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Home » How to Publish a Research Paper – Step by Step Guide

How to Publish a Research Paper – Step by Step Guide

Table of Contents

Publishing a research paper is an important step for researchers to disseminate their findings to a wider audience and contribute to the advancement of knowledge in their field. Whether you are a graduate student, a postdoctoral fellow, or an established researcher, publishing a paper requires careful planning, rigorous research, and clear writing. In this process, you will need to identify a research question , conduct a thorough literature review , design a methodology, analyze data, and draw conclusions. Additionally, you will need to consider the appropriate journals or conferences to submit your work to and adhere to their guidelines for formatting and submission. In this article, we will discuss some ways to publish your Research Paper.

How to Publish a Research Paper

To Publish a Research Paper follow the guide below:

• Conduct original research : Conduct thorough research on a specific topic or problem. Collect data, analyze it, and draw conclusions based on your findings.
• Write the paper : Write a detailed paper describing your research. It should include an abstract, introduction, literature review, methodology, results, discussion, and conclusion.
• Choose a suitable journal or conference : Look for a journal or conference that specializes in your research area. You can check their submission guidelines to ensure your paper meets their requirements.
• Prepare your submission: Follow the guidelines and prepare your submission, including the paper, abstract, cover letter, and any other required documents.
• Submit the paper: Submit your paper online through the journal or conference website. Make sure you meet the submission deadline.
• Peer-review process : Your paper will be reviewed by experts in the field who will provide feedback on the quality of your research, methodology, and conclusions.
• Revisions : Based on the feedback you receive, revise your paper and resubmit it.
• Acceptance : Once your paper is accepted, you will receive a notification from the journal or conference. You may need to make final revisions before the paper is published.
• Publication : Your paper will be published online or in print. You can also promote your work through social media or other channels to increase its visibility.

How to Choose Journal for Research Paper Publication

Here are some steps to follow to help you select an appropriate journal:

• Identify your research topic and audience : Your research topic and intended audience should guide your choice of journal. Identify the key journals in your field of research and read the scope and aim of the journal to determine if your paper is a good fit.
• Analyze the journal’s impact and reputation : Check the impact factor and ranking of the journal, as well as its acceptance rate and citation frequency. A high-impact journal can give your paper more visibility and credibility.
• Consider the journal’s publication policies : Look for the journal’s publication policies such as the word count limit, formatting requirements, open access options, and submission fees. Make sure that you can comply with the requirements and that the journal is in line with your publication goals.
• Look at recent publications : Review recent issues of the journal to evaluate whether your paper would fit in with the journal’s current content and style.
• Seek advice from colleagues and mentors: Ask for recommendations and suggestions from your colleagues and mentors in your field, especially those who have experience publishing in the same or similar journals.
• Be prepared to make changes : Be prepared to revise your paper according to the requirements and guidelines of the chosen journal. It is also important to be open to feedback from the editor and reviewers.

List of Journals for Research Paper Publications

There are thousands of academic journals covering various fields of research. Here are some of the most popular ones, categorized by field:

General/Multidisciplinary

• Nature: https://www.nature.com/
• Science: https://www.sciencemag.org/
• PLOS ONE: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/
• Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS): https://www.pnas.org/
• The Lancet: https://www.thelancet.com/
• JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association): https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama

Social Sciences/Humanities

• Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/psp
• Journal of Consumer Research: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/journals/jcr
• Journal of Educational Psychology: https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/edu
• Journal of Applied Psychology: https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/apl
• Journal of Communication: https://academic.oup.com/joc
• American Journal of Political Science: https://ajps.org/
• Journal of International Business Studies: https://www.jibs.net/
• Journal of Marketing Research: https://www.ama.org/journal-of-marketing-research/

Natural Sciences

• Journal of Biological Chemistry: https://www.jbc.org/
• Cell: https://www.cell.com/
• Science Advances: https://advances.sciencemag.org/
• Chemical Reviews: https://pubs.acs.org/journal/chreay
• Angewandte Chemie: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/15213765
• Physical Review Letters: https://journals.aps.org/prl/
• Journal of Geophysical Research: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/2156531X
• Journal of High Energy Physics: https://link.springer.com/journal/13130

Engineering/Technology

• IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/RecentIssue.jsp?punumber=5962385
• IEEE Transactions on Power Systems: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/RecentIssue.jsp?punumber=59
• IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/RecentIssue.jsp?punumber=42
• IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/RecentIssue.jsp?punumber=87
• Journal of Engineering Mechanics: https://ascelibrary.org/journal/jenmdt
• Journal of Materials Science: https://www.springer.com/journal/10853
• Journal of Chemical Engineering of Japan: https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/browse/jcej
• Journal of Mechanical Design: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/mechanicaldesign

Medical/Health Sciences

• New England Journal of Medicine: https://www.nejm.org/
• The BMJ (formerly British Medical Journal): https://www.bmj.com/
• Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA): https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama
• Annals of Internal Medicine: https://www.acpjournals.org/journal/aim
• American Journal of Epidemiology: https://academic.oup.com/aje
• Journal of Clinical Oncology: https://ascopubs.org/journal/jco
• Journal of Infectious Diseases: https://academic.oup.com/jid

List of Conferences for Research Paper Publications

There are many conferences that accept research papers for publication. The specific conferences you should consider will depend on your field of research. Here are some suggestions for conferences in a few different fields:

Computer Science and Information Technology:

• IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM): https://www.ieee-infocom.org/
• ACM SIGCOMM Conference on Data Communication: https://conferences.sigcomm.org/sigcomm/
• IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP): https://www.ieee-security.org/TC/SP/
• ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS): https://www.sigsac.org/ccs/
• ACM Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (CHI): https://chi2022.acm.org/

Engineering:

• IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA): https://www.ieee-icra.org/
• International Conference on Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (ICMAE): http://www.icmae.org/
• International Conference on Civil and Environmental Engineering (ICCEE): http://www.iccee.org/
• International Conference on Materials Science and Engineering (ICMSE): http://www.icmse.org/
• International Conference on Energy and Power Engineering (ICEPE): http://www.icepe.org/

Natural Sciences:

• American Chemical Society National Meeting & Exposition: https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/meetings/national-meeting.html
• American Physical Society March Meeting: https://www.aps.org/meetings/march/
• International Conference on Environmental Science and Technology (ICEST): http://www.icest.org/
• International Conference on Natural Science and Environment (ICNSE): http://www.icnse.org/
• International Conference on Life Science and Biological Engineering (LSBE): http://www.lsbe.org/

Social Sciences:

• Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association (ASA): https://www.asanet.org/annual-meeting-2022
• International Conference on Social Science and Humanities (ICSSH): http://www.icssh.org/
• International Conference on Psychology and Behavioral Sciences (ICPBS): http://www.icpbs.org/
• International Conference on Education and Social Science (ICESS): http://www.icess.org/
• International Conference on Management and Information Science (ICMIS): http://www.icmis.org/

How to Publish a Research Paper in Journal

Publishing a research paper in a journal is a crucial step in disseminating scientific knowledge and contributing to the field. Here are the general steps to follow:

• Choose a research topic : Select a topic of your interest and identify a research question or problem that you want to investigate. Conduct a literature review to identify the gaps in the existing knowledge that your research will address.
• Conduct research : Develop a research plan and methodology to collect data and conduct experiments. Collect and analyze data to draw conclusions that address the research question.
• Write a paper: Organize your findings into a well-structured paper with clear and concise language. Your paper should include an introduction, literature review, methodology, results, discussion, and conclusion. Use academic language and provide references for your sources.
• Choose a journal: Choose a journal that is relevant to your research topic and audience. Consider factors such as impact factor, acceptance rate, and the reputation of the journal.
• Follow journal guidelines : Review the submission guidelines and formatting requirements of the journal. Follow the guidelines carefully to ensure that your paper meets the journal’s requirements.
• Submit your paper : Submit your paper to the journal through the online submission system or by email. Include a cover letter that briefly explains the significance of your research and why it is suitable for the journal.
• Wait for reviews: Your paper will be reviewed by experts in the field. Be prepared to address their comments and make revisions to your paper.
• Revise and resubmit: Make revisions to your paper based on the reviewers’ comments and resubmit it to the journal. If your paper is accepted, congratulations! If not, consider revising and submitting it to another journal.
• Address reviewer comments : Reviewers may provide comments and suggestions for revisions to your paper. Address these comments carefully and thoughtfully to improve the quality of your paper.
• Submit the final version: Once your revisions are complete, submit the final version of your paper to the journal. Be sure to follow any additional formatting guidelines and requirements provided by the journal.
• Publication : If your paper is accepted, it will be published in the journal. Some journals provide online publication while others may publish a print version. Be sure to cite your published paper in future research and communicate your findings to the scientific community.

How to Publish a Research Paper for Students

Here are some steps you can follow to publish a research paper as an Under Graduate or a High School Student:

• Select a topic: Choose a topic that is relevant and interesting to you, and that you have a good understanding of.
• Conduct research : Gather information and data on your chosen topic through research, experiments, surveys, or other means.
• Write the paper : Start with an outline, then write the introduction, methods, results, discussion, and conclusion sections of the paper. Be sure to follow any guidelines provided by your instructor or the journal you plan to submit to.
• Edit and revise: Review your paper for errors in spelling, grammar, and punctuation. Ask a peer or mentor to review your paper and provide feedback for improvement.
• Choose a journal : Look for journals that publish papers in your field of study and that are appropriate for your level of research. Some popular journals for students include PLOS ONE, Nature, and Science.
• Submit the paper: Follow the submission guidelines for the journal you choose, which typically include a cover letter, abstract, and formatting requirements. Be prepared to wait several weeks to months for a response.
• Address feedback : If your paper is accepted with revisions, address the feedback from the reviewers and resubmit your paper. If your paper is rejected, review the feedback and consider revising and resubmitting to a different journal.

How to Publish a Research Paper for Free

Publishing a research paper for free can be challenging, but it is possible. Here are some steps you can take to publish your research paper for free:

• Choose a suitable open-access journal: Look for open-access journals that are relevant to your research area. Open-access journals allow readers to access your paper without charge, so your work will be more widely available.
• Check the journal’s reputation : Before submitting your paper, ensure that the journal is reputable by checking its impact factor, publication history, and editorial board.
• Follow the submission guidelines : Every journal has specific guidelines for submitting papers. Make sure to follow these guidelines carefully to increase the chances of acceptance.
• Submit your paper : Once you have completed your research paper, submit it to the journal following their submission guidelines.
• Wait for the review process: Your paper will undergo a peer-review process, where experts in your field will evaluate your work. Be patient during this process, as it can take several weeks or even months.
• Revise your paper : If your paper is rejected, don’t be discouraged. Revise your paper based on the feedback you receive from the reviewers and submit it to another open-access journal.
• Promote your research: Once your paper is published, promote it on social media and other online platforms. This will increase the visibility of your work and help it reach a wider audience.

