR, Journal Citation Reports; SCIE, Science Citation Index Expanded; IF, impact factor.

Table 3.
Top 20 journals in JCR
Journal Publisher Type 2017 2019 2021 CAGR to 2019 CAGR to 2021
Scientific Reports Springer OA 24,809 19,873 23,363 –10.5 –1.5
PLoS One PLoS OA 20,328 11,244 15,430 –25.6 –6.7
IEEE Access IEEE OA 2,221 14,985 12,388 159.7 53.7
Sustainability MDPI OA 2,346 7,184 13,769 75.0 55.6
International Journal of Molecular Sciences MDPI OA 2,727 6,273 13,382 51.7 48.8
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health MDPI OA 1,568 5,093 13,064 80.2 69.9
Applied Sciences MDPI OA 1,313 5,186 11,798 98.7 73.1
Science of Total Environment Elsevier Hybrid 2,717 6,247 9,349 51.6 36.2
Sensors MDPI OA 2,945 5,528 8,332 37.0 29.7
Nature Communications Springer OA 4,316 5,469 6,938 12.6 12.6
ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces ACS Hybrid 4,862 5,181 6,156 3.2 6.1
Energies MDPI OA 2,161 4,783 8,369 48.8 40.3
Physical Review B APS Hybrid 5,374 5,023 5,042 –3.3 –1.6
RSC Advances RSC OA 6,554 4,583 4,036 –16.4 –11.4
Molecules MDPI OA 2,223 4,583 7,528 43.6 35.7
Journal of Alloys and Compounds Elsevier Hybrid 4,708 4,845 5,990 1.4 6.2
Medicine Kluwer OA 3,593 4,464 4,418 11.5 5.3
Materials MDPI OA 1,443 4,207 7,713 70.7 52.1
Journal of Cleaner Production Elsevier Hybrid 2,741 4,059 5,361 21.7 18.3
Environmental Science and Pollution Research Springer Hybrid 2,454 3,097 5,794 12.3 24.0
Total no. of articles - - 101,403 131,907 188,220 14.1 16.7
Share of articles in JCR-SCIE (%) - - 6.9 7.9 8.8 - -

JCR, Journal Citation Reports; CAGR, compound annual growth rate; OA, open access; SCIE, Science Citation Index Expanded.

Table 4.
Continuous journals in JCR
JCR 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 CAGR to 2019 CAGR to 2021
All (11,079 journals)
Item
Article 1,562,770 1,654,595 1,723,391 2,058,916 2,118,676 5.0 7.9
Citation 63,415,537 69,406,900 74,304,193 93,019,897 104,698,313 8.2 13.4
IF 26,313 28,040 29,447 37,219 42,511 5.8 12.7
Share (%)
Article 97.8 97.0 95.6 80.5 77.6 - -
Citation 98.8 98.7 98.4 95.6 94.6 - -
IF 97.6 95.5 92.4 90.2 88.0 - -
SCIE (8,566 journals)
Item
Article 1,441,431 1,528,604 1,595,562 1,881,227 1,948,891 5.2 7.8
Citation 58,767,978 64,149,542 68,705,362 85,282,231 96,378,624 8.1 13.2
IF 22,474 23,848 25,024 30,878 35,558 5.5 12.2
Share (%)
Article 98.5 97.5 96.0 93.2 90.6 - -
Citation 99.2 99.0 98.6 98.0 97.3 - -
IF 98.3 96.0 92.6 89.9 87.7 - -
Non-SCIE (2,513 journals)
Item
Article 121,339 125,991 127,829 177,689 169,785 2.6 8.8
Citation 4,647,559 5,257,358 5,598,831 7,737,666 8,319,689 9.8 15.7
IF 3,839 4,192 4,423 6,341 6,953 7.3 16.0
Share (%)
Article 90.5 91.7 90.7 32.9 29.3 - -
Citation 94.4 96.1 95.9 75.6 71.2 - -
IF 93.8 93.2 91.1 91.8 89.7 - -

JCR, Journal Citation Reports; CAGR, compound annual growth rate; IF, impact factor; SCIE, Science Citation Index Expanded.

