(20 Mar 2023) Mega-journals, those that publish large numbers of articles per year, are growing rapidly across science and especially in biomedicine. Although 11 Scopus-indexed journals published more than 2,000 biomedical full papers (articles or reviews) in 2015 and accounted for 6% of that year’s literature, in 2022 there were 55 journals publishing more than 2,000 full articles, totaling more than 300,000 articles (almost a quarter of the biomedical literature that year). In 2015, biomedical research journals (PLoS One and Scientific Reports) published more than 3,500 full articles. In 2022, there were 26 such prolific journals. The accelerating growth of mega-journals creates both threats and opportunities for biomedical science, as analyzed by John P.A. Ioannidis of Stanford University in his recent article.
Concerns are also raised due to the recent delisting of such journals from Clarivate’s Web of Science. Find out more from the original article here.
