research paper publishing companies

Leading Scientific Publishing Companies: Top 18 Powerhouses in the Industry

The scientific publishing industry is dedicated to disseminating and promoting research findings across various disciplines. These companies provide platforms for researchers to submit and publish their work, ensuring that it reaches the global scientific community. Scientific publishing companies play a crucial role in quality control, peer review, and copyright protection. They offer a wide range of products and services, such as academic journals, textbooks, reference books, and online databases. The industry is constantly evolving, with a growing focus on open access publishing, allowing free and unrestricted access to scientific findings. Additionally, advancements in digital technology have led to the development of innovative publishing formats, such as interactive multimedia publications. The industry is also embracing data sharing and reproducibility initiatives to enhance transparency and scientific rigor. Overall, the industry aims to facilitate scientific progress and knowledge dissemination while adapting to the changing needs and trends of the research community.

Top 18 Scientific Publishing Companies

1.  elsevier.

• Headquarter: Amsterdam, North Holland, Netherlands
• Founded: 1880
• Headcount: 5001-10000
• Latest funding type: Private Equity

Elsevier is a scientific publishing company with over 100 years of experience. They provide a wide range of products and services to support researchers throughout the publication process, helping them improve their articles before submission.

2.  Springer Nature

• Headquarter: Berlin, Berlin, Germany
• Founded: 2015
• Headcount: 10001+

Springer Nature is a reputable company in the research industry, known for publishing influential journals. They aim to promote science and scientific reasoning by engaging with external editors and investing in initiatives to support their work. With a focus on open access, they have published a significant number of articles free to read online, contributing to an open science future.

3.  Jimma University

• Headquarter: Jimma, Ethiopia
• Founded: 1983

The Ethiopian Journal of Education and Sciences is a print journal published by Jimma University, focusing on scientific papers in the fields of science and education.

4.  Universitas Airlangga

• Headquarter: Surabaya, East Java, Indonesia
• Founded: 1954
• Headcount: 1001-5000

Unair.ac.id is a scientific journal that publishes original research findings in the field of Organic Chemistry, inorganic, Analytical, Physical Chemistry, Biochemistry, and other chemical sciences. It aims to solve problems in the medical, pharmaceutical, environmental, and agricultural fields using chemical approaches.

5.  UAP - Universidad Alas Peruanas

• Headquarter: Peru
• Founded: 1996

UAP.edu.pe is a multidisciplinary university institution that promotes scientific research through its own journal, Ciencia y Desarrollo. It publishes research conducted by its specialized faculty, external researchers, and students. The journal is available in both Spanish and English and focuses on promoting scientific research across various disciplines. It has been operating since 1996 and publishes on a quarterly basis.

6.  Mdpi

• Headquarter: Basel, Switzerland

MDPI.com is a platform for peer-reviewed, scientific open-access journals operated by MDPI.

7.  Frontiers

• Headquarter: Lausanne, Vaud, Switzerland
• Founded: 2007

Frontiersin.org is an open access publishing platform that aims to connect researchers with the latest scientific knowledge and breakthroughs. They provide a wide range of high-quality journals covering various fields, including life sciences, health, neuroscience, psychology, environment, robotics, AI, engineering, humanities, and sustainability. Frontiers also offers ebooks, publishing agreements, and institutional partnerships to promote open science and advance research.

8.  Taylor & Francis Group

• Headquarter: Milton Park, United Kingdom
• Founded: 1798

Taylor & Francis is a leading research publisher that provides rapid, transparent publishing solutions for a diverse range of organizations and researchers. They offer expert collections, e-books, and reference-led content in various subject areas including medicine, healthcare, humanities, social sciences, and STEM.

9.  Animal Nutrition

• Headquarter: Beijing, China
• Headcount: 11-50

ScienceDirect is a platform that provides access to a wide range of scientific literature and research articles. It offers downloadable reports, including Electronic Holdings Reports and KBART product and package reports.

10.  Universidade Estadual Paulista Júlio de Mesquita Filho

• Headquarter: Sao Paulo, Brazil
• Founded: 1976

Unesp.br is a university in São Paulo, Brazil that offers undergraduate and postgraduate courses in various fields, including Biological Sciences, Ecology, Physical Education, Pedagogy, Computer Science, Environmental Engineering, Physics, Geography, Geology, and Mathematics.

11.  UniCesumar

• Headquarter: Maringá, Paraná, Brazil
• Founded: 1990

UNICESUMAR is a university that offers various educational programs and courses. It publishes scientific journals and promotes research in different fields, including law, health sciences, and social sciences.

12.  Islamic Azad University, Central Tehran Branch

• Headquarter: Tehran, Tehran, Iran (Islamic Republic of)
• Founded: 1982

IAUCTB.ac.ir is the official website of the Islamic Azad University Central Tehran Branch. It provides information about the university's research and academic programs, including specific details about its psychological research journal. Users can access articles and publications, submit their own research papers, and contact the editorial board. The website also offers a glossary of key terms and a subscription service for important news and announcements.

13.  Egerton University

• Headquarter: Kenya

Egerton University is a higher education institution based in Egerton, Kenya. It publishes the Egerton Journal of Science and Technology, focusing on scientific research papers. The university offers a range of academic programs and conducts research in various fields.

14.  Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières

• Headquarter: Trois-Rivières, Québec, Canada
• Founded: 1969

The company uqtr.ca is a research journal that focuses on promoting the dissemination of research on small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and entrepreneurship in the French language. It publishes high-quality scientific contributions in the fields of management, economics, and related disciplines. The journal welcomes both theoretical and empirical works and encourages interdisciplinary research. It targets researchers, students, professionals, and policymakers interested in the latest developments in SMEs and entrepreneurship.

15.  Tabriz University of Medical Sciences

• Headquarter: Tabriz, Eastern Azarbaijan, Iran (Islamic Republic of)
• Founded: 1946

TBZMED.ac.ir is the official website of the Medical Journal of Tabriz University of Medical Sciences. It provides access to academic research articles and journals in the field of medical sciences.

16.  University of Évora

• Headquarter: Évora, Alentejo, Portugal
• Founded: 1559

UEvora.pt is the official website of the University of Évora, providing information about its libraries, events, research resources, and publications. It offers access to digital libraries, online journals, and ebooks, facilitating academic research and knowledge exchange. The website also highlights collaborations with external publishers and organizations in the scientific and architectural fields.

17.  Instituto Federal de Educação, Ciência e Tecnologia do Maranhão

• Headquarter: São Luís, Massachusetts, Brazil

IFMA (Instituto Federal do Maranhão) is an educational institution that offers a variety of academic publications. Their publications include journals such as Polifonia em Foco, Acta Tecnológica, and [re]Design, covering fields like humanities, technology, and design. These journals provide a platform for researchers to share their original articles, promoting knowledge democratization and scientific/technological progress.

18.  Universidad Nacional Pedro Henríquez Ureña

• Headquarter: Distrito Nacional, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic

UNPHU is a university in the Caribbean that focuses on promoting and preserving the cultural traditions and knowledge of the region. They offer a wide range of disciplines in humanities, architecture, and social sciences. The university publishes a scientific journal, AULA, that accepts original articles in Spanish and English.

Want to find more scientific publishing companies?

If you want to find more companies that offer academic journals, textbooks, and online databases you can doso with Inven. This list was built with Inven and there are hundreds ofcompanies like these globally.

With Inven you'll also get to know the company's:

• Ownership: Which of these are private equity backed? Which are family-owned?
• Contact data: Who are the owners and CEO's? What are their emailsand phone numbers?
• Financials: What is the financial performance of these companies?

...and a lot more!