Journals and Conferences for Free Research Paper publications

Here are the websites of the open-access journals and conferences mentioned:

Open-Access Journals:

• PLOS ONE – https://journals.plos.org/plosone/
• BMC Research Notes – https://bmcresnotes.biomedcentral.com/
• Frontiers in… – https://www.frontiersin.org/
• Journal of Open Research Software – https://openresearchsoftware.metajnl.com/
• PeerJ – https://peerj.com/

Conferences:

• IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM) – https://globecom2022.ieee-globecom.org/
• IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM) – https://infocom2022.ieee-infocom.org/
• IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM) – https://www.ieee-icdm.org/
• ACM SIGCOMM Conference on Data Communication (SIGCOMM) – https://conferences.sigcomm.org/sigcomm/
• ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) – https://www.sigsac.org/ccs/CCS2022/

Importance of Research Paper Publication

Research paper publication is important for several reasons, both for individual researchers and for the scientific community as a whole. Here are some reasons why:

• Advancing scientific knowledge : Research papers provide a platform for researchers to present their findings and contribute to the body of knowledge in their field. These papers often contain novel ideas, experimental data, and analyses that can help to advance scientific understanding.
• Building a research career : Publishing research papers is an essential component of building a successful research career. Researchers are often evaluated based on the number and quality of their publications, and having a strong publication record can increase one’s chances of securing funding, tenure, or a promotion.
• Peer review and quality control: Publication in a peer-reviewed journal means that the research has been scrutinized by other experts in the field. This peer review process helps to ensure the quality and validity of the research findings.
• Recognition and visibility : Publishing a research paper can bring recognition and visibility to the researchers and their work. It can lead to invitations to speak at conferences, collaborations with other researchers, and media coverage.
• Impact on society : Research papers can have a significant impact on society by informing policy decisions, guiding clinical practice, and advancing technological innovation.

Advantages of Research Paper Publication

There are several advantages to publishing a research paper, including:

• Recognition: Publishing a research paper allows researchers to gain recognition for their work, both within their field and in the academic community as a whole. This can lead to new collaborations, invitations to conferences, and other opportunities to share their research with a wider audience.
• Career advancement : A strong publication record can be an important factor in career advancement, particularly in academia. Publishing research papers can help researchers secure funding, grants, and promotions.
• Dissemination of knowledge : Research papers are an important way to share new findings and ideas with the broader scientific community. By publishing their research, scientists can contribute to the collective body of knowledge in their field and help advance scientific understanding.
• Feedback and peer review : Publishing a research paper allows other experts in the field to provide feedback on the research, which can help improve the quality of the work and identify potential flaws or limitations. Peer review also helps ensure that research is accurate and reliable.
• Citation and impact : Published research papers can be cited by other researchers, which can help increase the impact and visibility of the research. High citation rates can also help establish a researcher’s reputation and credibility within their field.

About the author

Muhammad Hassan

Researcher, Academic Writer, Web developer

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Open Access

Peer-reviewed

Research Article

The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era

* E-mail: [email protected]

Affiliations École de bibliothéconomie et des sciences de l’information, Université de Montréal, C.P. 6128, Succ. Centre-Ville, Montréal, QC. H3C 3J7, Canada, Observatoire des Sciences et des Technologies (OST), Centre Interuniversitaire de Recherche sur la Science et la Technologie (CIRST), Université du Québec à Montréal, CP 8888, Succ. Centre-Ville, Montréal, QC. H3C 3P8, Canada

Affiliation École de bibliothéconomie et des sciences de l’information, Université de Montréal, C.P. 6128, Succ. Centre-Ville, Montréal, QC. H3C 3J7, Canada

• Vincent Larivière, 
• Stefanie Haustein, 
• Philippe Mongeon

• Published: June 10, 2015
• https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0127502
• Reader Comments

The consolidation of the scientific publishing industry has been the topic of much debate within and outside the scientific community, especially in relation to major publishers’ high profit margins. However, the share of scientific output published in the journals of these major publishers, as well as its evolution over time and across various disciplines, has not yet been analyzed. This paper provides such analysis, based on 45 million documents indexed in the Web of Science over the period 1973-2013. It shows that in both natural and medical sciences (NMS) and social sciences and humanities (SSH), Reed-Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell, Springer, and Taylor & Francis increased their share of the published output, especially since the advent of the digital era (mid-1990s). Combined, the top five most prolific publishers account for more than 50% of all papers published in 2013. Disciplines of the social sciences have the highest level of concentration (70% of papers from the top five publishers), while the humanities have remained relatively independent (20% from top five publishers). NMS disciplines are in between, mainly because of the strength of their scientific societies, such as the ACS in chemistry or APS in physics. The paper also examines the migration of journals between small and big publishing houses and explores the effect of publisher change on citation impact. It concludes with a discussion on the economics of scholarly publishing.

Citation: Larivière V, Haustein S, Mongeon P (2015) The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era. PLoS ONE 10(6): e0127502. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0127502

Academic Editor: Wolfgang Glanzel, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, BELGIUM

Received: January 14, 2015; Accepted: March 24, 2015; Published: June 10, 2015

Copyright: © 2015 Larivière et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited

Data Availability: Aggregated data will be available on Figshare upon acceptance of the manuscript. However, restrictions apply to the availability of the bibliometric data, which is used under license from Thomson Reuters. Readers can contact Thomson Reuters at the following URL: http://thomsonreuters.com/en/products-services/scholarly-scientific-research/scholarly-search-and-discovery/web-of-science.html .

Funding: The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The authors also acknowledge financial support from the Canada Research Chairs program.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Introduction

This year (2015) marks the 350 th anniversary of the creation of scientific journals. Indeed, it was in 1665 that the Journal des Sçavans and the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London were first published, in France and in England respectively. They were founded with the intent to advance scientific knowledge by building on colleagues’ results and avoid duplication of results, and established both the principles of scientific priority and peer review. They changed the process of scholarly communication fundamentally, from personal correspondence through letters (which had become “too much for one man to cope with in his daily reading and correspondence”) [ 1 ], society meetings, and books to a more structured and regular distribution of scientific advancements. This structured form, combined with a regular and wide dissemination, enabled systematic recording and archiving of scientific knowledge [ 1 – 4 ].

Since the 17 th century, the importance of journals for diffusing the results of scientific research has increased considerably. After coexisting alongside correspondence, monographs and treaties—which often took several years to be published—they became, at the beginning of the 19 th century, the fastest and most convenient way of disseminating new research results [ 5 – 7 ] and their number grew exponentially [ 1 , 8 ]. During the 20 th century they consolidated their position as the main media for diffusing research [ 6 ], especially in the natural and medical sciences [ 9 ]. Scholarly journals also contributed to the professionalization of scientific activities by delimiting the frontier between popular science and the research front and, as a consequence, increased the level of specialization of research and the formation of disciplines. Interestingly, while the majority of periodicals emerged from scientific societies, a significant proportion were published by commercial ventures as early as in the Victorian era. At that time, these commercial publishing houses proved more efficient in diffusing them than scientific societies [ 10 ]. However, prior to World War II, most scholarly journals were still published by scientific societies [ 11 ]. Data from the mid-1990s by Tenopir and King [ 12 ] suggests an increase of commercial publishers’ share of the output; by then, commercial publishers accounted for 40% of the journal output, while scientific/professional societies accounted for 25% and university presses and educational publishers for 16%. Along these lines, the UK Competition Commission measured various publishers’ shares of ISI-indexed papers for the 1994–1998 period and showed that, over this period, Elsevier accounted for 20% of all papers published [ 13 ]. One could expect, however, that these numbers have changed during the shift from print to electronic publishing. Indeed, many authors have discussed the various transformations of the scholarly communication landscape brought by the digital era (see, among others, Borgman [ 14 – 15 ]; Kling and Callahan [ 16 ]; Tenopir & King [ 17 ]; Odlyzko [ 18 ]). However, although the digital format improved access, searchability and navigation within and between journal articles, the form of the scholarly journal was not changed by the digital revolution [ 16 , 19 ]. The PDF became the established format of electronic journal articles, mimicking the print format [ 20 ]. What was affected by the digital revolution is the economic aspect of academic publishing and the journal market.

The literature from the late 1990s suggests that the digital era could have had two opposite effects on the publishing industry. As stated by Mackenzie Owen [ 21 ], while some authors saw the Web as a potential solution to the serials’ crisis—decreasing library budgets facing large and constant annual increases of journal subscription rates [ 22 , 23 ]—most authors hypothesized that it would actually make the situation worse [ 24 ] or, at least, not provide a solution [ 25 , 26 ]. Despite the fact that it is generally believed that the digitalization of knowledge diffusion has led to a higher concentration of scientific literature in the hands of a few major players, no study has analyzed the evolution over time of these major publishers’ share of the scientific output in the various disciplines. This paper aims at providing such analysis, based on all journals indexed in the Web of Science over the 1973–2013 period.

This paper uses Thomson Reuters’ Web of Science (WoS)—including the Science Citation Index Expanded, the Social Sciences Citation Index and the Arts and Humanities Citation Index—transformed into a relational database optimized for bibliometric analysis. On the whole, 44,483,425 documents are analyzed for the 1973–2013 period, which include all document types published by various journals. In addition to indexing authors’ names, addresses and cited references, which are the units of analysis typically used in bibliometric studies, the WoS indexes the name, city and country of the publisher of the journal for each issue. Using this information, which changes over time, we are thus able to assign journals and papers to a publisher and see the evolution of journal ownership. One limitation of this source of data is that it does not index all of the world’s scientific periodicals but only those indexed in the WoS, which meet certain quality criteria such as peer review and which are the most cited in their respective disciplines. Hence, this analysis is not based on the entire scientific publication ecosystem but, rather, on the subset of periodicals that are most cited and most visible internationally.

