The research drew on four publicly available data sources, queried programmatically in a single session on April 1, 2026, to ensure temporal consistency. Journal identification came from PubMed/MEDLINE, metadata records from the Crossref REST API, impact values from the SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) 2024 dataset, and pricing information from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). Of 92,542 unique journals registered with Crossref, 20,333 were PubMed-indexed and 4,844 carried the more selective MEDLINE designation. After excluding 72 journals lacking geographic data, 4,772 journals formed the final analytical sample, each identified by its International Standard Serial Number.

Geographic classification was based on publisher headquarters, a choice with important implications. Western Europe accounted for 2,362 journals (49.5 percent) and Northern America for 1,896 (39.7 percent), meaning these two regions together hosted 89.2 percent of the sample. The remainder was spread thinly: 202 journals in the Asiatic Region, 95 in Eastern Europe, 88 in the Middle East, 75 in Latin America, 36 in the Pacific Region and just 18 in Africa. The author notes that this reflects the distribution of publishing infrastructure rather than the origin of research content or authorship, and that MEDLINE’s requirement that journals publish or provide abstracts in English contributes to this Anglocentric concentration.

Metadata completeness was scored on a composite scale from 0 to 12, built from eight indicators. Four core elements — abstracts, author affiliations, ORCID identifiers and funder information — were assessed as continuous coverage percentages and transformed into categorical scores, while four repository deposit elements — reference lists, license information, update policies and resource links — were scored as present or absent. The overall median score was 8.0, but regional differences were statistically significant (Kruskal-Wallis χ² = 231.42, p < 0.001). Africa and Eastern Europe consistently sat at the bottom, while the Middle East, somewhat counterintuitively, posted the highest median composite score, driven by high-performing journals in a bimodal distribution.

One finding stands out as near-universal: funder information was the most consistently deficient metadata element in every region, ranging from zero coverage in Africa to a maximum of just 40 percent in Western Europe. This matters because funders increasingly mandate institutional and financial tracking of research outputs. There is a hint of improvement on the horizon — Crossref announced reduced fees for registering grant information on ongoing works and complete waivers for historical records starting January 2026 — but the current picture is one of systemic underreporting. By contrast, references and licenses showed the highest and most consistent coverage, reaching 97 and 95 percent respectively in Western Europe.

Pricing data revealed a different kind of divide. APC information was available for 2,950 journals (61.8 percent of the sample), with an overall median fee of €2,470. Where data existed, Northern America (median €2,535) and Western Europe (€2,451) charged the highest fees, while Africa (€369) and Eastern Europe (€676) charged the lowest. But availability itself was highly uneven: fewer than a quarter of journals in Africa, Eastern Europe, the Asiatic Region and the Middle East reported an APC, compared with 73.6 percent in Western Europe. The author cautions that this missingness limits the comparability of regional figures, and an inverse-probability-weighted sensitivity analysis was used to probe whether selective reporting was distorting the results.

That sensitivity analysis produced one of the study’s most instructive results. In the unweighted complete-case model, metadata completeness appeared to be a significant negative predictor of APC — a counterintuitive suggestion that better-documented journals charge less. Under inverse-probability weighting, that association vanished entirely (β = 0.0007, p = 0.87), indicating it likely reflected which journals bother to report fees at all rather than a genuine pricing relationship. The regional pricing pattern, however, survived weighting largely intact, and APCs remained moderately positively correlated with SJR (ρ = 0.289), consistent with higher-impact journals commanding higher fees.

Journal impact showed the strongest regional stratification of all (χ² = 477.46, p < 0.001). Northern America, Western Europe and the Pacific Region formed a statistically indistinguishable high-impact cluster, each differing significantly from every other region, while Africa, Eastern Europe, Latin America and the Middle East formed a lower cluster. Distributions were right-skewed almost everywhere, suggesting a small number of high-impact journals within each region. In a multivariable model of log-transformed SJR, metadata completeness remained a significant positive predictor even after adjusting for region and APC, though the study’s correlational design cannot establish whether richer metadata causes higher impact.

The most consequential analytical move came when the author formally accounted for the fact that journals are nested within publishers. A multilevel model partitioning variance found that publisher identity alone explained roughly 87 percent of the variance in metadata completeness (ICC = 0.868) and about 45 percent of the variance in log-transformed SJR. Once publisher clustering was modeled, none of the regional coefficients for metadata completeness remained statistically significant. The pattern was stark in the raw data too: major publishers including Elsevier (987 journals), Springer-Verlag (455), Taylor & Francis (337), Springer BioMed Central (147) and S. Karger (62) all showed near-complete deposition of references and licenses (≥98 percent) alongside near-zero deposition of abstracts and/or affiliations. Because these deficits are concentrated among specific well-resourced publishers, resource constraints alone seem an unlikely full explanation, though the author flags this as a hypothesis that cannot be tested from Crossref deposition records alone.

The implications cut in two directions. For metadata, interventions aimed at a handful of large publishers could meaningfully close the global gap, since the regional pattern is substantially a publisher-level phenomenon that happens to cluster geographically. For pricing, the story is different: regional APC differences persisted even after accounting for publisher, suggesting that fee disparities would require region-targeted policy such as expanded waiver programs rather than publisher-targeted reform alone. The study has clear limitations — an ecological design prone to aggregation effects, headquarters location as an imperfect proxy for publishing activity, no disciplinary classification available as a covariate, and exclusion of journals not registered with Crossref, which may be concentrated in lower-resourced regions and could underestimate true disparities. Still, the overall picture is of a stratified biomedical publishing ecosystem in which discoverability, prestige and cost are entangled, and in which a relatively small number of corporate actors hold disproportionate leverage over whether the world’s medical literature can actually be found, linked and trusted.

Subject of Research: Geographic variation in metadata completeness, article processing charges and journal impact across MEDLINE-indexed biomedical journals

Article Title: Mapping geographic variation in metadata completeness, article processing charges and journal impact across MEDLINE journals and the influence of publisher clustering

Article References: Mapping geographic variation in metadata completeness, article processing charges and journal impact across MEDLINE journals and the influence of publisher clustering. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s44564-026-00027-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44564-026-00027-w

Keywords: MEDLINE, metadata completeness, article processing charges, journal impact, Crossref, SCImago Journal Rank, open access publishing, publisher clustering, geographic inequality, biomedical publishing, DOAJ, scholarly communication

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