Get started with Inven

Find companies 10x faster with Inven

Keep on reading

More articles.

When you choose to publish with PLOS, your research makes an impact. Make your work accessible to all, without restrictions, and accelerate scientific discovery with options like preprints and published peer review that make your work more Open.

• PLOS Biology
• PLOS Climate
• PLOS Complex Systems
• PLOS Computational Biology
• PLOS Digital Health
• PLOS Genetics
• PLOS Global Public Health
• PLOS Medicine
• PLOS Mental Health
• PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases
• PLOS Pathogens
• PLOS Sustainability and Transformation
• PLOS Collections

Breaking boundaries. Empowering researchers. Opening Science.

PLOS is a nonprofit, Open Access publisher empowering researchers to accelerate progress in science and medicine by leading a transformation in research communication.

Every country. Every career stage. Every area of science. Hundreds of thousands of researchers choose PLOS to share and discuss their work. Together, we collaborate to make science, and the process of publishing science, fair, equitable, and accessible for the whole community.

FEATURED COMMUNITIES

• Molecular Biology
• Microbiology
• Neuroscience
• Cancer Treatment and Research

RECENT ANNOUNCEMENTS

Written by Lindsay Morton Over 4 years: 74k+ eligible articles. Nearly 85k signed reviews. More than 30k published peer review history…

The latest quarterly update to the Open Science Indicators (OSIs) dataset was released in December, marking the one year anniversary of OSIs…

PLOS JOURNALS

PLOS publishes a suite of influential Open Access journals across all areas of science and medicine. Rigorously reported, peer reviewed and immediately available without restrictions, promoting the widest readership and impact possible. We encourage you to consider the scope of each journal before submission, as journals are editorially independent and specialized in their publication criteria and breadth of content. 

PLOS Biology PLOS Climate PLOS Computational Biology PLOS Digital Health PLOS Genetics PLOS Global Public Health PLOS Medicine PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases PLOS ONE PLOS Pathogens PLOS Sustainability and Transformation PLOS Water

Now open for submissions:

PLOS Complex Systems PLOS Mental Health

ADVANCING OPEN SCIENCE

Open opportunities for your community to see, cite, share, and build on your research. PLOS gives you more control over how and when your work becomes available.

Ready, set, share your preprint. Authors of most PLOS journals can now opt-in at submission to have PLOS post their manuscript as a preprint to bioRxiv or medRxiv.

All PLOS journals offer authors the opportunity to increase the transparency of the evaluation process by publishing their peer review history.

We have everything you need to amplify your reviews, increase the visibility of your work through PLOS, and join the movement to advance Open Science.

FEATURED RESOURCES

Ready to submit your manuscript to PLOS? Find everything you need to choose the journal that’s right for you as well as information about publication fees, metrics, and other FAQs here.

We have everything you need to write your first review, increase the visibility of your work through PLOS, and join the movement to advance Open Science.

Transform your research with PLOS.   Submit your manuscript

Navigation group

Home banner.

Where scientists empower society

Creating solutions for healthy lives on a healthy planet.

most-cited publisher

largest publisher

2.5 billion

article views and downloads

Main Content

• Editors and reviewers
• Collaborators

Find a journal

We have a home for your research. Our community led journals cover more than 1,500 academic disciplines and are some of the largest and most cited in their fields.

Submit your research

Start your submission and get more impact for your research by publishing with us.

Author guidelines

Ready to publish? Check our author guidelines for everything you need to know about submitting, from choosing a journal and section to preparing your manuscript.

Peer review

Our efficient collaborative peer review means you’ll get a decision on your manuscript in an average of 61 days.

Article publishing charges (APCs) apply to articles that are accepted for publication by our external and independent editorial boards

Press office

Visit our press office for key media contact information, as well as Frontiers’ media kit, including our embargo policy, logos, key facts, leadership bios, and imagery.

Institutional partnerships

Join more than 555 institutions around the world already benefiting from an institutional membership with Frontiers, including CERN, Max Planck Society, and the University of Oxford.

Publishing partnerships

Partner with Frontiers and make your society’s transition to open access a reality with our custom-built platform and publishing expertise.

Policy Labs

Connecting experts from business, science, and policy to strengthen the dialogue between scientific research and informed policymaking.

How we publish

All Frontiers journals are community-run and fully open access, so every research article we publish is immediately and permanently free to read.

Editor guidelines

Reviewing a manuscript? See our guidelines for everything you need to know about our peer review process.

Become an editor

Apply to join an editorial board and collaborate with an international team of carefully selected independent researchers.

My assignments

It’s easy to find and track your editorial assignments with our platform, 'My Frontiers' – saving you time to spend on your own research.

Chronic stress and inflammation linked to societal and environmental impacts in new study 

Scientists hypothesize that as-yet unrecognized inflammatory stress is spreading among people at unprecedented rates, affecting our cognitive ability to address climate change, war, and other critical issues.

Safeguarding peer review to ensure quality at scale

Making scientific research open has never been more important. But for research to be trusted, it must be of the highest quality. Facing an industry-wide rise in fraudulent science, Frontiers has increased its focus on safeguarding quality.

New ‘digital twin’ Earth technology could help predict water-based natural disasters before they strike

Scientists demonstrate the use of next-generation satellite data and advanced modeling to build virtual replicas of the terrestrial water cycle that can track water resources and create detailed simulations of flooding and other extreme events.

Tiny crustaceans discovered preying on live jellyfish during harsh Arctic night

Scientists used DNA metabarcoding to show for the first time that jellyfish are an important food for amphipods during the Arctic polar night in waters off Svalbard, at a time of year when other food resources are scarce.

Why studying astronauts’ microbiomes is crucial to ensure deep space mission success

In a new Frontiers’ guest editorial, Prof Dr Lembit Sihver, director of CRREAT at the Nuclear Physics Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences and his co-authors explore the impact the microbiome has on human health in space.

Cake and cookies may increase Alzheimer’s risk: Here are five Frontiers articles you won’t want to miss

At Frontiers, we bring some of the world’s best research to a global audience. But with tens of thousands of articles published each year, it’s impossible to cover all of them. Here are just five amazing papers you may have missed.

2024's top 10 tech-driven Research Topics

Frontiers has compiled a list of 10 Research Topics that embrace the potential of technology to advance scientific breakthroughs and change the world for the better.

Get the latest research updates, subscribe to our newsletter

• SpringerLink shop

Our business is publishing

With more than 2,900 journals and 300,000 books, Springer offers many opportunities for authors, customers and partners.

Discover our science

Search  all books, journals and book series published by Springer

Read over 10 million scientific documents on SpringerLink

Buy  from our collection of 300,000 books in the shop

Publish a book

Ready to publish your book? Find out how

Submit an article

Your research in our journals

Open access

Make your work freely available

Explore our subjects

• Behavioral Sciences
• Biomedical Sciences
• Business & Management
• Computer Science
• Earth Sciences
• Education & Language
• Engineering
• Environmental Sciences
• Food Science & Nutrition
• General Interest
• Life Sciences
• Mathematics
• Public Health
• Social Sciences

Springer Impact Report

Find our products.

Read over ten million scientific documents on SpringerLink. Buy  more than 300,000 different books in our SpringerLink shop

Join our mailing list

Get access to exclusive content, sales, promotions and events Be the first to hear about new book releases and journal launches Learn about our newest services, tools and resources

Who are the 100 largest scientific publishers by journal count? A webscraping approach

Journal of Documentation

ISSN : 0022-0418

Article publication date: 21 September 2022

Issue publication date: 19 December 2022

How to obtain a list of the 100 largest scientific publishers sorted by journal count? Existing databases are unhelpful as each of them inhere biased omissions and data quality flaws. This paper tries to fill this gap with an alternative approach.