The journal publishing market is a complex and dynamic system, with journals changing publishing houses and publishing houses acquiring or merging with competitors. Although these changes should be reflected in the publisher information provided for each issue, in some cases, the name of the publisher does not change immediately after a merger or an acquisition. Publishers’ activities are often distributed among multiple companies under their control, and over the past 40 years, there have been many mergers and acquisitions involving entire companies or parts of them. We looked at the mergers and acquisitions history of major publishers, based on their number of papers published, in order to identify and associate the companies that came to be under their control, and conversely the companies which they eventually sold. These publishers are the American Chemical Society, American Institute of Physics, American Physical Society, Cambridge University Press, Emerald, IEEE, Institute of Physics, Karger, Nature Publishing Group, Optical Society of America, Oxford University Press, Reed-Elsevier, Royal Society of Chemistry, Sage Publications, Springer, Taylor & Francis, Thieme Publishing Group, Wiley-Blackwell, and Wolters Kluwer. For example, Reed-Elsevier bought Pergamon Press in 1991 but, in the WoS, journals remain associated with Pergamon Press until the year 2000. Hence, we assigned any journal published by Pergamon Press since 1991 to Reed-Elsevier. In the case of partial acquisitions, journals were assigned to the publisher only if at least 51% of the company was under its control. Historical merger and acquisition data up to 2006 was found in the report by Munroe [ 27 ]. The data for subsequent years was retrieved from the companies’ profiles in the Lexis Nexis database, as well as in the press releases found on publishers’ websites.

Fig 1A presents, for Natural and Medical Sciences (NMS) and Social Sciences and Humanities (NMS), the proportion of papers published by the top five publishers that account for the largest number of papers in 2013, as well as the proportion of papers published in journals others than those of the top five publishers. Fig 1B provide numbers for the proportion of journals published by various publishers, while Fig 1C presents the publishers’ share of citation received. What is striking for both domains is the drop, since the advent of the digital era in the in the mid-1990s, in the proportion of papers, journals and citations that are published/received by journals from publishers other than the five major publishers. In both NMS and SSH, Reed-Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell, Springer, and Taylor & Francis are amongst the top five publishers with the highest number of scientific documents in 2013. While in NMS the American Chemical Society makes it to the top five (in fourth place in 2013), the fifth most prolific publisher in the SSH is Sage Publications. Hence, while all top publishers in SSH are private firms, one of the top publishers in NMS is a scientific society.

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0127502.g001

In terms of numbers of papers published, the five major publishers in NMS, accounted, in 1973, for little more than 20% of all papers published. This share increased to 30% in 1996, and to 50% in 2006, the level at which it remained until 2013 when it increased again to 53%. In this domain, three publishers account for more than 47% of all papers in 2013: Reed-Elsevier (24.1%; 1.5 fold increase since 1990), Springer (11.9%; 2.9 fold increase), and Wiley-Blackwell (11.3%; 2.2 fold increase). The American Chemical Society (3.4%; 5% decrease) and Taylor & Francis (2.9%; 4.9 fold increase) only account for a small proportion of papers. In the SSH, the concentration increased even more dramatically. Between 1973 and 1990, the five most prolific publishers combined accounted for less than 10% of the published output of the domain, with their share slightly increasing over the period. By the mid-1990s, their share grew to collectively account for 15% of papers. However, since then, this share has increased to more than 51%, meaning that, in 2013, the majority of SSH papers are published by journals that belong to five commercial publishers. Specifically, in 2013, Elsevier accounts for 16.4% of all SSH papers (4.4 fold increase since 1990), Taylor & Francis for 12.4% (16 fold increase), Wiley-Blackwell for 12.1% (3.8 fold increase), Springer for 7.1% (21.3 fold increase), and Sage Publications for 6.4% (4 fold increase). On the whole, for these two broad domains of scholarly knowledge, five publishers account for more than half of today’s published journal output. Very similar trends are observed for journals and citations, although with a less pronounced concentration, especially for citations in NMS which have remained quite stable between 1973 and the late 1990s. For instance, while the top 5 publishers account for 53% (NMS) and 51% (SSH) of papers, their proportion of journals is of 53% (NMS) and 54% (SSH), and of 55% (NMS) and 54% (SSH) when it comes to citations received. This suggests that the top 5 publishers publish a higher number of papers per journal than other publishers not making the top five, and that their papers obtain, on average, a lower scientific impact.

The increase in the top publishers’ share of scientific output has two main causes: 1) the creation of new journals and 2) existing journals being acquired by these publishers. Fig 2 presents, for both NMS and SSH, the number of journals over time that changed ownership from small to big publishers—that is, the four publishers with the largest share of published papers in both NMS and SSH—and, for NMS, the number of journals that moved from big to small publishing houses. Since we intend to emphasize developments of the publishing market by publisher type and not single actors, changes among small as well as among big publishers are not shown. It can be seen in both domains that, before 1997, publisher type changes were overall quite rare and the majority consisted of changes from big to small publishers in NMS. Importantly, not a single journal was found to have switched from a big to small publisher in SSH during the entire period of analysis. A first important large wave of journal acquisitions by the big publishers occurred in 1997–1998, when Taylor & Francis acquired several journals from Gordon & Breach Science Publishers, Harwood Academic Publishers, Scandinavian University Press, Carfax Publishing and Routledge. In the same period Reed-Elsevier acquired a few small publishers like Butterworth-Heinemann, Ablex Publications, JAI press, Gauthier-Villars and Expansion Scientifique Française. The next important peak occurred in 2001, and is mainly due to Reed-Elsevier continuing a series of acquisitions, including Academic Press, Churchill Livingstone, Mosby and WB Saunders. Finally, the peak of 2004 is mainly due to the acquisition of Kluwer Academic Publishers by Springer, who had not previously been involved in substantial journal acquisition activities. Wiley-Blackwell’s contribution to the four peaks in Fig 2 was steadier, with the company acquiring an average of 39 journals annually from various publishers during the 2001–2004 period.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0127502.g002

The share of journal papers published by the five publishers differs amongst the various disciplines in NMS and SSH. Figs 3 and 4 present the evolution of the top five publishers’ share of papers by discipline. Not surprisingly, chemistry has the highest level of concentration, as one of its disciplinary publishers, the ACS, made it to the top five most prolific publishers of NMS. For most disciplines, however, concentration in the top five publishers increased from between 10% and 20% in 1973 to between 42% and 57% in 2013, with a clear change of slope in the mid-1990s. Physics, on the other hand, follows a different pattern: after increasing from 20% in 1973 to 35% in 2000, it has since then remained stable and is subsequently the discipline where the top five publishers account for the lowest proportion of papers published. This lower concentration of papers in big publishers’ journals is mainly due to the strength and size of physics’ scientific societies, whose journals publish an important proportion of scientific papers in the field ( Fig 5 ). In 2013 for instance, journals of the American Physical Society (APS) and of the American Institute of Physics (AIP) each account for 15% of papers, while those of the Institute of Physics (IOP) represent 8% of papers. It is also worth noting that, in physics, Reed-Elsevier’s journals’ share of papers also decreased over the last decade or so, from 28% of papers in 2001 to 21% in 2013. Springer, however, increased its percentage of physics papers from 3% to 11% over the same period. On the whole, the central importance of scientific societies in physics, the presence of arXiv, the central preprint server of physics, astrophysics and mathematics, as well as Open Access agreements such as SCOAP3 ( http://scoap3.org/ ), are likely to make the field less profitable and thus less interesting for commercial publishers. In biomedical research, the share of the top five publishers almost reached 50% in 2009 (49%), but then decreased to 42% in 2013, mainly as a result of the emergence of new publishers, such as the Public Library of Science and its mega-journal PLOS ONE, which publishes more than 30,000 papers per year.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0127502.g003

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0127502.g004

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0127502.g005

Fig 4 clearly shows that disciplines typically labelled as ‘social sciences’ behave differently from the arts and humanities. For each discipline within the domain of social sciences (psychology, professional fields, social sciences and social aspects of health), there is an unambiguous change in the slope in the mid-1990s: while the top five—in this case, commercial—publishers accounted for percentages between 15% and 22% of the output in 1995, these percentages increased to between 54% and 71% in 2013. The disciplines in social sciences, which includes specialties such as sociology, economics, anthropology, political sciences and urban studies, is quite striking: while the top five publishers accounted for 15% of papers in 1995, this value reached 66% in 2013. Combined, the top three commercial publishers alone—Reed-Elsevier, Taylor & Francis and Wiley-Blackwell—represent almost 50% of all papers in 2013. Psychology follows a similar pattern, with the top five publishers increasing from 17% in 1995 to 71% in 2013.

On the other hand, papers in arts and humanities are still largely dispersed amongst many smaller publishers, with the top five commercial publishers only accounting for 20% of humanities papers and 10% of arts papers in 2013, despite a small increase since the second half of the 1990s. The relatively low cost of journals in those disciplines—a consequence of their lower publication density—might explain the lower share of the major commercial publishers. Also, the transition from print to electronic—a strong argument for journals to convert to commercial publishers—has happened at a much slower pace in those disciplines as the use for recent scientific information is less pressing [ 28 ]. Moreover, these disciplines make a much more important use of books [ 9 ] and generally rely on local journals [ 29 ], all of which are factors that make it much less interesting for big publishers to buy journals or found new ones in the arts and humanities.

Fig 6 presents the changes in articles’ relative citation rates for journals that have changed from small to big and big to small publishers (see Fig 1 ) for the 10 years before and after the transition. We focus on two four-year periods to ensure comparable environments for the publishing market and selected 1995–1998 and 2001–2004, as they were identified as important consolidation phases in Fig 1 . More specifically, for NMS, those that have changed from small to big publishers increased their impact slightly following the change. However, while for the 2001–2004 cohort of journals this followed a drop in impact, impact of the 1995–1998 cohort was relatively stable before. For the journals moving from big to small publishers, there is no effect: impact remains similar prior to and after the change. In SSH, no noticeable effect can be observed: changing from a small to a big commercial publisher does not affect papers' citation rates. It is also worth mentioning that, except for journals moving from small to big publishers between 2001 and 2004, the mean impact of papers before and after remained below the world average. It suggests that, on average, journals changing publishers did not produce many high impact papers.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0127502.g006

Discussion and Conclusion

The effect of scientific societies.

