(30 Mar 2023) “Some call them Special Issues (MDPI & Hindawi), others call them Research Topics (Frontiers), and others Collections (Springer Nature). In this post, I will refer to them as articles published via the Guest Editor model, whereby a journal invites a scholar or a group of scholars to serve as guest editors for a set of thematically linked papers. The Guest Editor model fueled MDPI’s rise, yet it pushed Hindawi off a cliff. It has contributed to MDPI’s questionable reputation, yet it is becoming a permanent fixture in the industry.”
Christos Petrou, founder and Chief Analyst at Scholarly Intelligence, shares statistics and his observations on such special issues that raise concerns after the delisting announcement from Web of Science recently. Christos is a former analyst of the Web of Science Group at Clarivate and the Open Access portfolio at Springer Nature.
Scholarly Kitchen has the article here.