Design/methodology/approach

The content coverages of Scopus, Publons, DOAJ and SherpaRomeo were first used to extract a preliminary list of publishers that supposedly possess at least 15 journals. Second, the publishers' websites were scraped to fetch their portfolios and, thus, their “true” journal counts.

The outcome is a list of the 100 largest publishers comprising 28.060 scholarly journals, with the largest publishing 3.763 journals, and the smallest carrying 76 titles. The usual “oligopoly” of major publishing companies leads the list, but it also contains 17 university presses from the Global South, and, surprisingly, 30 predatory publishers that together publish 4.517 journals.

Research limitations/implications

Additional data sources could be used to mitigate remaining biases; it is difficult to disambiguate publisher names and their imprints; and the dataset carries a non-uniform distribution, thus risking the omission of data points in the lower range.

Practical implications

The dataset can serve as a useful basis for comprehensive meta-scientific surveys on the publisher-level.

Originality/value

The catalogue can be deemed more inclusive and diverse than other ones because many of the publishers would have been overlooked if one had drawn from merely one or two sources. The list is freely accessible and invites regular updates. The approach used here (webscraping) has seldomly been used in meta-scientific surveys.

• Bibliographic systems
• Data collection
• University presses
• Online databases
• Journal publishers
• Predatory publishers

Nishikawa-Pacher, A. (2022), "Who are the 100 largest scientific publishers by journal count? A webscraping approach", Journal of Documentation , Vol. 78 No. 7, pp. 450-463. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-04-2022-0083

Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2022, Andreas Nishikawa-Pacher

Published by Emerald Publishing Limited. This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode

Introduction

There is no complete and freely accessible catalogue of all scientific publishers and their journals. Since there may be tens of thousands of active publishers, a project that uses a sample of journals to assess meta-scientific trends could be content with analyzing only the largest publishers. This superlative can be defined by the yearly volume of paper outputs, by the annual profit margin, by the size of the publishing company, by the reputation among the academic community, or by the number of journals published. The present paper is interested in the latter; for, while publishers with high journal counts are believed to amount only to a tiny share of the scientific publication ecosystem, they are nevertheless assumed to process the vast majority of the scholarly output ( Pollock, 2022 , based on data from OpenAlex , cf. Priem et al. , 2022 ). But how would one proceed to identify the, say, hundred largest academic publishers by their journal counts?

An authoritative list of the largest academic publishers, however, could be helpful in many ways. It would aid in achieving robust analyses regarding various aspects of scholarly publishing, such as on the implementation of research ethics policies ( Gardner et al. , 2022 ); on the prices of Article Processing Charges, or APCs ( Asai, 2020 ; Schönfelder, 2019 ); on peer review practices ( Besançon et al. , 2020 ; Hamilton et al. , 2020 ; Spezi et al. , 2018 ); on journals' social media presence ( Ortega, 2017 ; Zheng et al. , 2019 ); on their profit-orientation ( Beverungen et al. , 2012 ); on their open access and pre-print policies ( Laakso, 2014 ; Laakso et al. , 2011 ); on “editormetrics” ( Mendonça et al. , 2018 ; Pacher et al. , 2021 ); on community engagement through paper awards ( Lincoln et al. , 2012 ) or through podcasts ( Quintana and Heathers, 2021 ); on data-sharing policies ( Holt et al. , 2021 ); on their efforts in fostering diversity ( Metz et al. , 2016 ) or in supporting early career researchers ( O'Brien et al. , 2019 ); on their rate of ORCID adoption (cf. Porter, 2022 ); and so forth.

But without a near-complete catalogue of publishers and journals, any researcher risks omissions. An analyst who usually covers STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) disciplines may overlook, for example, the publisher Philosophy Documentation Center which possesses 249 journals; a social scientist may not know of the World Scientific despite its portfolio size of 204 journals; and a Western scientist may easily miss the Chinese company KeAi (with 130 journals) or the Indonesian press of Universitas Gadjah Mada (with 123 journals).

To fill this gap, a webscraping approach could aid in generating a list of major academic publishers as well as their journals. Due to coverage biases inherent to every platform, this approach should webscrape not just a single, but rather multiple research-related sources. The underlying rationale thus resembles a “Swiss cheese model”, where a given layer (or platform) has various holes (or flaws and omissions), but if multiple layers are stacked together side by side, losses can be prevented since the holes (or flaws and omissions) differ in their position. Accordingly, the project presented here first fetches data from four large research-related platforms to obtain a list of publishers that are supposed to be mid-sized or large according to each platform respectively. As a second step, it accesses each of these publishers' websites to scrape their journal count, so as to filter out only the largest publishers among the collected sample.

The aim is thus to generate a catalogue of major academic publishers and their scholarly journals, a list that is supposed to be more comprehensive, accessible and inclusive than any of the existing ones – while still being focused only on publishers with voluminous portfolios (to reduce the data-collection burden). Moreover, the list should not merely offer a snapshot of a specific moment but be adaptable over time; this possibility of always having the data up-to-date is guaranteed by a public sharing of the codes so as to enable extensions and reiterations of the webscraping process.

The following describes the methodical approach in greater detail. The chapter afterwards presents the results of the top 100 academic publishers, sorted by the number of serial titles they publish, with interesting findings regarding the relatively high shares of Global South university presses on the one hand, and of allegedly predatory publishers on the other hand. The discussion section then outlines various limitations encountered during the research process, including issues of data quality due to the non-uniform data distribution, or the difficulty of disambiguating imprints. The paper concludes with a possible guidance on how the limitations nevertheless point towards future research paths so as to reach the wider goal of a complete overview of academic publishers and their scholarly journals that could serve as a starting point for broad meta-scientific investigations.

To generate a comprehensive list of academic publishers and their scholarly journals, two separate methodical steps were necessary. The first one comprised data collection on the publisher -level. Based on the preliminary results of that first step, the second one proceeded with gathering journal -level data, or at least the respective journal count. The following will describe the respective approach in sequence.

The data and the codes are available in a Zenodo repository at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7081147 under a Creative Commons-license (CC0).

Publisher-level data

Data sample and data collection.

One single data source seems insufficient when one seeks to attain a complete overview over the landscape of scholarly publications; for each source inheres its own biases and indexing criteria. Instead, one should draw from multiple platforms. While heterogenous in character and scope, they may, taken together, provide a more complete menu of publishers than if one merely used a single database.

The present project thus uses four data samples, each of which comprises not only a large list of academic publishers, but also (at least implicitly) the number of journals assigned to them.

The first one is Scopus , a large-scale database of scientific publications that provides an openly available source title list. Using their source list from October 2020 comprising 40.804 journals in total, the names of the publishers were extracted and their frequency (i.e. journal count) counted.

The second data sample, Publons , is a platform designed to document and verify peer reviews. It allows anyone to register a referee report conducted for any journal from any publisher ( Van Noorden, 2014 ). It thus follows a “bottom-up” approach which potentially covers even publishers that tend to be invisibilized in other indexing services. Using webscraping with R 's rvest library ( Wickham and RStudio, 2020 ), this project accessed Publons ' directory of publishers ( “All publishers”, n.d. ).

The third source is DOAJ , a directory of open access journals aiming at a global coverage of scholarly publishers and journals that adhere to standards of open access publishing. To fetch the relevant information, this project used the JSON-formatted journal metadata from DOAJ 's public data dump.

The final source of publishers used was Sherpa Romeo , a website which aggregates open access archiving policies from a growing number of more than 4.000 publishers. Their publisher list was scraped with R .

All these data were collected on 11. December 2020.

