MDPI: Why has the volume of published articles decreased by 22% over the past three months, and how does the publisher manage to maintain its productivity?
Some interesting facts. Christos Petrou, Linkedin contributor, notes the following:
Since the removal of IJERPH from WoS, the number of articles in the journal has decreased by 85% compared to the peak (the second largest journal in 2022 (17.5 thousand articles) becomes a much smaller one (> 1 thousand articles per year)). And it hasn’t yet been excluded from Scopus, and perhaps will not be excluded.
The removal from the list appears to have affected MDPI as a whole, as (excluding IJERPH) the volume of MDPI papers published has fallen by 22% over the past three months from its peak (December 2022 to February 2023) and averaged 23,000 articles per month, and not 29,000 as before.
For example, Sustainability (MDPI's second largest journal) is down about 20% from its peak.
Overall, the MDPI is down 25% from its peak, and while this may seem dramatic, in 2023 the publisher is likely to hold onto last year’s positions (the first three months of 2023 were incredible in terms of articles) and could stabilize at >250 thousand articles per year (USD 500 million).
The author also asks: What will it take for MDPI to maintain its performance and potentially return to growth?
And answers: It is necessary to pay the same attention to your reputation as to your activities. MDPI looks unconvincing here and will not be able to control its fate in the short term.
The accumulated damage to its reputation can lead to negative events with a delay, i.e., another major exclusion from indexing in serious databases or even a recommendation not to publish in the publisher's journals (publishing ban) in some country may not be far off.
Source: Linkedin