Table 5.
Estimated OA articles in JCR from search results of WoS
WoS 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 CAGR to 2019 CAGR to 2021
All
Article
Gold 402,581 462,280 574,264 719,423 859,335 19.4 20.9
Hybrid 89,464 100,045 122,371 165,522 201,523 17.0 22.5
Subscription 1,465,693 1,502,796 1,620,709 1,662,777 1,710,623 5.2 3.9
All 1,957,738 2,065,121 2,317,344 2,547,722 2,771,481 8.8 9.1
Growth (%)
Gold - 14.8 24.2 25.3 19.4 - -
Hybrid - 11.8 22.3 35.3 21.7 - -
Subscription - 2.5 7.8 2.6 2.9 - -
All - 5.5 12.2 9.9 8.8 - -
OA
Article 492,045 562,325 696,635 884,945 1,060,858 19.0 21.2
Percentage 25.1 27.2 30.1 34.7 38.3 9.4 11.1
SCIE
Article
Gold 298,715 340,511 430,544 546,536 665,679 20.1 22.2
Hybrid 77,345 87,561 104,225 136,211 157,806 16.1 19.5
Subscription 1,153,967 1,184,390 1,263,342 1,288,056 1,341,645 4.6 3.8
All 1,530,027 1,612,462 1,798,111 1,970,803 2,165,130 8.4 9.1
Growth (%)
Gold - 14.0 26.4 26.9 21.8 - -
Hybrid - 13.2 19.0 30.7 15.9 - -
Subscription - 2.6 6.7 2.0 4.2 - -
All - 5.4 11.5 9.6 9.9 - -
OA
Article 376,060 428,072 534,769 682,747 823,485 19.2 21.6
Percentage 24.6 26.5 29.7 34.6 38.0 10.0 11.5
Non-SCIE
Article
Gold 103,866 121,769 143,720 172,887 193,656 17.6 16.9
Hybrid 12,119 12,484 18,146 29,311 43,717 22.4 37.8
Subscription 311,726 318,406 357,367 374,721 368,978 7.1 4.3
All 427,711 452,659 519,233 576,919 606,351 10.2 9.1
Growth (%)
Gold - 17.2 18.0 20.3 12.0 - -
Hybrid - 3.0 45.4 61.5 49.1 - -
Subscription - 2.1 12.2 4.9 -1.5 - -
All - 5.8 14.7 11.1 5.1 - -
OA
Article 115,985 134,253 161,866 202,198 237,373 18.1 19.6
Percentage 27.1 29.7 31.2 35.0 39.1 7.2 9.6

OA, open access; JCR, Journal Citation Reports; WoS, Web of Science; CAGR, compound annual growth rate; SCIE, Science Citation Index Expanded.

Table 6.
COVID-19 and early access articles in WoS
WoS COVID-19 article
OA article in COVID-19 (share) (%)
Early access article
2020 2021 2020 2021 2020 2021
All 53,151 116,919 22,583 (42.5) 56,010 (47.9) 7,614 55,036
SCIE 34,955 76,486 15,205 (43.5) 38,865 (50.8) 4,179 29,827
Non-SCIE 18,196 40,433 7,378 (40.5) 17,145 (42.4) 3,435 25,209

WoS, Web of Science; OA, open access; SCIE, Science Citation Index Expanded.

Table 7.
Duration for publishing articles for KRIBB researchers
KRIBB article Submit to accept
Accept to publish
Submit to publish
Average day No. of articles Average day No. of articles Average day No. of articles
Year
2020 99 690 16 506 117 503
2021 93 611 17 487 108 486
All 96 1,301 17 993 113 989
Publisher
MDPI 36 274 3 274 39 274
Elsevier 115 266 8 224 123 223
Springer 141 239 26 229 169 228
Wiley 125 92 36 33 172 33
Frontiers 103 59 26 59 129 59
Others 90 371 29 175 124 172

KRIBB, Korea Research Institute of Bioscience and Biotechnology.