Data analysis

Having collected four datasets comprising publisher names and their number of journals according to each respective platform, this project joined these datasets together, harmonized some publisher names, and extracted the highest journal count per publisher. For example, if the publisher Copernicus Publications had 41 journals in Scopus , 47 in Publons , 40 in DOAJ , and 71 in Sherpa Romeo , that publisher was assigned the maximum journal count of 71. This count was only a preliminary one; the real number of journals would be verified later (as will be outlined below).

After garnering these data, the list was sorted by the preliminary number of journals in descending order. In total, there were 24.722 distinct publisher names. As resource constraints made it impossible to look at each of the publisher distinctly and thoroughly, a threshold was chosen that would leave one with a still-manageable sample while ensuring that the result would still be a plausible list of the largest publishers. With that threshold, only publishers that supposedly carried at least 15 titles according to any of the four data sources were kept – for example, since Copernicus Publications had been assigned the preliminary count of 71 journals (above the threshold of 15), it remained in the sample for further validation of its journal count. The threshold was chosen because it seemed low enough to ensure that all publishers that would make it into the final list would pass that threshold, even if the four data sources did not have a complete portfolio of these publishers; in this sense, the lower the threshold, the more complete will be the final data. However, the threshold should not be too low – it should rather be high enough to yield a sample that would be manageable for a manual verification of each publisher's journal count. In other words, as one lowers the threshold, the sample size increases, and thereby the likelihood of detecting yet another large publisher that will make it into the final list becomes greater. However, larger sample sizes require more resources, and there may be “a point where an effect [of increasing the sample size] becomes so minuscule that it is meaningless in a practical sense” ( Alba-Fernández et al. , 2020 , p. 14). The threshold of 15 journals may have allowed for sufficient data to create a reliable top 100 list (cf. the superficial assessment in the Results section below).

Preliminary publisher-level results

A preliminary result extracted 568 distinct publisher names that supposedly published at least 15 journals, according to any of the four data sources DOAJ, Publons, Scopus or Sherpa Romeo.

This preliminary list was then cleaned manually, as there were obvious data quality issues such as inflated numbers and unharmonized publisher names. The manual refinement also got rid of duplications, discontinued presses and non-publishers (e.g. Egyptian Knowledge Bank or SciELO ), resulting in a preliminary list of 414 academic publishers.

Journal-level data

Based on the preliminary list that resulted from the publisher-level data collection, the next step was to visit each listed publisher's website to find the respective portfolio of journals. In order to webscrape each publisher's respective journal list, the so-called CSS [2] selectors that harbour the names and the links of the journals were required. The manual collection of these CSS selectors for each of the 414 publishers was undertaken in January 2021 (and updated in mid-2022). The respective publisher websites were then scraped between March and July 2022, fetching data about journal names and journal counts [3] , finally filtering the 100 largest publishers according to these webscraped journal counts.

Figure 2 offers a diagram of the methodical approach taken.

The outcome of the data-collection resulted in a catalogue of the 100 largest academic publishers (comprising 28.060 serial titles) based on journal counts. Summary statistics are visible in Table 1 .

Ordered by journal counts, the top ones resemble the prominent “oligopoly” of academic publishing ( Larivière et al. , 2015 ) – Springer, Taylor & Francis, Elsevier, Wiley, and SAGE lead the list. Many of the middle-ranging ones, however, may offer surprisingly unknown or only faintly familiar names to researchers whose usual range is confined to just a single, specific discipline or to a single, specific region.

Of the 100 largest publishers, 17 are university-based presses headquartered in research institutions at the Global South (perhaps surprisingly; cf. Collyer, 2018 ). Eight of them are from Latin America (cf. Delgado-Troncoso and Fischman, 2014 ), while seven are based in Indonesia (cf. Irawan et al. , 2021 ; Wiryawan, 2014 ) – including the largest among them, the Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia that publishes 177 journals. One press from Iran and Malaysia each round up this subset of Global South university presses.

Another possibly surprising result is that the list contains a large share of so-called predatory publishers – namely, 30 out of 100 [4] . Most of the allegedly predatory publishers in the present list even publish more than one hundred titles; the largest one, OMICS , even has 705 journals in its portfolio, propelling it into the sixth place of the overall ranking. In total, they publish 4.517 outlets, or more than 16% of all journals covered by the 100 publishers – roughly every sixth journal of a major publisher is a predatory one. Admittedly, the attribute of predatoriness is a contested one, but in its core, the term denotes organizations that publish seemingly scientific articles against monetary charges without offering an authentic peer-review, while at the same time conducting dishonest practices such as deceiving the public of wrong impact factors, or listing researchers as editorial board members without their knowledge ( Cobey et al. , 2018 , p. 8). Such (allegedly) predatory publishers are usually left out by curated databases for ethical reasons, but for comprehensive meta-scientific surveys, it may be useful to not exclude them.

The top 100, sorted by journal count, is visible in Table 2 .

Some of the publishers listed are not indexed in all four data sample platforms, meaning that they would have been overlooked if this project merely drew from one or two sources. This is especially the case for the so-called predatory publishers; for instance, OMICS (with 705 titles) was missing at both DOAJ and Sherpa Romeo ; or, if one only used DOAJ and Scopus as relevant sources, then one would have omitted Gavin Publishers (with 168 journals) and Scientific and Academic Publishing (comprising 149 titles); and if one drew from just Publons and Scopus , then Open Access Pub (boasting 198 journals in its portfolio) would not have been found.

However, non-predatory publishers like university presses would have suffered a similar fate; for example, the press of Universitas Negeri Semarang which has 120 journals would not have been found if one merely collected publishers that had any reviews verified at Publons .

The “Swiss cheese model” approach of using various layers, or multiple research-related platforms for data-collection, thus helped to prevent potential data losses.

This is not to claim that the result is exhaustive and accurate, as the Discussion section will consider below. There still may be omissions, especially in the lower ranks of the list – the distribution is so non-uniform that the upper “cloud” of the ranking is likely accurate, while the “tail” is rather noisy. To give a rough impression of how accurate the ranking is, at least with regards to the four data sources used here, one can slice the original sample (the unharmonized one comprising the 414 publishers that had at least 15 journals according to either of our four data sources) into ten deciles, with the tenth decile showing the largest publishers and the first decile the smallest ones. Each decile contains 41 or 42 publisher names. In the tenth decile, the vast majority of the publishers (87.8%) made it into the final top 100 list; in the ninth decile, that share fell to roughly a half (48.8%). The eigth decile was down to less than a fourth (22.0%). In general, there is a clear downward trend (with a few exceptions) until the first decile, which had just 2.4% of its publishers in the final list (see Table 3 ). With each decile, the median decline in percentage points was −7.1%, so that one could except a further quantile to have an even lower probability that any of the listed publishers there would make it into the final list. While such statistical numbers do not guarantee that the final top 100 list is accurate, they do provide confidence that the probability of errors is not overly high, at least given the four data sources here; and even if one demanded higher precision, the paper's purpose was primarily to demonstrate the utility of a method (webscraping) rather than to execute it until perfection.

Webscraping, first, multiple databases of scientific indexing services, and second, the publishers' websites themselves offers an effective way to obtain a comprehensive overview of the landscape of academic publishing, at least when it comes to large publishers in terms of the number of journals in their portfolio. The present project utilized data from Scopus , Publons , DOAJ and Sherpa Romeo to automatically enumerate a list of major academic publishers and their scholarly journals as complete as possible. It first gathered a list of publishers that allegedly published at least 15 journals, before validating each publisher's journal count that resulted in a catalogue of the 100 largest academic publishers comprising 28.060 scholarly periodicals.