“University presses and disciplinary associations were founded to disseminate research in the original cycle of scholarly communication. The faculty produced the work to be published; non-profit publishers organized the distribution of knowledge; the university library bought the published work at an artificially high price, as a subsidy for learned societies; and the faculty used this literature as the foundation for further research and teaching. […] However, over the past fifty years, as federal research funding has encouraged specialization, journal publishing has become commercialized, and some parts of the scientific and technical literature are now being monopolized by multinational publishing conglomerates.” (p. 89)

The economics of scholarly publishing

As one might expect, the consolidation of the publishing industry led to an increase of the profits of publishers. Fig 7 presents, as an example, the evolution of Reed-Elsevier’s profits over the 1991–2013 period, for the firm taken as a whole as well as for its Scientific, Technical & Medical division. One can clearly see in Fig 7A that, between 1991 and 1997, both the profits and the profit margin increased steadily for the company as a whole. While profits more than doubled over that period—from 665M USD to 1,451M USD—profit margin also rose from 17% to 26%. Profit margins decreased, however, between 1998 and 2003, although profits remained relatively stable. Absolute profits as well as the profit margin then rose again, with the exception of the 2008–2009 period of economic crisis, resulting in profits reaching an all-time high of more than 2 billion USD in 2012 and 2013. The profit margin of the company’s Scientific, Technical & Medical division is even higher ( Fig 7B ). Moreover, its profits increased by a factor of almost 6 throughout the period, and never dropped below 30% from one year to another. The profit margin of this division never decreased below 30% during the period observed, and steadily increased from 30.6% to 38.9% between 2006 and 2013. Similarly high profit margins were obtained in 2012 by Springer Science+Business Media (35.0%, see: http://static.springer.com/sgw/documents/1412702/application/pdf/Annual_Report_2012_01.pdf ), and in 2013 and John Wiley & Sons’ Scientific, Technical, Medical and Scholarly division (28.3%, see: http://www.wiley.com/legacy/about/corpnews/fy13_10kFINAL.pdf ) and Taylor and Francis (35.7%, see: http://www.informa.com/Documents/Investor%20Relations/Annual%20Report%202013/Informa%20plc%20Annual%20Report%20Accounts%202013.pdf ), putting them on a comparable level with Pfizer (42%), the Industrial & Commercial Bank of China (29%) and far above Hyundai Motors (10%), which comprise the most profitable drug, bank and auto companies among the top 10 biggest companies respectively, according to Forbes’ Global 2000 [ 30 ]. At a total revenue of 9.4 billion US dollars in 2011 [ 31 ], the majority of which were generated by a few publishing houses, the scientific journal publishing market faces oligopolistic conditions, where big players such as Elsevier, Springer, Taylor & Francis, Wiley-Blackwell and Wolters Kluwer determine annually increasing subscription rates that make up a considerable amount of research spending, leaving academic libraries with no other choice but to cancel subscriptions [ 20 , 32 , 33 ].

Compilation by the authors based on the annual reports of Reed-Elsevier. ( http://www.reedelsevier.com/investorcentre/pages/home.aspx ) Numbers for the Scientific, Technical & Medical division were only available in GBP; conversion to USD was performed using historical conversion rates from http://www.oanda.com .

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0127502.g007

The possibility to increase profits in such an extreme fashion lies in the peculiarity of the economics of scholarly publishing. Unlike usual suppliers, authors provide their goods without financial compensation and consumers (i.e. readers) are isolated from the purchase. Because purchase and use are not directly linked, price fluctuations do not influence demand. Academic libraries, contributing 68% to 75% of journal publishing revenues [ 31 ], are atypical buyers because their purchases are mainly controlled by budgets. Regardless of their information needs, they have to manage with less as prices increase. Due to the publisher’s oligopoly, libraries are more or less helpless, for in scholarly publishing each product represents a unique value and cannot be replaced [ 19 , 20 , 33 , 34 ].

Scholarly publications themselves can be considered information goods with high fixed and low variable costs [ 35 , 36 ]. Regarding academic journals, fixed or first-copy costs comprise manuscript preparation, selection and reviewing as well as copy-editing and layout, writing of editorials, marketing, and salaries and rent, the two most substantial of which, manuscript writing and reviewing, are provided free of charge by the scholarly community [ 20 ]. In that sense and contrary to any other business, academic journals are an atypical information good, because publishers neither pay the provider of the primary good—authors of scholarly papers—nor for the quality control—peer review. On the publisher’s side, average first-copy costs of journal papers are estimated to range between 20 and 40 US dollars per page, depending on rejection rates [ 37 ]; [ 17 ], which neither explains open access publication fees as high as 5,000 $US (e.g., Cell Reports by Elsevier) nor hybrid journals, where publishers charge twice per article, i.e. the subscription and open access fees (e.g., Open Choice by Springer or Online Open by Sage Publications).

In addition, the Ingelfinger law, initiated by the publisher of the New England Journal of Medicine in 1969, prohibits authors from submitting their manuscript to more than one journal [ 38 ]. Although the law was initially created to protect the journal’s revenue streams and has become largely obsolete through electronic publishing [ 39 ], it is still a universal rule in academic journal publishing, often enforced by copyright transfer agreements. Hence, each journal has the monopoly on the scientific content of papers it publishes: paper A published in journal Y is not an alternative to paper B published in journal Z [ 11 ]. In other words, access to paper A does not replace access to paper B, both papers being complementary to each other.

Variable costs of academic journals are paid by the publisher and, as long as journals were printed and distributed physically, these costs were sizeable. In the print era, publishers had to typeset the manuscripts, print copies of journals, and send them to various subscribers. Hence, each time an issue was printed, sent and sold, another copy had to be printed to be sent and sold. However, with the advent of electronic publishing, these costs became marginal. The digital era exacerbated this trend and increased the potential revenues of publishers. While, in economic terms, printed journals can be considered as rival goods—goods that cannot be owned simultaneously by two individuals—online journals are non-rival goods [ 40 ]: a single journal issue that has been uploaded by the publisher on the journal’s website can be accessed by many researchers from many universities at the same time. The publisher does not have to upload or produce an additional copy each time a paper is accessed on the server as it can be duplicated ad infinitum , which in turn reduces the marginal cost of additional subscriptions to 0. In a system where the marginal cost of goods reaches 0, their cost becomes arbitrary and depends merely on how badly they are needed, as well as by the purchasing power of those who need them. In addition, costs are strongly influenced by the power relations between the buyer and seller, i.e. publishers and academic libraries. In such a system, any price is good for the seller, as the additional unit sold is pure profit. All these factors explain the different and often irrational big deals made between publishers and subscribers, with university libraries subscribing to a publisher’s entire set or large bundle of journals regardless of their specific needs [ 41 ]. Through these big deals, university researchers have been accustomed to, for almost 20 years, having access to an increasingly large proportion of the scientific literature published, which makes it very difficult for university libraries today to cancel subscriptions and negotiate out of big deals with publishers to optimize their collections and meet budget restrictions.

General conclusions

Since the creation of scientific journals 350 years ago, large commercial publishing houses have increased their control of the science system. The proportion of the scientific output published in journals under their ownership has risen steadily over the past 40 years, and even more so since the advent of the digital era. The value added, however, has not followed a similar trend. While one could argue that their role of typesetting, printing, and diffusion were central in the print world [ 20 , 7 ], the ease with which these function can be fulfilled—or are no longer necessary—in the electronic world makes one wonder: what do we need publishers for? What is it that they provide that is so essential to the scientific community that we collectively agree to devote an increasingly large proportion of our universities budgets to them? Of course, most journals rely on publishers’ systems to handle and review the manuscripts; however, while these systems facilitate the process, it is the researchers as part of the scientific community who perform peer review. Hence, this essential step of quality control is not a value added by the publishers but by the scientific community itself.

Thus, it is up to the scientific community to change the system in a similar fashion and in parallel to the open access and open science movements. And, indeed, the scientific community has started to react to and protest against the exploitative behaviour of the major for-profit publishers. In 2012, the “Cost of Knowledge” ( http://thecostofknowledge.com/ ) campaign started by Cambridge mathematician and Fields Medalist Timothy Gowers asked researchers to protest against Elsevier’s business model through a boycott against its journals by ceasing to submit to, edit and referee them. Started by a blogpost, the boycott was later termed the beginning of an “Academic Spring” [ 42 , 43 ]. Several university libraries, including large and renowned universities such as the University of California [ 44 ] and Harvard [ 45 ], stopped negotiations and threatened to boycott major for-profit publishers, while other universities—such as the University of Konstanz—simply cancelled all Elsevier subscriptions as they were neither able nor willing to keep up with their aggressive pricing policy: 30% increase over five years [ 46 , 47 ].

But these are exceptions. Unfortunately, researchers are still dependent on one essentially symbolic function of publishers, which is to allocate academic capital, thereby explaining why the scientific community is so dependent on ‘The Most Profitable Obsolete Technology in History’ [ 48 ]. Young researchers need to publish in prestigious journals to gain tenure, while older researchers need to do the same in order to keep their grants, and, in this environment, publishing in a high impact Elsevier or Springer journal is what ‘counts’. In this general context, the negative effect of various bibliometric indicators in the evaluation of individual researchers cannot be understated. The counting of papers indexed by large-scale bibliometric databases—which mainly cover journals published by commercial publishers, as we have seen in this paper—creates a strong incentive for researchers to publish in these journals, and thus reinforces the control of commercial publishers on the scientific community.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Sam Work for proofreading and editing the manuscript, as well as the two referees, for comments and suggestions.

Author Contributions

Conceived and designed the experiments: VL. Performed the experiments: VL SH PM. Analyzed the data: VL SH PM. Wrote the paper: VL SH PM.

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Publishing Trends in Political Science: How Publishing Houses, Geographical Positions, and International Collaboration Shapes Academic Knowledge Production

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• Published: 14 July 2023
• Volume 39 , pages 201–218, ( 2023 )

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• Tamás Kaiser 1 ,
• Tamás Tóth 1 &
• Marton Demeter 1  

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Even though political science is one of the most extensive research fields within the social sciences, there is little scholarly knowledge about its publishing trends and the internationalization of the discipline. This paper analyzes international publishing by taking a close look at publishers, Scopus-indexed journals, articles, and author collaboration networks. The results show that the number of political science journals almost tripled between 2000 and 2022. Our descriptive analysis also reveals that only a few Western commercial international publishers, and Taylor & Francis in particular, dominate the publication of political science journals, and Western authors account for the majority of both academic papers and citations. Additionally, our research explores that the most prolific country in terms of publication within political science is still the United States, but the BRICS countries, especially India, Russia, and China, have achieved remarkable growth in their publication outputs. Finally, our network analysis suggests that the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia occupy central positions in international collaborations among political scientists, but Asian, Eastern European and Latin-American regional networks have been developing in the last decade.

