Changes in article share and growth by publisher and access type in Journal Citation Reports 2016, 2018, and 2020

Abstract

Purpose: This study explored changes in the journal publishing market by publisher and access type using the major journals that publish about 95% of Journal Citation Reports (JCR) articles.Methods: From JCR 2016, 2018, and 2020, a unique journal list by publisher was created in Excel and used to analyze the compound annual growth rate by pivot tables. In total, 10,953 major JCR journals were analyzed, focusing on publisher type, open access (OA) status, and mega journals (publishing over 1,000 articles per year).Results: Among the 19 publishers that published over 10,000 articles per year, in JCR 2020, six large publishers published 59.6% of the articles and 13 publishers 22.5%. The other publishers published 17.9%. Large and OA publishers increased their article share through leading mega journals, but the remaining publishers showed the opposite tendency. In JCR 2020, mega journals had a 26.5% article share and an excellent distribution in terms of the Journal Impact Factor quartile. Despite the high growth (22.6%) and share (26.0%) of OA articles, the natural growth of non-OA articles (7.3%) and total articles (10.7%) caused a rise in journal subscription fees. Articles, citations, the impact factor, and the immediacy index all increased gradually, and the compound annual growth rate of the average immediacy index was almost double than that of the average impact factor in JCR 2020.Conclusion: The influence of OA publishers has grown under the dominance of large publishers, and mega journals may substantially change the journal market. Journal stakeholders should pay attention to these changes.

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

“…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.…”

“…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][2][3][4][5] based on the JCR for Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) and Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI).…”

“…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][2][3][4][5]. This study was conducted to expand previous research to JCR 2021 data.…”