Many of these publishers, especially in the mid- and smaller range, would have been omitted if one had drawn only from a subset of the databases. This is especially pertinent to those that are either located in the Global South ( Collyer, 2018 ; Jimenez et al. , in press , pp. 4–5; Okune et al. , 2018 ; Teixeira da Silva et al. , 2019 ) or that publish articles in languages other than English (“LOTE”) ( Ren and Rousseau, 2002 ; Vera-Baceta et al. , 2019 ). They are not always indexed in the major scientific databases, and some of them do not issue DOIs for various reasons, making it easy to overlook them in conventional searches. Examples include the Iranian press of the University of Tehran (with 115 journals), the Chinese one of KeAi (130 journals), the major Indonesian players like the presses of Universitas Gadjah Mada (123 journals), Universitas Negeri Semarang (120 journals) and Universitas Diponegoro (87 journals), Eastern European publishers like the Editura Academiei Romane (76 journals), or Latin American entities belonging to the Universidade de Brasília (86 journals) or to the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (127 journals). The fact that the present project did not omit them indicates that the catalogue gathered here might be less susceptible to systemically biased omissions than if one had used merely one or two sources.

The list generated by this project thus offers a gateway towards large-scale analyses regarding macro-scale engagements, actions and policies of publishers and journals. May they relate to open access aspects, to the conduct of peer review, to article processing charges, to the availability of metadata or to editorial boards – whatever the use case, a webscraping approach that gathers meta-scientific information seems to offer a viable path for alternative and inclusive samples. And it is on the basis of these samples that one can thoroughly investigate existing research cultures in all their diversity.

In addition, as all the present paper's codes and data are shared publicly, they can find extension so as to cover further data sources, and they me be executed repeatedly to update the catalogue over time.

However, there are various weaknesses and limitations to be discussed. First and foremost, while the upper “cloud” of the dataset may accurately depict the league of the largest academic publishers, the mid- and lower ranges (or “tail”) may be more susceptible to noisy errors and omissions. In other words, the dataset is most likely an imbalanced one due to the non-uniform distribution of the underlying data ( Kotsiantis et al. , 2006 ). That is, there is a high probability of the largest publishers to occur in any of the four samples, but the smaller the publisher, the less likely it is that one identifies them through webscraping the four sources (a problem of undersampling). After all, the use of multiple platforms does not dispense with the necessity to be aware of inherent biases; it is possible that there are still enough publishers that have not made it into any of the four data samples used for this project. Such biases could be mitigated by drawing from more and more sources. CORE ( Makhija et al. , 2018 ), JSTOR ( Schonfeld, 2012 ) , BASE ( Pieper and Summann, 2006 ) , OpenAIRE Explore ( Alexiou et al. , 2016 ), the Directory of Free Arab Journals (DFAJ) (2021), SciELO ( Packer, 2009 ), the Iranian Scientific Information Database (SID.ir), or African Journals OnLine (AJOL) may serve as likely candidates, though one would first need to ensure that one can indeed obtain structured data from them.

Other data difficulties remain. The issue of disambiguating publisher names and their imprints is one that may lead to arbitrary definitions (e.g. differentiating Springer from Springer Nature and BioMedCentral , but not from Demos Medical Publishing , even though they all share the same parent companies). A related problem arises when the samples used aggregators or information retrieval platforms (such as SciELO or the Egyptian Knowledge Base ) erroneously as publishers. This is one reason why CrossRef 's member list or Scilit could not be used as data sources for the present project. A further limitation lies in the fact that some of the journals listed in the publisher's online catalogues may be discontinued or inactive ( Cortegiani et al. , 2020 ). The next step should thus necessarily entail a closer and possibly manual assessment of each publisher's precise journal count.

Once these limitations are addressed, the webscraping approach outlined here may fill a gap in the meta-scientific literature, especially with regards to exhaustive surveys of university presses, scholarly publishers and scientific journals. Without a reliably and freely available comprehensive list, scientometric examinations would risk an incomplete coverage of the diverse landscape of academic publishing, leading to a structural invisibilisation of underrepresented journals or an underestimation of the extent to which predatory publishers have occupied the scientific ecosystem.

With additional data refinements and even more encompassing, alternative sources, the list may finally attain a satisfying degree of saturation and accuracy. Once one can be certain that there is a complete and inclusive catalogue of academic publishers and scholarly journals from all around the world without any blind spots, this cannot but benefit the whole science of science.

Screenshot of Ulrichsweb 's filter option regarding publishers, sorted by count, after the search query Status:(“Active”) Serial Type:(“Journal”) Content Type:(“Academic / Scholarly”) on 14 May 2021

The methodical approach that led to the final list of the 100 largest academic publishers

Descriptive data about the number of journals (grouped by publisher) in the one hundred largest publishers in the webscraped dataset

The final list of the 100 largest academic publishers ordered by their journal counts

How many publishers in the original sample made it into the final top 100 list?

Note(s): The data are based on the preliminary list of 414 publishers; accordingly, the journal counts refer not necessarily to the ‘true’ count, but to the maximum value according to any of the four data sources (DOAJ, Publons, Romeo Sherpa, or Scopus)

CrossRef itself does not have data about whether and which of their members are (non-)publishers; private communication from 26 April 2021 (internally saved at CrossRef as request #364948).

Cascading Style Sheets, a computer language used for layouting and structuring websites (usually in conjunction with HTML, or Hypertext Markup Language).

Due to technical errors (e.g. outdated security certificates of the respective host server) or due to improperly structured websites, some journal counts had to be collected manually.

Despite controversies ( Koerber et al ., 2020 ), this paper defines predatoriness largely by the inclusion of the respective publisher in the updated version of Beall's list as of December 2021 ( “Beall's List of Potential Predatory Journals and Publishers”, 2021 ). There are two exceptions – Frontiers is not marked as predatory in the present paper because its inclusion into Beall's List has always remained highly contested ( Kendall, 2021 , p. 382); but Annex Publishers is marked as predatory even though it was not in Beall's List for the following reasons: it refers to a bogus version of the Impact Factor (“CiteFactor”) as a reference, promises rapid peer reviews (21 days), a publication within 24 h after acceptance, a high visibility due to its inclusion on Google Scholar (which is trivial); furthermore, it is not indexed in the DOAJ and demands quite high Article Processing Charges (between USD 1.200 and USD 3.600, as of July 2022).

“All publishers” ( n.d. ), “ Publons ”, available at: https://publons.com/publisher/?page=1 ( accessed 4 January 2021 ).

Alba-Fernández , M.V. , Ariza-López , F.J. , Rodríguez-Avi , J. and García-Balboa , J.L. ( 2020 ), “ Statistical methods for thematic-accuracy quality control based on an accurate reference sample ”, Remote Sensing , Vol.  12 No.  5 , p. 816 .

Alexiou , G. , Vahdati , S. , Lange , C. , Papastefanatos , G. and Lohmann , S. ( 2016 ), “ OpenAIRE LOD services: scholarly communication data as linked data ”, in González-Beltrán , A. , Osborne , F. and Peroni , S. (Eds), Semantics, Analytics, Visualization. Enhancing Scholarly Data , Springer International Publishing , Cham , pp.  45 - 50 .

Asai , S. ( 2020 ), “ Market power of publishers in setting article processing charges for open access journals ”, Scientometrics , Vol.  123 No.  2 , pp.  1037 - 1049 .

“Beall’s List of Potential Predatory Journals and Publishers” ( 2021 ), 8 December, available at: https://web.archive.org/web/20220727081817/https://beallslist.net/ ( accessed 29 July 2022 ).

