Psychology Journal’s Citation Score Soars as Global Submissions Surge Nearly Sixfold

When Angelo Brandelli Costa and Giuseppina Marsico took over the editorship of Trends in Psychology in 2019, the journal was a modest, nationally focused outlet publishing a handful of papers a year. As their tenure as Co-Editors-in-Chief draws to a close, the two researchers have published a formal retrospective of the period from 2019–2020 to 2024, and the numbers they report describe one of the most dramatic transformations of a scientific journal in recent memory. The editorial, published in the journal’s December 2025 issue, documents a rise in citation impact, an explosion in readership and submissions, and a decisive shift from a Brazil-centered publication to a genuinely international platform for psychological science.

The headline metric is the journal’s CiteScore, Elsevier’s measure of average citations per document over a rolling window. In the 2019–2020 baseline period, Trends in Psychology posted a CiteScore of just 0.6, a figure that placed it deep in the lower ranks of general psychology journals. By 2024, that value had climbed to 3.4, an increase of nearly sixfold. In percentile terms, the journal moved from the 17th percentile of its field in 2019 to the 53rd percentile in 2024, crossing the median of General Psychology and joining the majority of journals it competes with for authors and readers. For a publication that had long operated on the periphery of mainstream visibility, crossing that threshold represents a structural change in how the journal is perceived by researchers deciding where to submit their best work.

Corroborating evidence comes from an independent source of citation data. The journal’s h5-index on Google Scholar, which counts the number of articles published in the last five complete years that have each received at least that number of citations, rose from a base of 5 before 2019 to 24 in 2024. The h5-index is deliberately resistant to manipulation by a small number of highly cited papers, because it requires a broad base of articles each accumulating comparable citation counts. A jump from 5 to 24 therefore implies that dozens of papers published in the period are now regularly cited, rather than a handful of outliers carrying the journal’s reputation. Together, the CiteScore and h5-index trajectories suggest a broad-based improvement in the scientific resonance of the work the journal has published.

Perhaps the most striking figure in the editorial concerns raw readership. Annual full-text article requests, the standard proxy for downloads, increased approximately 1,700 percent over the period, from roughly 12,000 in 2020 to an average of about 220,000 in 2023–2024. That is an eighteenfold expansion in the number of times readers worldwide opened and downloaded the journal’s articles each year. Download statistics of this magnitude reflect a combination of factors: more published content, greater discoverability through indexing services and search engines, and a wider geographic distribution of readers who find the journal’s output relevant to their work. Whatever the precise mix of causes, the scale of the increase indicates that the journal’s content is now reaching an audience orders of magnitude larger than the one it served at the start of the decade.

The surge in impact is mirrored by an unprecedented volume of submissions. Total submissions rose from an annual average of 117 in 2019–2020 to a yearly average of 657 in 2023–2024, more than a fivefold increase in the flow of manuscripts arriving at the editorial office. The international component of that flow changed even more dramatically. Submissions from authors outside Brazil grew from an average of 51 per year in the baseline period to around 548 per year in 2023–2024. In proportional terms, the journal went from receiving roughly 40 percent of its submissions from outside Brazil to roughly 80 percent, meaning international authors now constitute the clear majority of its contributor base. This inversion of the journal’s demographic profile is the clearest quantitative evidence that Trends in Psychology has become a global platform rather than a national one with international pretensions.

Acceptance volumes scaled accordingly. The journal accepted an average of 7 articles per year in 2019–2020, compared with an average of 85 articles accepted per year in 2023–2024, a more than tenfold increase in annual output. Notably, around 67 percent of recently accepted articles came from foreign authors, a share lower than the 80 percent international share of submissions. That gap indicates that the journal has not abandoned its role as a vital forum for Brazilian psychology; domestic authors continue to be published at a meaningful rate even as the overall volume expands. The editors describe this balance as maintaining Brazil as a vital forum while significantly expanding the journal’s reach, a formulation that captures the dual identity the publication now occupies as the official journal of the Brazilian Society of Psychology with a worldwide authorship.

The transformation was not only quantitative. The thematic composition of the journal’s content shifted substantially over the period. In 2019–2020, coverage was concentrated, with psychometrics and psychological assessment dominating the listed topic occurrences at roughly 30 percent. By the more recent period, the editors report a significant amplification and diversification of fields, with mental health and psychometrics leading the topical distribution but with cross-cultural psychology emerging as an area of high relevance. This diversification matters for the journal’s scientific identity: a publication dominated by a single methodological specialty tends to attract a narrow community of authors and citers, whereas a journal that hosts work spanning assessment, mental health, and cross-cultural research can participate in a much wider range of scholarly conversations. The editors interpret this shift as attesting to the journal’s openness to a wider variety of research areas and its capacity to host a comprehensive academic dialogue.

Editorial operations appear to have kept pace with the growth in volume. In 2024, the journal recorded an author satisfaction rate of 91 percent, a figure the editors present as evidence of an efficient and respectful editorial experience despite the more than fivefold increase in manuscript flow. Sustaining service quality during rapid scaling is a well-known challenge in academic publishing, since review capacity, editorial staffing, and production workflows all come under pressure as submission counts climb. The editors attribute much of the journal’s success to its Editorial Board, which they describe as nationally rooted but globally expert, currently composed of academics from Brazil, Italy, Portugal, the United States, Luxembourg, Georgia, Turkey, and China. They also credit managing editor Felipe Vilanova for his assistance over the last years, along with Springer editors Bruno Fiuza and Kimberly Poss.

The retrospective is also notable for what it reveals about the governance of the journal. Costa and Marsico state that their tenure is concluding as a result of their decision, informed by strategic differences with the Brazilian Society of Psychology regarding the journal’s continued future growth and development. The editorial does not elaborate on the nature of those differences, but the framing makes clear that the outgoing editors view the period they led as one of deliberate, strategic expansion rather than passive growth. Their decision to publish a data-rich account of the journal’s trajectory at the moment of their departure provides the scientific community with an unusually transparent record of what a sustained editorial strategy can achieve for a mid-ranked national journal seeking international standing.

The broader significance of the Trends in Psychology story lies in what it suggests about the changing geography of scientific publishing. The editors emphasize that the journal, originating from Brazil, is dedicated to fostering dialogue within the international research community, particularly with authors from the Global South. Journals based outside the traditional publishing centers of North America and Western Europe have historically struggled to attract international submissions, citation visibility, and readership, creating a self-reinforcing cycle in which visibility begets submissions begets impact. The metrics documented in this editorial, from the 1,700 percent rise in downloads to the crossing of the citation median, offer a concrete case study of how that cycle can be broken. As the outgoing editors put it in their closing reflection, they hope the journal remains committed to advancing psychological science and providing a dynamic, inclusive, and impactful space, from Brazil, for researchers worldwide.

Subject of Research: Editorial retrospective of bibliometric and readership growth at the journal Trends in Psychology from 2019 to 2024

Article Title: Trends in Psychology: a Remarkable Period of Growth and Global Impact 2019–2024

Article References: Brandelli Costa, A., & Marsico, G. (2025). Trends in Psychology: a Remarkable Period of Growth and Global Impact 2019–2024. Trends in Psychology, 33(4), 1225-1226. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43076-025-00510-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43076-025-00510-7

Keywords: Trends in Psychology, bibliometrics, CiteScore, h5-index, scientific publishing, Global South, Brazilian Society of Psychology, cross-cultural psychology, mental health, psychometrics, journal impact, editorial governance