Figure & Data

References

    Citations

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    Publishing trends of journals and articles in Journal Citation Reports during the COVID-19 pandemic: a descriptive study
    Publishing trends of journals and articles in Journal Citation Reports during the COVID-19 pandemic: a descriptive study
    JCR 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 CAGR to 2019 CAGR to 2021
    All
    Item
    Journal 11,559 11,776 12,075 20,418 20,916 2.2 16.0
    Article 1,597,875 1,705,575 1,802,408 2,557,584 2,729,153 6.2 14.3
    Citation 64,180,698 70,294,170 75,509,184 97,285,376 110,730,545 8.5 14.6
    IF 26,960 29,348 31,872 41,247 48,298 8.7 15.7
    Publisher 1,824 1,814 1,822 4,293 4,267 –0.1 23.7
    Growth (%)
    Journal - 1.9 2.5 69.1 2.4 - -
    Article - 6.7 5.7 41.9 6.7 - -
    Citation - 9.5 7.4 28.8 13.8 - -
    IF - 8.9 8.6 29.4 17.1 - -
    Publisher - –0.5 0.4 135.6 –0.6 - -
    SCIE
    Item
    Journal 8,831 9,028 9,273 9,523 9,524 2.5 1.9
    Article 1,463,785 1,568,118 1,661,422 2,017,881 2,150,241 6.5 10.1
    Citation 59,258,465 64,821,289 69,669,593 87,051,731 99,045,970 8.4 13.7
    IF 22,867 24,850 27,019 34,338 40,543 8.7 15.4
    Publisher 1,467 1,474 1,486 1,509 1,484 0.6 0.3
    Growth (%)
    Journal - 2.2 2.7 2.7 0.0 - -
    Article - 7.1 6.0 21.5 6.6 - -
    Citation - 9.4 7.5 24.9 13.8 - -
    IF - 8.7 8.7 27.1 18.1 - -
    Publisher - 0.5 0.8 1.5 –1.7 - -
    Non-SCIE
    Item
    Journal 2,728 2,748 2,802 10,895 11,392 1.3 43.0
    Article 134,090 137,457 140,986 539,703 578,912 2.5 44.1
    Citation 4,922,233 5,472,881 5,839,591 10,233,645 11,684,575 8.9 24.1
    IF 4,093 4,498 4,853 6,909 7,755 8.9 17.3
    Publisher 357 340 336 2,784 2,783 –3.0 67.1
    Growth (%)
    Journal - 0.7 2.0 288.8 4.6 - -
    Article - 2.5 2.6 282.8 7.3 - -
    Citation - 11.2 6.7 75.2 14.2 - -
    IF - 9.9 7.9 42.4 12.2 - -
    Publisher - –4.8 –1.2 728.6 0.0 - -
    Publisher Article share (%)
    Citation share (%)
    IF share (%)
    2017 2021 2017 2021 2017 2021
    Elsevier 25.7 26.3 28.1 29.6 23.3 25.1
    Springer 15.2 13.6 12.2 13.4 18.3 20.0
    MDPI 1.9 9.7 0.4 2.0 0.5 0.9
    Wiley 10.2 9.0 11.0 10.4 12.8 11.1
    Taylor & Francis 4.0 3.7 2.3 2.5 5.4 5.3
    Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers 2.5 3.2 2.3 2.5 2.4 2.3
    Frontiers 1.0 3.2 0.3 1.0 0.4 0.6
    American Chemical Society 3.1 2.8 5.4 4.7 1.6 1.2
    Oxford University Press 2.3 2.0 3.8 3.4 2.9 2.7
    Royal Society of Chemistry 2.3 1.8 2.1 2.1 1.1 0.9
    Total 68.2 75.3 67.9 71.6 68.7 70.1
    Journal Publisher Type 2017 2019 2021 CAGR to 2019 CAGR to 2021
    Scientific Reports Springer OA 24,809 19,873 23,363 –10.5 –1.5
    PLoS One PLoS OA 20,328 11,244 15,430 –25.6 –6.7
    IEEE Access IEEE OA 2,221 14,985 12,388 159.7 53.7
    Sustainability MDPI OA 2,346 7,184 13,769 75.0 55.6
    International Journal of Molecular Sciences MDPI OA 2,727 6,273 13,382 51.7 48.8