Besançon , L. , Rönnberg , N. , Löwgren , J. , Tennant , J.P. and Cooper , M. ( 2020 ), “ Open up: a survey on open and non-anonymized peer reviewing ”, Research Integrity and Peer Review , Vol.  5 No.  1 , p. 8 .

Beverungen , A. , Böhm , S. and Land , C. ( 2012 ), “ The poverty of journal publishing ”, Organization , Vol.  19 No.  6 , pp.  929 - 938 .

Cobey , K.D. , Lalu , M.M. , Skidmore , B. , Ahmadzai , N. , Grudniewicz , A. and Moher , D. ( 2018 ), “ What is a predatory journal? A scoping review ”, F1000 .

Collyer , F.M. ( 2018 ), “ Global patterns in the publishing of academic knowledge: global North, global South ”, Current Sociology , Vol.  66 No.  1 , pp.  56 - 73 .

Cortegiani , A. , Ippolito , M. , Ingoglia , G. , Manca , A. , Cugusi , L. , Severin , A. , Strinzel , M. , Panzarella , V. , Campisi , G. , Manoj , L. , Gregoretti , C. , Einav , S. , Moher , D. and Giarratano , A. ( 2020 ), “ Citations and metrics of journals discontinued from Scopus for publication concerns: the GhoS(t)copus Project ”, F1000 .

Delgado-Troncoso , J.E. and Fischman , G.E. ( 2014 ), “ The future of Latin American academic journals ”, in Cope , B. and Phillips , A. (Eds), The Future of the Academic Journal , 2nd ed. , Chandos Publishing , pp.  379 - 400 .

Gardner , V. , Robinson , M. and O'Connell , E. ( 2022 ), “ Implementing the declaration on research assessment: a publisher case study ”, Insights , Vol.  35 No.  0 , p. 7 .

Hamilton , D.G. , Fraser , H. , Hoekstra , R. and Fidler , F. ( 2020 ), “ Journal policies and editors' opinions on peer review ”, eLife , Vol.  9 , e62529 .

Harzing , A.-W. ( 2014 ), “ A longitudinal study of Google Scholar coverage between 2012 and 2013 ”, Scientometrics , Vol.  98 No.  1 , pp.  565 - 575 .

Himmelstein , D.S. , Romero , A.R. , Levernier , J.G. , Munro , T.A. , McLaughlin , S.R. , Greshake Tzovaras , B. and Greene , C.S. ( 2018 ), “ Sci-Hub provides access to nearly all scholarly literature ”, eLife , Vol.  7 , e32822 .

Holt , J. , Walker , A. and Jones , P. ( 2021 ), “ Introducing a data availability policy for journals at IOP Publishing: measuring the impact on authors and editorial teams ”, Learned Publishing , Vol.  34 No.  41 , pp.  478 - 486 .

Irawan , D.E. , Abraham , J. , Zein , R.A. , Ridlo , I.A. and Aribowo , E.K. ( 2021 ), “ Open access in Indonesia ”, Development and Change , Vol.  52 No.  3 , pp.  651 - 660 .

Jimenez , A. , Vannini , S. and Cox , A. ( In press ), “ A holistic decolonial lens for library and information studies ”, Journal of Documentation .

Kendall , G. ( 2021 ), “ Beall's legacy in the battle against predatory publishers ”, Learned Publishing , Vol.  34 No.  3 , pp.  379 - 388 .

Koerber , A. , Starkey , J.C. , Ardon-Dryer , K. , Cummins , R.G. , Eko , L. and Kee , K.F. ( 2020 ), “ A qualitative content analysis of watchlists vs safelists: how do they address the issue of predatory publishing? ”, The Journal of Academic Librarianship , Vol.  46 No.  6 , 102236 .

Kotsiantis , S. , Kanellopoulos , D. and Pintelas , P. ( 2006 ), “ Handling imbalanced datasets: a review ”, GESTS International Transactions on Computer Science and Engineering , Vol.  30 No.  1 , pp.  25 - 36 .

Laakso , M. ( 2014 ), “ Green open access policies of scholarly journal publishers: a study of what, when, and where self-archiving is allowed ”, Scientometrics , Vol.  99 No.  2 , pp.  475 - 494 .

Laakso , M. , Welling , P. , Bukvova , H. , Nyman , L. , Björk , B.-C. and Hedlund , T. ( 2011 ), “ The development of open access journal publishing from 1993 to 2009 ”, PLOS ONE , Vol.  6 No.  6 , e20961 .

Larivière , V. , Haustein , S. and Mongeon , P. ( 2015 ), “ The oligopoly of academic publishers in the digital era ”, PLOS ONE , Vol.  10 No.  6 , e0127502 .

Lincoln , A.E. , Pincus , S. , Koster , J.B. and Leboy , P.S. ( 2012 ), “ The matilda effect in science: awards and prizes in the US, 1990s and 2000s ”, Social Studies of Science , Vol.  42 No.  2 , pp.  307 - 320 .

Makhija , V. , Kumar , V. , Tiwari , A. and Verma , A. ( 2018 ), “ Knowledge management system using CORE repository ”, 2018 5th International Symposium on Emerging Trends and Technologies in Libraries and Information Services (ETTLIS) , pp.  59 - 64 .

Mendonça , S. , Pereira , J. and Ferreira , M.E. ( 2018 ), “ Gatekeeping African studies: what does ‘editormetrics’ indicate about journal governance? ”, Scientometrics , Vol.  117 No.  3 , pp.  1513 - 1534 .

Metz , I. , Harzing , A.-W. and Zyphur , M.J. ( 2016 ), “ Of journal editors and editorial boards: who are the trailblazers in increasing editorial board gender equality? ”, British Journal of Management , Vol.  27 No.  4 , pp.  712 - 726 .

Mongeon , P. and Paul-Hus , A. ( 2016 ), “ The journal coverage of Web of Science and Scopus: a comparative analysis ”, Scientometrics , Vol.  106 No.  1 , pp.  213 - 228 .

Okune , A. , Hillyer , R. , Albornoz , D. , Posada , A. and Chan , L. ( 2018 ), “ Whose infrastructure? Towards inclusive and collaborative knowledge infrastructures in open science ”, ELPUB 2018 .

Ortega , J.L. ( 2017 ), “ The presence of academic journals on Twitter and its relationship with dissemination (tweets) and research impact (citations) ”, Aslib Journal of Information Management , Vol.  69 No.  6 , pp.  674 - 687 .

O'Brien , A. , Graf , C. and McKellar , K. ( 2019 ), “ How publishers and editors can help early career researchers: recommendations from a roundtable discussion ”, Learned Publishing , Vol.  32 No.  4 , pp.  383 - 393 .

Pacher , A. , Heck , T. and Schoch , K. ( 2021 ), “ Open editors: a dataset of scholarly journals' editorial board positions ”, SocArXiV . doi: 10.31235/osf.io/jvzq7 .

Packer , A.L. ( 2009 ), “ The SciELO open access: a gold way from the South ”, Canadian Journal of Higher Education , Vol.  39 No.  3 , pp.  111 - 126 .

Pieper , D. and Summann , F. ( 2006 ), “ Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE): an end‐user oriented institutional repository search service ”, Library Hi Tech , Vol.  24 No.  4 , pp.  614 - 619 .

Pollock , D. ( 2022 ), “ News and views: publishers and market consolidation – Part 1 of 2 ”, Delta Think , 21 June, available at: https://deltathink.com/news-views-publishers-and-market-consolidation-part-1-of-2/ ( accessed 6 July 2022 ).

Porter , S.J. ( 2022 ), “ Measuring research information citizenship across ORCID practice ”, Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics , Vol.  7 , 779097 .