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Introduction

Publishing research papers in prestigious academic journals and the internationalization of science are intertwined. Although internationalization in publishing is an essential step toward academic knowledge transfer beyond institutions and states, the distribution of the most productive countries is heavily skewed in favor of the United States and the United Kingdom [ 1 ]. Considering the “publishing industry,” many researchers agree that academic journals primarily disseminate scholarly knowledge via research papers in contemporary science [ 1 , 2 , 3 ]. Most published studies are written by two or more authors [ 4 ], proving that scientific collaboration within and beyond institutions and states is inevitable. Since scientific databases such as Scopus collect extensive data on bibliometrics, researchers have an opportunity to understand publication patterns and the internationalization of various research fields. Researchers have taken advantage of bibliometrics and started to analyze the network structures, publication patterns, and the growth of scholarly knowledge in various fields, including the social sciences [ 1 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 ]. Bibliometric analysis of the different research fields is useful because it helps to evaluate researcher performance, contributes to learning which institutions and authors are prominent in specific research fields, supports understanding the past and current state of science, and can predict future knowledge production trends [ 8 , 9 , 10 ]. This paper also relies on bibliometrics and focuses on publication trends within political science.

Political science is particularly interesting because the experts in this field consciously review the developments and the state of their discipline [ 11 ]. Additionally, political science is an exciting field because editors’ decisions in accepting or rejecting manuscripts can outline those political issues that are “worth” scholarly attention. Since political science consists of many research topics, for example: international relations, public opinion, comparative political science, political sociology, political economy, the oppression of human rights, public choice, public policy, public administration, and political communication [ 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 ], it has an important, if not central, position among the social sciences. Finally, a small but growing number of articles deal with bibliometrics in political science, showing that the importance of analyzing international publication trends in political science can contribute to our understanding of global political debates [ 16 ].

This paper aims to advance bibliometrics and analyze all the published papers in political science in every Scopus-indexed journal since 2013 to depict this field’s publication patterns. Moreover, we also analyze every Scopus-indexed journal’s affiliation and publisher in political science from 2000 onwards to give a more informative picture of publishing in this research field. We chose Scopus to collect the relevant data because it is “the largest database of abstracts and citations of peer-reviewed literature containing active coverage of nearly 25,000 journals published by more than 5000 international publishers and covering periods” [ 1 ]. This paper is an exploratory one that utilizes quantitative, descriptive, and network analyses to reveal publishing trends and collaborations in political science between states [ 16 ]. Our results suggest that the hegemony of the US and UK institutions is unquestionable in terms of publication output, citations, and H-indices. Furthermore, our outcomes demonstrate that the US and UK’s central positions are spectacular in the publication network of the most prolific political scientists. However, there is a clear and very important trend that shows some decline regarding the publication productivity of the United States, together with a stronger position for Western Europe and Asia. Even more importantly, our analysis shows that Russia was able to significantly raise the number of its internationally published papers in political science, and it has a significant position in the international collaboration network of political science scholars today.

Literature Review

As stated above, a few valuable studies have analyzed bibliometric data in political science so far [ 13 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 ]. We summarize the most important and relevant findings in this subchapter. Prominent researchers have outlined a clear message regarding publication trends in political science: “Publications in most academic journals in political science are stones that fall into the pool of disciplinary discourse without causing a ripple” [ 18 ]. In other words, if researchers aim to gain considerable impact in political science, they should not struggle to publish several papers in lower-ranking journals but to publish a single piece of research in one of the top ten periodicals [ 18 ]. The above political science journals were research ranked by considering their impact: seven of the top ten journals are affiliated with the United Kingdom, while the rest are embedded in the United States [ 18 ]. Footnote 1

Wæver [ 2 ] analyzed the distribution of authors by their locations in prestigious European and American international relations journals. His findings clearly show the distribution of authors between 1970 and 1995: American authors’ shares from publications are between 66 and 100% in North American journals. The aforementioned results indicate that “American [international relations] journals are not becoming more ‘global’” [ 2 ] in the long run. Even though the distribution of authors in the sense of publication was more balanced in European journals, authors beyond North America and Europe published in those journals at a maximum of 14.3% of the time [ 2 ].

Chi [ 19 ] analyzed the bibliometrics of two top-ranking political scientific departments in Germany. The analysis was conducted on a database consisting of bibliometrics between 2003 and 2007. Unsurprisingly, Chi [ 19 ] found that publications written in English receive more citations than works written in German. Leifeld et al. [ 23 ] also focused on German political scientists: they analyzed the entire co-author network (1339 researchers) of German political science. The outcomes revealed that the following few well-connected institutions in Berlin host the most influential and central political scientists: Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung, the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, and Freie Universität Berlin [ 23 ].

Kristensen [ 20 ] analyzed the bibliographic coupling of references in more than 20,000 articles in international relations between 2005 and 2009 and found that the network of international relations journals is dominated by American periodicals. Furthermore, the aforementioned study also revealed that authors located in the United States tend to publish more in American journals, while scholars affiliated to Europe are willing to publish their works in European journals, which makes the discipline divided [ 20 ]. In his conclusion, Kristensen [ 20 ] states that “non-Western journals are conspicuously absent” [ 20 ].

Jensen and Kristensen [ 24 ] analyzed the citation structures of four EU studies journals between 2003 and 2010 by scrutinizing 2561 documents because “citation network constitutes a latent structure of communication, a specific citation practice that EU scholars acknowledge is there but nevertheless tend to leave unaddressed” [ 24 ]. Their goal was to reveal the network characteristics of the most important sources dealing with EU studies. The results indicate the dominance of the Anglophone sources, but there is a divide between these sources (including journals). Specifically, sources from the United States tend to cite US-affiliated papers, while European sources mostly cite the works of European-affiliated scholars. The outcomes imply solid evidence on geographical clustering between European and US journals: the former refers to mostly pluralist and non-positivist sources, while the latter cites positivist sources [ 24 ].

Metz and Jäckle [ 25 ] analyzed the number of co-authors political scientists had between 1990 and 2013. Their analysis showed that the co-author numbers of the most-connected researchers range from 41 to 86. Their findings show that nglophone authors dominate, and were the most central political scientists (e.g., closeness and betweenness centrality in the network). The above study revealed that the more co-authors a researcher has, the more connected they become in the political science network. Moreover, well-connected political scientists cooperate with each other strongly, and there is a similar trend among the most prolific researchers in the field [ 25 ].

Researchers analyzed the bibliometrics of an important journal in the field, namely European Political Science (EPS) [ 13 ]. The most productive and influential authors at EPS had affiliations at Western institutions; six British, one Irish, Canadian, Portuguese, and German universities provided the most prolific political scientists. The research went further and also explored the most productive and influential institutions at EPS. The results show that British, Italian, Portuguese, Canadian, Dutch, and German universities dominate this prestigious journal [ 13 ].

One of the most extensive analyses on political science bibliometrics was conducted by Carammia [ 16 ], who studied 67,000 articles in 100 high-impact journals between 2000 and 2019. According to Carammia [ 16 ], scholars hosted in the United States contributed the most to knowledge production between 2010 and 2019. In terms of production, the United States is top, followed by the United Kingdom and Germany. Among European political scientists, those from the United Kingdom, Germany, and the Netherlands are involved to the largest extent in international collaboration. Moreover, American (40%) and British (15%) institutions provided more than half of the articles published in top-tier political scientific journals. Considering collaboration networks in co-authorship by country, the United States and the United Kingdom were in central positions between 2000 and 2009 and could stabilize their critical role in the following decade. Carammia [ 16 ] also concluded that in Europe, mostly two subgroups exist in political science: “a larger group of scholars based in seventeen countries; and an even more integrated, highly productive and connected core of scholars based in seven northern European countries” [ 16 ].

While there are former studies that focused on publication trends in political science, we have only a limited knowledge of the complex publishing patterns that entail both the ownership of academic publishers in political science, the geographic diversity of political science journals, and the publication trends and collaborative publication networks of political science scholars. In order to provide a complex, systematic, and detailed analysis on the abovementioned features of publishing in the field of political science, we outlined the following research questions:

What publication trends characterize the Scopus-indexed journals in political science since 2013?

What are the characteristics of internationalization in the Scopus-indexed journals in political science for the past two decades?

Methods and Results

To address our research questions we applied both descriptive statistics (RQ1 and RQ2) and network analysis (RQ2). For the analysis of the publication trends we selected the most related Scimago Journal Rank (SJR) category: political science and international relations. In scrutinizing the participation of different publishing houses from the market of political science journals, we worked with the latest SJR data (2019–2022). Then, as Table 1 shows, we calculated three values for each publishing house: (a) the number of different journal titles they published in the analyzed period; (b) the number of different papers they published in the analyzed period; (c) the impact of the published papers as measured by the number of citations.

The results show that Taylor & Francis owns almost a quarter of the journals, and the ten most productive publishing houses publish more than half of all the journals and almost 60% of the published papers in political science. More importantly, the journals of these publishers provide even more impact than production as the journals of the ten most prolific publishers account for more than 80% of the field’s impact. Accordingly, the influence of the giant publishing houses’ journals on the field of political science is even more than it can be estimated by their production. It means that they do not just publish the most journals but, even more importantly, they publish the most influential journals.

Next, we calculated the share of different countries in political science publishing, with a specific attention to open access publication trends. Moreover, as Table 2 shows, we made the same analysis in the case of the top-ranked political science journals indicated by the Q1 category in Scopus/Scimago.

The general publication trend in political science shows a rapid growth with almost three times more journals in 2022 than in 2000, and now the amount of open access journals is 20%. While the same ratio amongst Q1 journals is only 14%, we must emphasize that it was 0% until 2010, so we can see that at least some of the Q1 journals had to consider open access publishing in the last decade. However, as we will show later, Q1 open access publishing has very strong regional differences.

Regarding open access, results show that, similarly to the trends in other disciplines [ 26 ] Latin-America has a leading position in open access publishing as the vast majority of their Scopus journals provide open access publication. While the participation of this region in Q1 journals is still very limited (there were only two Q1 journals published in Latin-America in 2022), they retained the open access model even in the case of their leading journals. Eastern Europe is another region where open access publication flourishes with open access journals accounting for 50% of the entire sample, and only one Eastern European Q1 journal follows an open access model, too. Asia is a bit more moderate in terms of open access publishing, but there is clearly a growing tendency towards open access as the amount of open access journals has grown from 10 to 27% between 2000 and 2022. The participation of Africa and the Middle East is marginal in political science publishing, so we cannot estimate clear trends for them.