    International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health MDPI OA 1,568 5,093 13,064 80.2 69.9
    Applied Sciences MDPI OA 1,313 5,186 11,798 98.7 73.1
    Science of Total Environment Elsevier Hybrid 2,717 6,247 9,349 51.6 36.2
    Sensors MDPI OA 2,945 5,528 8,332 37.0 29.7
    Nature Communications Springer OA 4,316 5,469 6,938 12.6 12.6
    ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces ACS Hybrid 4,862 5,181 6,156 3.2 6.1
    Energies MDPI OA 2,161 4,783 8,369 48.8 40.3
    Physical Review B APS Hybrid 5,374 5,023 5,042 –3.3 –1.6
    RSC Advances RSC OA 6,554 4,583 4,036 –16.4 –11.4
    Molecules MDPI OA 2,223 4,583 7,528 43.6 35.7
    Journal of Alloys and Compounds Elsevier Hybrid 4,708 4,845 5,990 1.4 6.2
    Medicine Kluwer OA 3,593 4,464 4,418 11.5 5.3
    Materials MDPI OA 1,443 4,207 7,713 70.7 52.1
    Journal of Cleaner Production Elsevier Hybrid 2,741 4,059 5,361 21.7 18.3
    Environmental Science and Pollution Research Springer Hybrid 2,454 3,097 5,794 12.3 24.0
    Total no. of articles - - 101,403 131,907 188,220 14.1 16.7
    Share of articles in JCR-SCIE (%) - - 6.9 7.9 8.8 - -
    JCR 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 CAGR to 2019 CAGR to 2021
    All (11,079 journals)
    Item
    Article 1,562,770 1,654,595 1,723,391 2,058,916 2,118,676 5.0 7.9
    Citation 63,415,537 69,406,900 74,304,193 93,019,897 104,698,313 8.2 13.4
    IF 26,313 28,040 29,447 37,219 42,511 5.8 12.7
    Share (%)
    Article 97.8 97.0 95.6 80.5 77.6 - -
    Citation 98.8 98.7 98.4 95.6 94.6 - -
    IF 97.6 95.5 92.4 90.2 88.0 - -
    SCIE (8,566 journals)
    Item
    Article 1,441,431 1,528,604 1,595,562 1,881,227 1,948,891 5.2 7.8
    Citation 58,767,978 64,149,542 68,705,362 85,282,231 96,378,624 8.1 13.2
    IF 22,474 23,848 25,024 30,878 35,558 5.5 12.2
    Share (%)
    Article 98.5 97.5 96.0 93.2 90.6 - -
    Citation 99.2 99.0 98.6 98.0 97.3 - -
    IF 98.3 96.0 92.6 89.9 87.7 - -
    Non-SCIE (2,513 journals)
    Item
    Article 121,339 125,991 127,829 177,689 169,785 2.6 8.8
    Citation 4,647,559 5,257,358 5,598,831 7,737,666 8,319,689 9.8 15.7
    IF 3,839 4,192 4,423 6,341 6,953 7.3 16.0
    Share (%)
    Article 90.5 91.7 90.7 32.9 29.3 - -
    Citation 94.4 96.1 95.9 75.6 71.2 - -
    IF 93.8 93.2 91.1 91.8 89.7 - -
    WoS 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 CAGR to 2019 CAGR to 2021
    All
    Article
    Gold 402,581 462,280 574,264 719,423 859,335 19.4 20.9
    Hybrid 89,464 100,045 122,371 165,522 201,523 17.0 22.5
    Subscription 1,465,693 1,502,796 1,620,709 1,662,777 1,710,623 5.2 3.9
    All 1,957,738 2,065,121 2,317,344 2,547,722 2,771,481 8.8 9.1
    Growth (%)
    Gold - 14.8 24.2 25.3 19.4 - -
    Hybrid - 11.8 22.3 35.3 21.7 - -
    Subscription - 2.5 7.8 2.6 2.9 - -
    All - 5.5 12.2 9.9 8.8 - -
    OA
    Article 492,045 562,325 696,635 884,945 1,060,858 19.0 21.2
    Percentage 25.1 27.2 30.1 34.7 38.3 9.4 11.1
    SCIE
    Article
    Gold 298,715 340,511 430,544 546,536 665,679 20.1 22.2