Priem , J. , Piwowar , H. and Orr , R. ( 2022 ), “ OpenAlex: a fully-open index of scholarly works, authors, venues, institutions, and concepts ”, arXiv 2205.01833 . doi: 10.48550/arXiv.2205.01833 .

Quintana , D.S. and Heathers , J.A.J. ( 2021 ), “ How podcasts can benefit scientific communities ”, Trends in Cognitive Sciences , Vol.  25 No.  1 , pp.  3 - 5 .

Ren , S. and Rousseau , R. ( 2002 ), “ International visibility of Chinese scientific journals ”, Scientometrics , Vol.  53 No.  3 , pp.  389 - 405 .

Schönfelder , N. ( 2019 ), “ Article processing charges: mirroring the citation impact or legacy of the subscription-based model? ”, Quantitative Science Studies , Vol.  1 No.  1 , pp.  6 - 27 .

Schonfeld , R.C. ( 2012 ), JSTOR: A History , Princeton University Press , New Jersey .

Spezi , V. , Wakeling , S. , Pinfield , S. , Fry , J. , Creaser , C. and Willett , P. ( 2018 ), “ Let the community decide’? The vision and reality of soundness-only peer review in open-access mega-journals ”, Journal of Documentation , Vol.  74 No.  1 , pp.  137 - 161 .

Teixeira da Silva , J.A. , Adjei , K.O.K. , Owusu-Ansah , C.M. , Sooryamoorthy , R. and Balehegn , M. ( 2019 ), “ Africa's challenges in the OA movement: risks and possibilities ”, Online Information Review , Vol.  43 No.  4 , pp.  496 - 512 .

Van Noorden , R. ( 2014 ), “ The scientists who get credit for peer review ”, Nature , doi: 10.1038/nature.2014.16102 .

Vera-Baceta , M.-A. , Thelwall , M. and Kousha , K. ( 2019 ), “ Web of science and Scopus language coverage ”, Scientometrics , Vol.  121 No.  3 , pp.  1803 - 1813 .

Wickham , H. and RStudio ( 2020 ), “ Rvest: easily harvest (scrape) web pages ”, available at: https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=rvest ( accessed 4 January 2021 ).

Wiryawan , K.G. ( 2014 ), “ The current status of science journals in Indonesia ”, Science Editing , Vol.  1 No.  2 , pp.  71 - 75 .

Zheng , H. , Aung , H.H. , Erdt , M. , Peng , T.-Q. , Raamkumar , A.S. and Theng , Y.-L. ( 2019 ), “ Social media presence of scholarly journals ”, Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology , Vol.  70 No.  3 , pp.  256 - 270 .

Acknowledgements

Corrigendum: It has come to the attention of the publisher that the article: Nishikawa-Pacher, A. (2022), “Who are the 100 largest scientific publishers by journal count? A webscraping approach”, Journal of Documentation , Vol. 78 No. 7, pp. 450-463. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-04-2022-0083 mistakenly labelled IOS Press as a predatory publisher in Table 2. Amendments have been made to Table 2 and throughout the text to correct this issue. The authors sincerely apologise to IOS Press and the readers for any inconvenience caused.

A preprint version of this paper appeared as “Who are the 100 Largest Scientific Publishers by Journal Count? A Webscraping Approach” and has been posted on the SocArXiv repository.

Funding: The author acknowledges TU Wien Bibliothek for financial support through its Open Access Funding Programme.

Corresponding author

Related articles, we’re listening — tell us what you think, something didn’t work….

Report bugs here

All feedback is valuable

Please share your general feedback

Join us on our journey

Platform update page.

Visit emeraldpublishing.com/platformupdate to discover the latest news and updates

Questions & More Information

Answers to the most commonly asked questions here

Research publishing solutions

Increase the visibility and value of your publications

The ongoing rise in scholarly output. The changing market dynamics driven by open research. The constantly changing stakeholder expectations. It’s more important today than ever for publishers to build strong, long-lasting relationships with the research community.

For over twenty years, we’ve helped publishers connect with researchers to ensure content is peer-reviewed, published, seen and cited by the right audiences. Our robust workflow solutions, publisher-neutral data and expert teams help you provide a modern, streamlined experience for your authors, editors, and reviewers. Manage your entire publication workflow from acquisition to publication: connect with millions of potential authors; quickly find relevant, available and motivated reviewers; efficiently turn around manuscript submissions; and ease administrative burden for your editors.

“We take research integrity immensely seriously at Wiley and see this open peer review initiative as a step towards making the publishing process more transparent. This will allow authors, reviewers, editors and readers to focus on review quality and informed decision-making. It will also dissuade manipulation of the peer review process, and provide reviewers and authors with greater visibility and recognition of their efforts. We are delighted that our partnership with Publons and ScholarOne has brought about a practical and scalable solution, independently validated and securely stored.”

• Director, Research Integrity and Publishing Ethics

How we help

Assess your journal’s performance

• Understand the relative contribution of each article to your journal’s overall citation performance​
• Gain insight into competitor publications, down to the paper level​
• Obtain the transparency you need to make data-driven decisions about your open access strategy​

More on Journal Citation Reports

Manage publication workflows

• Streamline workflow with innovative capabilities such as AI-powered metadata extraction and submission filtering​
• Protect the integrity of your journal and editorial processes with proprietary algorithms that help you spot potentially unusual activities from authors and reviewers​
• Partner with key industry organizations for single sign-on, taxonomy and other tracking and verification capabilities​

More on ScholarOne

Market to the right audience

• Target authors based on academic affiliations and countries/regions​
• Reach the right audience with multiple targeting options across the sciences, arts and humanities and social sciences
• Boost campaign performance by personalizing your campaigns with dynamic content​
• Cover all your campaign needs with compliance and data protection, and campaign performance monitoring​

More on Author Connect

Find reviewers & build stronger relationships

• Expand your pool of potential reviewers through powerful and accurate search with comprehensive search parameters
• Screen and assess reviewer candidates with 360° view​
• Reliably contact and connect with prospective reviewers
• Build stronger relationships with reviewers by recognizing their contributions with our Reviewer Recognition Service
• Provide enhanced visibility and recognition for peer reviewers

More on Reviewer Locator

Manage scholarly conferences

• Manage submissions, peer-reviews and content for any size conference in one place​
• Implement a scalable solution for your community of authors, reviewers, committees, speakers and attendees
• Provide a seamless transition from opening to event and beyond​

More on ScholarOne for Conferences

Bring transparency to peer review

• Bring more openness to peer review with minimal effort, using existing technology
• Publish an article’s complete peer review process — from initial review and response through to revision and final publication decision​
• Advance research integrity and reproducibility
• Help prevent research manipulation and fraudulent review

More on Transparent Peer Review

Our solutions

Journal citation reports, web of science author connect – marketing database and services , scholarone for conferences, web of science reviewer locator, web of science reviewer recognition service, transparent peer review service on scholarone, web of science core collection, scholarone webinars.

Submit journals for inclusion in the Web of Science Core Collection™

Web of Science Core Collection™ editorial selection process

Get started

Talk to us about your research publishing needs.

Speak to our team

Home → Get Published → How to Publish a Research Paper: A Step-by-Step Guide

How to Publish a Research Paper: A Step-by-Step Guide

Jordan Kruszynski

• January 4, 2024

You’re in academia.

You’re going steady.

Your research is going well and you begin to wonder: ‘ How exactly do I get a research paper published?’

If this is the question on your lips, then this step-by-step guide is the one for you. We’ll be walking you through the whole process of how to publish a research paper.