In the case of Western Europe, we defined two groups: the UK and Western Europe without the UK, and continental Europe. It is an important distinction because the UK publishes many more journals than all the other Western European countries together, so without this distinction the data and would show a bias. Results indicate that political science publishing in Western Europe (without the UK) is skyrocketing as this region has produced the most considerable growth in the last two decades with more than four times as many journals in 2022 than in 2000. The open access ratio is as high as in Asia: in 2022, more than a quarter of all the journals are published through open access and, more importantly, almost half of the Q1 journals are open access journals. With this, while Latin-America is the front-runner in open access publishing, Western Europe is the front-runner in Q1 open access publishing. The United States still has a considerable number of journals, but by 2022 it was lagging behind both the UK and Western Europe with a relatively limited amount of open access journals (10%). Still, the most modest country in terms of open access is the UK, which has almost half of all the journals and two thirds of the Q1 journals. Here open access journals still amount to under 5% which leaves the vast majority of UK journals, and correspondingly the vast majority of Q1 journals, as subscription-based outlets.

Thus far we have analyzed the regional distribution of the publishers: now we turn to the analysis of the national distribution of the journal authors. As the next step, we collected longitudinal data on the publication output of different countries over the last two decades, more precisely, from 2000 to the latest available data (2022). For data collection we used the Scimago Journal country rankings database that shows the country of affiliation of the authors. Table 3 shows the ranking of the top 10 most productive countries in 5-year periods. The results show that the US and the UK remain the leading countries in publishing over the last two decades, India also has a stable position, but there are interesting regional changes in the sample. For instance, China, which had previously focused more on natural sciences and engineering, appeared amongst the most productive countries in political science in 2022. Even more striking is the publication record of Russia that only appeared amongst the top publishers in 2015 and now stands in third place following the US and the UK.

Considering all the countries that published in political science, we calculated the regional contribution of different world regions as well (Table 4 ). Results show a clear decline in the hegemony of North America as the amount of papers from there decreased significantly, from 38% in 2000 to 18% in 2022. The most significant development can be seen in Western Europe with even more growth in citations than in production in 2022, accounting for almost the half of all citations. Another trend is the development of Eastern European publication, which rose from 2 to 12% in 2022, mostly as a consequence of the skyrocketing number of published papers from Russian authors. Finally, Asia and the BRICS countries show steady, systematic growth, but unlike Eastern Europe they have shown a significant increase in the number of citations as well.

To address our second research question, we analyzed the international collaboration patterns of the ten most productive countries in political science. Table 5 shows that there is steady growth in international cooperation in all the analyzed countries, except Russia, and we can also see that the most significant development took place in those countries in the Western world that had a low level of international collaboration 10 years ago. So, for example, international collaboration almost doubled in the US and the UK where the level of internationalization was relatively low in 2013, while there is only a moderate growth in Germany and the Netherlands where internationalization was already high in 2013. In sum, international papers account for more than 25% of the total in each Western country while it is still relatively low (around 10%) in Russia and India.

Taking the most productive countries as reference points, we downloaded their internationally coauthored papers for the last 10 years (2013–2022) from Scopus. Based on this data, we developed a cooperation network where nodes represent the countries of the internationally coauthored papers the edges of which represent the cooperation between different countries. Edge weights represent the frequency of the international cooperation between the corresponding countries (Fig.  1 ).

The network of international collaboration in political science (2013–2022)

As can be seen in Fig.  1 , the most international countries in political science publishing are the four English speaking countries (the UK, the US, Canada, and Australia) together with Germany. These countries do not only collaborate a lot with other countries, but the majority of their collaborations are with each other, thus, for example, US-UK cooperation is extremely frequent. Scandinavian countries are very international and collaborate a lot with other Western European countries and with US authors as well, but they still form a Scandinavian—North European sub hub with Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland.

China has an important publication tie to the US and, in a more moderate way, to other important Western countries. Together with its Western relations, China is an important intermediate point between the Western world and other Asian countries such as Pakistan, Hong Kong or Taiwan that have many collaborative papers with Chinese authors but only moderate connection with Western peers. Japan is another intermediate point in Asia as it connects some economically developed Asian countries such as South Korea, and some economically developing countries such as Thailand or Indonesia, to the international publication network in political science. In sum, while Asian countries tend to be very international and, especially through China, they have significant Western collaborations, they still have an Asian hub so the collaboration between different Asian authors—especially in the case of less cooperative Asian countries—are still very typical.

Another hub is formed by the Eastern European countries with Russia in a central position. Russia is less international than China, but still has significant ties to some Western European countries and the US, and it is an important intermediate point between underrepresented Eastern European countries and the central Western hub.

As Fig.  1 shows, there is a linguistically and culturally distinguished subgraph formed by the most productive Iberoamerican countries: Spain and Brazil. Many Latin-American authors collaborate with these countries, while Spain and Brazil themselves tend to publish authors beyond Iberoamerica with a specific focus on Western European countries.

Finally, South Africa is also in an important position, most likely because of its colonial ties to the Western world. Similarly to China’s position in the Asian hub, South Africa, beyond its strong Western collaboration, connects other African countries to the international network.

Discussion and Conclusions

The academic publishing industry is held to be both diverse (as indicated by the large number of publishing houses and university publishers) and centralized, as the majority of well-known international academic journals is in the hands of huge, established, and profit-oriented publishers [ 26 ]. It terms of ownership, it can lead to the hegemonic position of giant publishers, typically located in the US and the UK, as they publish the most important, most popular and most prestigious journals [ 27 ]. Former studies have found that, in terms of authorship in political science, the leading position of the US and the UK is unquestionable [ 13 , 16 ] and our current analysis found that the same holds true for journal publishers as well. The leading position of Taylor and Francis is evident as it publishes almost one quarter of the indexed political science journals. While, according to former studies, the primacy of Taylor and Francis holds for other disciplines such as law and legislation, researchers found the Taylor and Francis share to be less significant because while it has the largest share in law journals, that actually amounts to only 10% of the journals [ 26 ]. Moreover, we found that the top 10 biggest publishers account for more than half of all the journals in political science so we can say that the market is significantly centralized in terms of the ownership of Scopus journals, with a specific position for Taylor and Frances. Even more notable is that the journals of the top ten publishers receive more than 80% of the publications that means that they have the most prestigious journals of the field and thus the journals of these giant publishing houses have the most significant impact on the development of the field [ 18 ].

The geographically centralized nature of political science publishing is even more evident when we take a look at the national diversity of the most prestigious journals that are indexed as Q1 journals in Scopus. Our results show that the UK, the US, and Western Europe were the exclusive owners of the Q1 journals until 2010, but non-Western Q1 journals still only amounted to around 4% in 2022. Most journals in this top category are published in the UK, which has 62% of Q1 journals in political science—three times more than the US and six times more than Western Europe. With this, we can rightfully say that the UK has the single most powerful position in elite political science publishing, followed by the US and Western Europe, and other world regions are literally invisible amongst the Q1 journals.

When it comes to the emerging or less established journals, we can see a more nuanced picture with the participation of world regions beyond the Western world. Specifically, Eastern Europe, Asia and Latin America now publish a lot of Scopus indexed journals (more than 110 together) but there are only five in the highest quartile (Q1). In other words, regions beyond the Western world succeeded in terms of productivity—they publish a lot of journals—but still failed to develop in terms of impact, because, due to their limited number of citations, their journals are indexed in lower quartiles.

While the non-Western world regions lag behind the Western world in terms of impact, they perform much better in terms of open access publishing. Similarly to the patterns of law publishing [ 26 ], non-Western regions publish many more journals in open access than do their Western counterparts. While the overall share of open access publication grew significantly from 2000 to 2002 (from 5 to 20%), this development is very different across both world regions and journal prestige. In terms of geography, the most developed open access market is in Latin-America, followed by Eastern Europe and Asia, but only 4% of British journals were published in the open access model in 2002. Moreover, in the case of the most prestigious journals (Q1), the proportion of open access periodicals is much lower (14%), and as most of the Q1 journals are published in the UK, we can add a geographic variance to the prestige variance. In other words, the most significant trend in political science regarding open access publishing is that open access journals are typically lower ranked and published outside the Western world. However, while this trend seems to be persistent in the analyzed period, the number and amount of open access journals is emerging in all the analyzed world regions, with the least development in the UK and the US. This trend can be explained—at least partially—that in Latin America, Asia, and Eastern Europe—but even in Western Europe—Scopus-indexed academic journals are typically younger than the established American and British journals, and in many cases—especially in Latin-America and Eastern Europe—are published by nonprofit university publishers. However, as open access publishing is the subject of an ongoing and widespread scholarly debate within both academia and the publishing industry, we can assume that the share of open access journals will continuously rise in the next couple of years, even in the case of the most prestigious journals [ 28 ].

When we turn to the most prolific countries in terms of journal authors, we found that, while the US is only ranked second amongst the countries with the most journals, it has the leading position amongst journal authors across the analyzed years. The trends we found are very similar to the trends that former studies found [ 13 , 16 , 18 , 26 ], as authors from English speaking countries publish the most papers in political science journals. However, a more detailed analysis found interesting evidence of regional trends, especially in the case of India, Russia and China, and with them, in the case of the BRICS region. Perhaps because of its colonial past, India is constantly amongst the most prolific countries in political science, despite being in other subcategories in Scimago, India is typically not amongst the most productive countries and focuses more on engineering and computer science. In the general social science category, India is not amongst the top ten countries in Scopus, however, in the political science subcategory, it had the third position in 2000, 2010 and 2015, and now it has fourth position right after the US, the UK and Russia. There could be a variety of possible explanations on why India has a leading position in political science publishing. First, India is a multicultural country with a complex political landscape that includes federalism, regional identities, caste dynamics, and religious diversity. This context provides Indian researchers with rich opportunities to explore and analyze various aspects of political science, such as electoral politics, identity politics, federalism, and social justice. Moreover, India has strong historical, political and policy ties to the Western world and especially to the UK, so the Indian political processes (such as the development of democracy, multiculturalism, etc.) can be easily related to Western political issues, and it makes it possible to conduct comparative research across Western and Indian political cultures. In international journals, sometimes it can be challenging to prove why national political issues have international importance, so the self-evident international ties make it easier for Indian political science researchers to publish their papers for international audiences.

