International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
Clarivate did not provide a reason why it delisted International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, along with about 50 others including another one from MDPI (Journal of Risk and Financial Management), but there is a lot of speculation. Amongst the most popular suggestions is that the number of articles the journal publishes has significantly increased and does this affect the quality of the papers?
Increase in the number of papers
The Science article mentioned the increase in the number of papers published, across the MDPI portfolio. Of particular note is the number of special issues that MDPI publishes. Figure 1 is a graphic from the Science article that shows the comparison between the number of special issues published by MDPI and some other publishers. It is apparent that MDPI publishes more special issues that the other publishers shown in the graphic.
On our Twitter feed we looked at how many articles the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health had published year-on-year. You can see that tweet here, (we note that there is a mistake in the tweet as we said that the journal had been delisted by Scopus, but we should have said Clarivate Web of Science).
The main message from that tweet was a figure, which we have shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2 certainly shows a rise year-on-year but as 2023 is only part way through, it begs the question “Is this going to continue this year?” Only time will tell but we can try and make a prediction.
Figure 3 shows the number of papers that are published every day (we tweeted about this here).
For the complete years (2005-2022), this means taking the total number of papers published in that year and dividing by 365 (or 366). For 2023, we divide the number of papers published so far and divide by 101, the number of days that had passed in 2023 when we collected the data.
Based on Figure 3, it looks as if the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health will publish more journals in 2023, than it did in 2022 which, was already a record year. But, as we say, time will tell. We plan to revisit these stats in a few months, just to see how things are progressing.
So what?
Does it matter that one of MDPI’s journals has seen a significant rise in the number of articles it publishes year-on-year? To be honest, we do not know. There is simply not enough evidence and not enough comparative data.
We are currently working to address this. We have two sets of comparison in mind, which should provide more context and, perhaps, answer the question whether this rise in one journal should be seen as a problem, or is just par for the course. It might even be seen as a positive condition.
We’ll get back to you when we have collected the data and carried out the analysis.
In the meantime, let us know your thoughts in the comments.