Publishing a research paper is a significant milestone for researchers and academics, as it allows you to share your findings, contribute to your field of study, and start to gain serious recognition within the wider academic community. So, want to know how to publish a research paper? By following our guide, you’ll get a firm grasp of the steps involved in this process, giving you the best chance of successfully navigating the publishing process and getting your work out there.

Understanding the Publishing Process

To begin, it’s crucial to understand that getting a research paper published is a multi-step process. From beginning to end, it could take as little as 2 months before you see your paper nestled in the pages of your chosen journal. On the other hand, it could take as long as a year .

Below, we set out the steps before going into more detail on each one. Getting a feel for these steps will help you to visualise what lies ahead, and prepare yourself for each of them in turn. It’s important to remember that you won’t actually have control over every step – in fact, some of them will be decided by people you’ll probably never meet. However, knowing which parts of the process are yours to decide will allow you to adjust your approach and attitude accordingly.

Each of the following stages will play a vital role in the eventual publication of your paper:

• Preparing Your Research Paper
• Finding the Right Journal
• Crafting a Strong Manuscript
• Navigating the Peer-Review Process
• Submitting Your Paper
• Dealing with Rejections and Revising Your Paper

Step 1: Preparing Your Research Paper

It all starts here. The quality and content of your research paper is of fundamental importance if you want to get it published. This step will be different for every researcher depending on the nature of your research, but if you haven’t yet settled on a topic, then consider the following advice:

• Choose an interesting and relevant topic that aligns with current trends in your field. If your research touches on the passions and concerns of your academic peers or wider society, it may be more likely to capture attention and get published successfully.
• Conduct a comprehensive literature review (link to lit. review article once it’s published) to identify the state of existing research and any knowledge gaps within it. Aiming to fill a clear gap in the knowledge of your field is a great way to increase the practicality of your research and improve its chances of getting published.
• Structure your paper in a clear and organised manner, including all the necessary sections such as title, abstract, introduction (link to the ‘how to write a research paper intro’ article once it’s published) , methodology, results, discussion, and conclusion.
• Adhere to the formatting guidelines provided by your target journal to ensure that your paper is accepted as viable for publishing. More on this in the next section…

Step 2: Finding the Right Journal

Understanding how to publish a research paper involves selecting the appropriate journal for your work. This step is critical for successful publication, and you should take several factors into account when deciding which journal to apply for:

• Conduct thorough research to identify journals that specialise in your field of study and have published similar research. Naturally, if you submit a piece of research in molecular genetics to a journal that specialises in geology, you won’t be likely to get very far.
• Consider factors such as the journal’s scope, impact factor, and target audience. Today there is a wide array of journals to choose from, including traditional and respected print journals, as well as numerous online, open-access endeavours. Some, like Nature , even straddle both worlds.
• Review the submission guidelines provided by the journal and ensure your paper meets all the formatting requirements and word limits. This step is key. Nature, for example, offers a highly informative series of pages that tells you everything you need to know in order to satisfy their formatting guidelines (plus more on the whole submission process).
• Note that these guidelines can differ dramatically from journal to journal, and details really do matter. You might submit an outstanding piece of research, but if it includes, for example, images in the wrong size or format, this could mean a lengthy delay to getting it published. If you get everything right first time, you’ll save yourself a lot of time and trouble, as well as strengthen your publishing chances in the first place.

Step 3: Crafting a Strong Manuscript

Crafting a strong manuscript is crucial to impress journal editors and reviewers. Look at your paper as a complete package, and ensure that all the sections tie together to deliver your findings with clarity and precision.

• Begin by creating a clear and concise title that accurately reflects the content of your paper.
• Compose an informative abstract that summarises the purpose, methodology, results, and significance of your study.
• Craft an engaging introduction (link to the research paper introduction article) that draws your reader in.
• Develop a well-structured methodology section, presenting your results effectively using tables and figures.
• Write a compelling discussion and conclusion that emphasise the significance of your findings.

Step 4: Navigating the Peer-Review Process

Once you submit your research paper to a journal, it undergoes a rigorous peer-review process to ensure its quality and validity. In peer-review, experts in your field assess your research and provide feedback and suggestions for improvement, ultimately determining whether your paper is eligible for publishing or not. You are likely to encounter several models of peer-review, based on which party – author, reviewer, or both – remains anonymous throughout the process.

When your paper undergoes the peer-review process, be prepared for constructive criticism and address the comments you receive from your reviewer thoughtfully, providing clear and concise responses to their concerns or suggestions. These could make all the difference when it comes to making your next submission.

The peer-review process can seem like a closed book at times. Check out our discussion of the issue with philosopher and academic Amna Whiston in The Research Beat podcast!

Step 5: Submitting Your Paper

As we’ve already pointed out, one of the key elements in how to publish a research paper is ensuring that you meticulously follow the journal’s submission guidelines. Strive to comply with all formatting requirements, including citation styles, font, margins, and reference structure.

Before the final submission, thoroughly proofread your paper for errors, including grammar, spelling, and any inconsistencies in your data or analysis. At this stage, consider seeking feedback from colleagues or mentors to further improve the quality of your paper.

Step 6: Dealing with Rejections and Revising Your Paper

Rejection is a common part of the publishing process, but it shouldn’t discourage you. Analyse reviewer comments objectively and focus on the constructive feedback provided. Make necessary revisions and improvements to your paper to address the concerns raised by reviewers. If needed, consider submitting your paper to a different journal that is a better fit for your research.

For more tips on how to publish your paper out there, check out this thread by Dr. Asad Naveed ( @dr_asadnaveed ) – and if you need a refresher on the basics of how to publish under the Open Access model, watch this 5-minute video from Audemic Academy !

Final Thoughts

Successfully understanding how to publish a research paper requires dedication, attention to detail, and a systematic approach. By following the advice in our guide, you can increase your chances of navigating the publishing process effectively and achieving your goal of publication.

Remember, the journey may involve revisions, peer feedback, and potential rejections, but each step is an opportunity for growth and improvement. Stay persistent, maintain a positive mindset, and continue to refine your research paper until it reaches the standards of your target journal. Your contribution to your wider discipline through published research will not only advance your career, but also add to the growing body of collective knowledge in your field. Embrace the challenges and rewards that come with the publication process, and may your research paper make a significant impact in your area of study!

Looking for inspiration for your next big paper? Head to Audemic , where you can organise and listen to all the best and latest research in your field!

Keep striving, researchers! ✨

Table of Contents

Related articles.

You’re in academia. You’re going steady. Your research is going well and you begin to wonder: ‘How exactly do I get a

Behind the Scenes: What Does a Research Assistant Do?

Have you ever wondered what goes on behind the scenes in a research lab? Does it involve acting out the whims of

How to Write a Research Paper Introduction: Hook, Line, and Sinker

Want to know how to write a research paper introduction that dazzles? Struggling to hook your reader in with your opening sentences?

Blog Podcast

Privacy policy Terms of service

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Discover more from Audemic: Access any academic research via audio

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Type your email…

Continue reading

SCOPUS Publication

Publish your paper in Paid / UnPaid Scopus Indexed Journals with faster reviewing and low cost.

UGC Approved Publication

Publish your paper in UGC Approved Journals within 48 hours. Publication Starts @ Rs.999 / Paper.

Overseas Publications

Publish your paper in Overseas International Journals with faster reviewing and discounted fees.

Low Cost Plagiarism Checking

Turnitin Plagiarism Checking at very low charges

Fast Reviewing

Fast Reviews for Scopus, SCI and WoS Journals

Faster Publications

Publication of Proceeding Papers in Scopus Indexed Journal within 3 Months

• Submit Paper
• Check Paper Status
• Download Certificate/Paper

• --> --> --> --> --> E-mail [email protected] --> -->