Another significant trend is the rapidly growing Russian participation in political science journals. Our results show that Russian authors were not represented amongst the top publishing countries until 2015, when they held 8 th position, and now they are the third most prolific authors behind the US and the UK in political science that puts Russia in a distinguished position in the international network of political scientists. Evidently, Russia has a very important role in global affairs and Russian research often focuses on topics such as Russian foreign policy, Eurasian integration, energy politics, and security studies, which—being very interesting for the international audiences—contribute to the country's prominence in political science publishing. However, the Russian presence was not significant before 2015, so the importance of the country cannot be the sole explanation. While we do not have the analysis that could help us to explain the emerging Russian presence, there can be some tentative explanations. First, the pressure to publish in English language international journals might make Russian political science researchers put more emphasis on their international profile. Second, Russia managed moreover, to get some Russian journals onto the Scopus/Scimago list: while there were no Russian journals in Scimago in 2010, there were 15 journals in 2022 that might also have led to a more visible presence for Russian authors. Third, the Eastern European presence in political science publishing is rapidly growing with 57 journals in 2022, and we can assume that they favor Russian researchers more than Western journals as they are historically and geopolitically more related. Finally, as a result of the Ukrainian conflict, Russia has become more interesting to the international political science discourse, which might have made it easier for Russian political scientists to publish their research in international political science journals.

The last trend that we would like to mention is China, which has a growing presence in international publishing in political science. China has been the second-largest country in terms of R&D expenditure and accounts for more than twenty of global science and engineering publications [ 29 ]. However, research shows that in social sciences China does not have the same level of influence as in natural sciences, due to several factors such as imperial legacies, Confucianism, or the Western cultural hegemony in global academia [ 30 ]. While research shows that China implemented policies to influence international publishing patterns, its long-term impacts on China’s international engagements, publications, and collaborations remain uncertain [ 31 ]. Our study shows that, at least in political sciences, the Chinese science policy led to some success as China appeared amongst the most prolific countries in 2022.

Regarding our second research question, we also explored significant trends in both internationalization and international collaboration. In political science publishing, the international process is continuously evolving, but it holds mainly for the Western countries, as there is no significant improvement regarding internationalization in Russia and India that typically publish papers without international collaboration. From this, we can conclude that the improving internationalization of Western countries is the consequence of their cooperation with each other, and the internationalization process has not resulted in a geographically diverse field of political science. Indeed, our network analysis clearly shoes that the political science publishing field has a strong center within the network that consists of Western countries only. The strongest ties are between the UK, the US, and other English-speaking countries such as Canada and Australia, together with some economically well-developed European countries. Beyond the Western center, there are regional hubs for all world regions, except the Middle East and Africa that are represented only through their most “Westernized” countries, namely Turkey and South Africa. The Latin-American hub is established around Brazil, the Eastern European hub is around Russia, China and Japan have a loose set of Asian countries that cooperate with them. However, these semi-peripheral hubs are not just slightly disconnected from the Western center, but also more or less isolated from each other.

This semi-peripheral positionality shows that, even if need for de-Westernization, de-centralization and the diversification of academic knowledge production are frequently expressed in the literature, the publishing field is still Western-centric where English speaking western countries define the picture of the discipline. As we have seen, the vast majority of journals are published by the West, and most of the political science articles are written by Western authors, or increasingly frequently, in the cooperation of Western authors from different Western countries. One explanation could be—besides the western hegemony in academic publishing—that the language of international journals is still English, so authors from non-English speaking countries are in a worse position when it comes to publication. Our results also show that other cultural features of different world regions can be important when it comes to international cooperation in political science. One of them is language: our findings prove that world regions with the same or similar languages—typically Iberoamerican countries—cooperate with each other very frequently, and, at least partially, it could be a consequence of the shared Roman languages (Spanish and Portuguese). A less visible example is the case of Germany and Austria which share the German language and the cooperation between these two countries is significant. Another important feature is culture because we can see that Asian countries collaborate each other quite often, and in terms of the number of the participating countries, the Asian hub is the most populous with the participation of ten Asian countries. Finally, besides language and culture, a common historical background can lead to frequent collaboration, too. In the case of Eastern European countries, there is neither a common language, nor a common shared culture, but these countries share the post-Soviet legacy that makes them comparable in terms of democratic development, political history and even in terms of academic internationalization.

In sum, our findings show that the publishing field in political science is still lead by a Western core that holds most of the journals, and its influence is extremely high on the level of the most prestigious journals that are located almost exclusively in the Western countries. While there is an improvement in terms of geographical diversity, world regions beyond the Western world tend to create semi-isolated hubs and cannot challenge Western centrality in publishing academic research in international journals. However, in the last few years, Russia, India, and China started to gain significant visibility in the field, thus future research should focus directly on these countries to see if these changes are parts of a general trend towards decentralization or just episodic phenomena.

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Kaiser, T., Tóth, T. & Demeter, M. Publishing Trends in Political Science: How Publishing Houses, Geographical Positions, and International Collaboration Shapes Academic Knowledge Production. Pub Res Q 39 , 201–218 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12109-023-09957-x

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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

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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).

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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.

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ANNEXURE VII - List of ICSSR Approved Publishers

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30 Best Book Publishers in India (List + Submissions)

Are you looking for top book publishers in India? You’re in the right place.

I saw a couple of lists on the web, but they all lacked something. So I created a comprehensive resource that will stand the test of time. Below you will find company descriptions, published titles, contact info, as well as submission guidelines of these leading publishers. I lived in India for a while, and the country has always remained close to my heart. It has a great literary tradition  and I’m glad to help  new authors  to find publishing houses . Hopefully, they will review your manuscript and release it in printed and digital form. Having finished this guide, take the next step by exploring my grand collection of over 3,000 publishing companies .

Here are the best book publishers in India:

1. penguin random house india.

Penguin is an internationally known publishing house with branches all over the world. The India division was established in 1985 and they have grown to sizable proportions. Now the company is publishing titles across a wide range of subjects and genres – fiction, non-fiction, poetry , and prose. Since its inception, the company has been famous for its affordable paperbacks of classics and modern titles. In 2017, Penguin released over 250 new titles in India and currently has a backlist of over 3000 different books. It released such classics as The God of Small Things and Life of Pi. Their titles are available in the most popular Indian languages like Hindi, Marathi, and Gujarati. But currently, they accept book proposals only in the English language. The good part is that they will review a manuscript in almost any genre (except scientific titles, and educational books ).

• Phone: +91 124 478 5600
• Address: 7th Floor, C, Infinity Tower, DLF Cyber City, DLF Phase 1, Sector 24, Gurugram, Haryana, 122002, India
• Submission guidelines

Pirates is an innovative publishing house, which focuses not only on books but on films as well. They put a lot of emphasis on a great story and they call themselves the “story surgeons”. They want to give a chance to new voices in a variety of Indian languages. One of their goals is to offer many titles based on a collaboration of two or more authors, which is uncommon. A great advantage here is that you don’t need a full manuscript to be considered as a Pirates’ author. All you need is a synopsis and the first five chapters of your novel or a nonfiction narrative.

• Email: [email protected]
• Phone: +91 93526 39888
• Address: Sanghi Brothers, Station Road, N, K Sanghi Circle, Jodhpur, Rajasthan 342001, India
• Submission guidelines 

3. Harper Collins India

The Indian branch of the global publishing house was established in 1992. Harper Collins specializes in entertainment and education titles and has grown over the last couple of years. It depends mostly on well-established authors, but over the years it’s also promoted a couple of great new writers such as Advaita Kala or Anuja Chauhan. It also has a couple of local imprints dealing with different genres: Fourth Estate, Harper Perennial, and Harper Litmus. You can submit your manuscript as long as it’s in English in the genres of fiction and non-fiction (adult and children’s books ), biography, current affairs, and  self-help . All you need to get started is a synopsis and the first three chapters.

• Email: [email protected]
• Phone: +91 120 404 4800
• Address: Block A, 75, Kamal Marg, Block A, Sector 57, Noida, Uttar Pradesh 201307, India

4. Taxman Publications Limited

If you’re interested in taxation and corporate law publishing , Taxman will have you covered. The company was established in 1960 by Shri UK Bhargava, and now it has many divisions dealing with research, technology, printing, publishing, sales, and marketing. They publish titles related to taxes, international taxation, auditing, bankruptcy, and corporate laws. They also have a lot of books related to corporate exam preparation. Unfortunately, I could not find information regarding submissions. You would probably need to get in touch with them through an agent .

• Email: [email protected]
• Phone: +91-11-45562222
• Address: 59/32, New Rohtak Road, New Delhi – 110005 (India)
• Submission guidelines – Not Provided

5. Westland Publishers

According to Kitaab, Westland has been recently taken over by Amazon (2017) and now is run by Karthika VK, who previously worked for Harper Collins. The company started in 1962 and grew to become one of the largest English-language trade publishers in India. Some of their best authors include Chetan Bhagat, Amish Tripathi, and Ashwin Sanghi. Their books regularly appear in the top 50 best-selling book charts in India. They publish titles in a variety of different formats – print, e-books, and books available on Amazon Kindle, and Audible. The main genres included in their strategy are literary fiction, business, politics, biography, spirituality , health, and cookery. Some other imprints that belong to Westland are Tranquebar and EastWest.

• Email: [email protected]
• Phone: not provided
• Address: No 61, Silverline building, Maduravayil, Alappakkam Main Rd, Chennai, Tamil Nadu 600095, India

6. Cambridge University Press

The organization started in the UK, and it has been around for over 6 centuries, publishing books by many best-selling authors including over 60 Nobel Prize laureates. Now, Cambridge University Press has a wide presence on the Indian subcontinent (as well as 140 other countries around the world). This is a go-to company if you would like to publish a monograph, research paper, educational book, English language manual, or a breakthrough scientific discovery. Cambridge publishes over 1600 books and 380 monographs each year in 29 different subject areas. The focus in India is mainly on providing great and affordable educational materials.

• Email: [email protected]
• Phone: +91 11 4354 3500
• Address: Splendor Forum, Plot no. 3, 3rd Floor, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025

7. MacMillan India Ltd.

The MacMillan Publishing House started in 1843. Since then, they have published some of the most amazing works of literary fiction from authors like Lewis Carroll and Rudyard Kipling. The company is also responsible for launching the classic research journal “Nature” and since then promoted educational and scientific materials as well. In India, the company operates under three main imprints – Picador India, Pan, and Macmillan. The editors are interested in manuscripts as long as they have a strong connection to the Indian subcontinent. The published works fall under the following genres – fiction (all sub-genres except for college romance and poetry), and general and narrative non-fiction. They recommend you get in touch with them through a literary agent, but unsolicited manuscripts are also considered.

