Publishing trends of journals and articles in Journal Citation Reports during the COVID-19 pandemic: a descriptive study

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 [1–5] 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 [1–5]. 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.

Table 1.

Journals and articles in JCR

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.

Table 2.

Top 10 publishers in JCR-SCIE

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.

Table 3.

Top 20 journals in JCR

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.

Table 4.

Continuous journals in 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.

Table 5.

Estimated OA articles in JCR from search results of WoS

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.

Table 6.

COVID-19 and early access articles in WoS

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).

Table 7.

Duration for publishing articles for KRIBB researchers

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.