The rise of Gold open access journals has been a defining feature of the past decade. Some of those fully OA journals have subsequently fallen from grace, after they were delisted by Web of Science.
In this blog post, James Butcher from Journalology demonstrates how Dimensions can be used to explore the core characteristics of a journal, using two rapidly expanding journals as an example.
Exploring trends
Dimensions recently added an article filter, which allows users to drill down into the trends underlying the papers that we care most about — original research articles. All of the graphs in this blog post have the following filter applied:
Publication type = Article
Document Type = Research Article
This removes editorials, correspondence etc. and also strips out preprints.
The ten journals that grew the fastest in 2023 (in absolute terms), according to Dimensions, were:
I’m particularly interested in how traditional journals change over time, so in this blog post I am focusing on Heliyon and Cureus, which occupy the number 2 and 3 slots.
Heliyon, which is part of the Cell Press stable, grew incredibly fast last year after what can best be described as a “slow burner” launch back in 2015.
Another journal that has grown very quickly is Cureus Journal of Medical Science, which Springer Nature acquired in 2022.
The below graph shows how the volume of research articles has increased over time for both journals:
The dots for 2024 are year-to-date, so Heliyon and Cureus have both continued their rapid growth this year.
Subject areas
Let’s now take a look at the subject areas for each journal and how they changed since 2015.
Dimensions has several built-in classification schemes, which are useful if you want to take a quick look at how a journal has changed over time.
For Heliyon we’re going to use the ANZSRC 2020 classification scheme. The Dimensions support centre defines ANZSRC 2020 as follows:
Fields of Research covers all areas of research and emerging areas of study from the Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classification (ANZSRC). Fields of Research (FoR) include major fields and related sub-fields of research and emerging areas of study. The ANZSRC system has three levels (2-, 4- and 6-digit codes). The implementation in Dimensions categorizes on 2- and 4-digit codes only.
This classification scheme is helpful if you want to see how a broad scope journal, like Heliyon, is performing by subject area.
The graph below shows data for six “2-digit” ANZSRC codes for Heliyon. It’s pretty clear that articles that Dimensions classifies as “Biomedical and Clinical Sciences” grew faster than any of the other subject areas (the 2024 data are year-to-date, not extrapolations)
We can get more information about sub-categories by applying a filter for the code “32 Biomedical and Clinical Sciences” and then looking at which 4-digit codes with the prefix 32 are growing the fastest in Heliyon.
Let’s change tack and now take a look at Cureus, a medical journal, using a different classification scheme, the RCDC scheme (Research, Condition and Disease Categorization). The Dimensions support site has this to say about the RCDC scheme:
This categorisation system is used by the NIH to report to Congress and is a biomedical system consisting of 237 categories, some of which are very specific in topic (e.g. “ataxia telangiectasia”), and others more general (e.g. “neuroscience”).
The graph below shows some of the most frequently used RCDC terms to classify Cureus content. The largest category is “Rare Diseases”.
This is what the same graph looks like for JAMA Network Open, another fully OA broad-scope medical journal. Note how the Infectious Diseases category peaks in 2021 and 2022 (because of Covid) and then drops back down. Articles about rare diseases are, as you might expect, relatively rare.
Author location
Publishers and editors often want to get a sense of where published articles are coming from and the “Places” Analytical View in Dimensions makes that easy to do. Here’s what the graph looks like for Cureus. In 2023 around 5300 research articles had at least one author from the USA and 3400 research articles had at least one author from India; growth from the USA has slowed in 2024, but articles from India continue to increase.
There was also strong growth from Saudi Arabia in 2023. It’s worth noting that China doesn’t make it on to the top-6 list, which is very unusual.
The picture for Elsevier’s Heliyon is very different, with large numbers of papers having at least one author from China.
Web of Science
A few days after I wrote the first draft of this blog post I saw on Twitter that Web of Science has put indexing of Heliyon ‘on hold’.
I went to the Web of Science to look up some other large journals. Sure enough, Cureus is listed as ‘on hold’ in the Web of Science too. PLOS One and Scientific Reports do not seem to be affected.
It’s not clear to me how many journals are ‘on hold’ in Web of Science at any one time or what proportion of journals are subsequently delisted.
This is how Web of Science describes ‘on hold’:
Concerns have been raised about the quality of the content published in this journal. The journal is being re-evaluated according to our selection criteria; new content will not be indexed during the course of the re-evaluation. When the evaluation is complete, the publisher will be informed of the outcome and the journal will either:
– be removed from coverage if it no longer meets the quality criteria
– or remain covered if it continues to meet the quality criteria.
We should assume innocence until we hear otherwise. We don’t know what aspects of the journals the Web of Science team is investigating.
However, other fast growing journals have fallen foul of Web of Science indexing criteria. The International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (IJERPH), which is published by MDPI, was delisted from Web of Science in March 2023 for publishing articles that were out of scope and output plummeted as a result.
Here’s a graph showing what happens if a journal gets delisted by the Web of Science.
We will watch with interest what happens in the weeks and months to come with Heliyon and Cureus. The stakes are especially high for Cureus, as Springer Nature announced the launch of a third spin-off journal this week.
About the author
James Butcher launched the Journalology newsletter just over two years ago to help editors and publishers navigate a rapidly evolving scholarly publishing landscape. He is also a consultant, speaker and coach.
If you want more information on how Dimensions data can be used to support publishers and authors, contact the Dimensions team.