    Hybrid 77,345 87,561 104,225 136,211 157,806 16.1 19.5
    Subscription 1,153,967 1,184,390 1,263,342 1,288,056 1,341,645 4.6 3.8
    All 1,530,027 1,612,462 1,798,111 1,970,803 2,165,130 8.4 9.1
    Growth (%)
    Gold - 14.0 26.4 26.9 21.8 - -
    Hybrid - 13.2 19.0 30.7 15.9 - -
    Subscription - 2.6 6.7 2.0 4.2 - -
    All - 5.4 11.5 9.6 9.9 - -
    OA
    Article 376,060 428,072 534,769 682,747 823,485 19.2 21.6
    Percentage 24.6 26.5 29.7 34.6 38.0 10.0 11.5
    Non-SCIE
    Article
    Gold 103,866 121,769 143,720 172,887 193,656 17.6 16.9
    Hybrid 12,119 12,484 18,146 29,311 43,717 22.4 37.8
    Subscription 311,726 318,406 357,367 374,721 368,978 7.1 4.3
    All 427,711 452,659 519,233 576,919 606,351 10.2 9.1
    Growth (%)
    Gold - 17.2 18.0 20.3 12.0 - -
    Hybrid - 3.0 45.4 61.5 49.1 - -
    Subscription - 2.1 12.2 4.9 -1.5 - -
    All - 5.8 14.7 11.1 5.1 - -
    OA
    Article 115,985 134,253 161,866 202,198 237,373 18.1 19.6
    Percentage 27.1 29.7 31.2 35.0 39.1 7.2 9.6
    WoS COVID-19 article
    OA article in COVID-19 (share) (%)
    Early access article
    2020 2021 2020 2021 2020 2021
    All 53,151 116,919 22,583 (42.5) 56,010 (47.9) 7,614 55,036
    SCIE 34,955 76,486 15,205 (43.5) 38,865 (50.8) 4,179 29,827
    Non-SCIE 18,196 40,433 7,378 (40.5) 17,145 (42.4) 3,435 25,209
    KRIBB article Submit to accept
    Accept to publish
    Submit to publish
    Average day No. of articles Average day No. of articles Average day No. of articles
    Year
    2020 99 690 16 506 117 503
    2021 93 611 17 487 108 486
    All 96 1,301 17 993 113 989
    Publisher
    MDPI 36 274 3 274 39 274
    Elsevier 115 266 8 224 123 223
    Springer 141 239 26 229 169 228
    Wiley 125 92 36 33 172 33
    Frontiers 103 59 26 59 129 59
    Others 90 371 29 175 124 172
    Table 1. Journals and articles in JCR

    JCR, Journal Citation Reports; CAGR, compound annual growth rate; IF, impact factor; SCIE, Science Citation Index Expanded.

    Table 2. Top 10 publishers in JCR-SCIE

    JCR, Journal Citation Reports; SCIE, Science Citation Index Expanded; IF, impact factor.

    Table 3. Top 20 journals in JCR

    JCR, Journal Citation Reports; CAGR, compound annual growth rate; OA, open access; SCIE, Science Citation Index Expanded.

    Table 4. Continuous journals in JCR

    JCR, Journal Citation Reports; CAGR, compound annual growth rate; IF, impact factor; SCIE, Science Citation Index Expanded.

    Table 5. Estimated OA articles in JCR from search results of WoS

    OA, open access; JCR, Journal Citation Reports; WoS, Web of Science; CAGR, compound annual growth rate; SCIE, Science Citation Index Expanded.

    Table 6. COVID-19 and early access articles in WoS

    WoS, Web of Science; OA, open access; SCIE, Science Citation Index Expanded.

    Table 7. Duration for publishing articles for KRIBB researchers

    KRIBB, Korea Research Institute of Bioscience and Biotechnology.


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