• Email: [email protected]
• Phone: 011 – 23320837/38
• Address: 707, 7th Floor, Kailash Building, 26, K.G. Marg, New Delhi -110001

8. Hachette India Publishers

Hachette India is a division of Hachette UK, which comprises several companies and publishing under dozens of imprints. They are known for their Asterix comic books , as well as the titles of Stephen King. The Indian branch started in 2008 and began publishing in 2009 with the first book rolling out the press being Amit Varma’s “My Friend Sancho” which became a huge success. In the next few years, the publisher released many other best-selling titles, giving a chance to many new Indian authors. The company deals mainly with fiction, children’s books , and reference books, as well as memoirs , self-help , travel, history , business, and popular culture titles. Right now they only accept submissions sent via a literary agent. On their submissions page, they provide a healthy list of literary agents you can get in touch with.

• Email: c&[email protected]
• Phone: +91-124-4195000
• Address: 4th/5th Floors, Corporate Centre; Plot no 94, Sector 44; Gurgaon-122003 INDIA

9. Wiley India

John Wiley & Sons, Inc. was founded in 1807, and since its inception, it has been publishing books around the areas of personal development, technical expertise, professional education, advertising, training services, and professional education . Their books are  focused on helping the readers  to achieve their goals and career aspirations. It has published the books of over 45 Nobel Prize laureates in all categories. The Indian office is in Noida, but there are also a couple of other regional branches. The focus here is on publishing a wide array of books and digital products in IT and business, as well as affordable best-selling higher education textbooks. You can submit your proposal to the main office and then it’s going to be passed along to one of the regional branches.

• Email: [email protected]
• Phone: 0120-6291100
• Address: 1402, 14th Floor, World Trade Tower, Plot No. C-1, Sector – 16, Noida – 201301

10. Seagull Books

Seagull Books is a small independent book publisher based in Kolkata. It’s an imprint and a nonfiction division of Leo Publishing, LCC. They accept manuscripts in the areas of science fiction , fantasy , young adult fiction , techno-thrillers, mystery, crime, poetry books,  short story collections , as well as children’s books. Note that the word count will have to be around 70,000 to 130,000 words. You will also need to list your credentials, share the purpose of your book, list your similar titles, and tell how your book is unique compared to others. Overall, there are many requirements, but it might be worth it to jump through the hoops because it’s always easier to deal with a smaller independent publisher .

• Email: [email protected]
• Phone: 033 2476 5869 / 65
• Address: 31A, S.P. Mukherjee Road, Calcutta, 700 025

11. S Chand Publishing

This is one of the oldest and largest publishing houses in India, which was founded in 1939, in New Delhi. They mostly deal with educational materials for primary and higher education. With over 110 offices and 2000 employees, in 2013 Forbes named the company as “one of the fastest-growing players in the educational sector.” Their books are distributed across multiple countries in Asia the Middle East and Africa. Their backlist includes over 15,000 titles in a variety of different languages, which are distributed among 40,000 schools and higher education institutions. They welcome unsolicited manuscripts and constantly want to sign up new authors. You can start by submitting a synopsis in a digital form and someone will soon get in touch with you to ask for more details.

• Email: [email protected]
• Phone: + 91-11- 66672000
• Address: Regd. Office: 7361, Ram Nagar, Qutab Road, New Delhi-110055

12. Rupa Publications

Rupa was founded over 80 years ago and has a long tradition of working with some of India’s most distinguished authors. They release books in the area of fiction , non-fiction, self-help, and young adult titles. Some of their most famous titles include “Gurgaon Diaries” and “Things My Kids Say”. If you want to submit a proposal, you may send it as a hard copy or in an electronic version. You will need a synopsis of the first three chapters and you will have to wait around three months to get a response (which is pretty standard). They accept general fiction and non-fiction works in the English language.

• Email: [email protected]
• Phone: +91 11 49226666
• Address: 161, B-4, Ground Floor, Gulmohar House, Yusuf Sarai Community Centre, New Delhi – 110 049

13. Roli Books

This is one of the biggest publishing companies on the subcontinent, with over 7 different branches across the country. Roli Books has been established around 40 years ago. The company was always interested in releasing titles related to Indian heritage that would help to bolster the country’s rich culture. Their mission is to release innovative titles and books that are beautifully designed with photographs and illustrations. The notion is that of expert scholarship and accessible prose that would inspire lay readers. Moving on with time, the company ventured into the area of design, gifts, and stationery products. They are friendly towards first-time authors and will be glad to receive your submission. Just keep in mind that it can take from 10 to 12 weeks to get a response.

• Email: [email protected]
• Phone: +91 11 40682000
• Address: M-75, Greater Kailash 2 Market, New Delhi, 110048

14. Jaico Publishing House

The company was established in 1946. Now it has over 10 branches across India and other countries. Their main interest is sharing life-transforming information with the readers. They’ve been working with authors such as Robin Sharma, Deepak Chopra, Stephen Hawking, and Sri Paramahansa Yogananda. The publishing house was the first one to release affordable paperback books in India in the English language. They concentrate mostly on  self-help , religion, philosophy, mind, and body, as well as business titles. Some of their more popular releases are also translated into 9 different Indian languages. They release over 125 new titles every year. If you’re interested in becoming an author, you can submit your manuscript through an online form available on their website.

• Email: [email protected]
• Phone: +91 11 2214 4221
• Address: G- 16, 2/32, Ansari Rd, Dariya Ganj, New Delhi, Delhi 110002, India

15. Aleph Book Company

This is one of the youngest publishing houses on the list. It was established in 2011 with the help of Rupa Publications India. They are mainly interested in books about India and other South Asian countries. They release around 40 titles annually in the areas of fiction, history , biography, autobiography, current events, reportage, travel , and many others. They don’t accept unsolicited submissions (no exceptions here). If you’re interested in publishing with them, you will need to do it through a literary agent.

• Email: [email protected]
• Address: 161, B-4, Ground Floor, Gulmohar House, Yusuf Sarai Community Centre, New Delhi – 110049

16. Scholastic India

Scholastic is a huge publishing house with around $2 billion in annual revenues. They have branches all around the world and employ almost 10,000 people. They have been deemed the largest children’s book publisher in the world, as well as a leader in educational technology and children’s media. Some of the most important authors they work with are Ruskin Bond, Paro Anand, and Sampurna Chatterji. They accept unsolicited work in English for their children and young adult imprints in the genres of fiction such as fantasy , adventure, suspense thriller, and more, as well as non-fiction, biographies, activity, quiz and puzzle books, and self-help books.

• Email: [email protected]
• Phone: 0124-4842800
• Address: A 27 Sigma Centre, Ground floor, Infocity-1, near Harley Davidson showroom, Sector 34, Gurugram, Haryana 122001, India

17. Srishti Publishers & Distributors

This is a fairly young company, which is especially into signing up new, young promising authors. And it’s really easy to get published if you already have an established brand in the publishing industry. The idea behind Srishti is to give new authors a chance to share their stories with the world. They have a large distribution network and sell books through the main stores in India, such as Crossword Landmark, Om Book Shop, or Sapna Book House. They also deal with online distribution through Amazon, Flipkart, Snapdeal, etc. All you need to get started as a potential author is a synopsis and the three first chapters of your work. All works have to be in English.

• Email: [email protected]
• Phone: 011-41751981
• Address: N-16, Chittaranjan Park, New Delhi – 110019

18. 24by7 Publishing

This is a perfect company to use if you’re into self-publishing and print-on-demand. They’re  based in Kolkata and growing fast , by signing the actual authors, as the partial owners of the operation. What’s cool is that you can find a “cost per book” and royalty calculator on their website. It will give you a rough estimate of what you can expect from your self-publishing project . The publishing process here seems to be more complicated, as it’s a DIY type of operation. They have a good deal of different publishing “packages” where you need to choose how many copies you need to have printed. You need to take care of proper formatting, images, etc.

• Email: [email protected]
• Phone: (+91) 9433 444 334,
• Address: 13 New Road, Birati, Kolkata 700051, India

19. Leadstart Publishing

Leadstart is one of the leading publishing houses in India. Many of their authors won major literary prizes, such as Padma Bhushan, Sahitya Akademi Award, and Vodafone Crossword Awards. The “Week” magazine called them “the fastest-growing book publishing company in India today”. With nine different imprints and over 200 new books per year, they truly deserve some recognition. They are interested in receiving new manuscripts in a digital form. What’s interesting is that they have a “manuscript evaluation metrics” page on their website. Over there, you can check which types of work get a higher score, and try to improve your chances of success. This is something you can use as a template when dealing with other publishers as well.

• Email: [email protected]
• Phone: +91 9699933000
• Address: Unit – 25-26, Building A/1, Near Wadala R.T.O., Wadala (E), Mumbai – 400 037.

20. Juggernaut Books

This is one of the most innovative companies out there. It was founded only in 2015 by Chiki Sarkar in New Delhi. It’s an online platform where almost anyone can  publish their book  and become successful (if they’re able to attract enough readers). They also have a physical book operation run through Hachette India (already mentioned in this list). You can upload your manuscript digitally, and after a few steps, it should go live on the platform. They already have 5000+ books on their blacklist and work with 3000+ different authors. Try them to join the publishing revolution.

• Email: [email protected]
• Phone: Not provided
• Address: Not provided

Pothi is another one of the self-publishing and print-on-demand publishing houses. If you’re interested in publishing your work (in digital or print form), you can do it easily at a low cost. They’ll also provide an ISBN for your book, which is quite neat. However, there have been some minor complaints about the quality of their work. Mainly, their delivery time and royalty reporting are super slow. But hopefully, they’ll resolve these issues as they grow. They have an extensive FAQ section on their website from which you can learn all the details of the publishing process and how to submit your manuscript. They need you to provide a lot of information, so it’s probably better if you have the help of a literary agent.

• Email: Not provided (contact form available on the website)
• Address: 634, 5th Main Rd, Indira Nagar II Stage, Hoysala Nagar, Indiranagar, Bengaluru, Karnataka 560038, India

22. Mahaveer Publishers

This is a tiny, but growing publishing house that has only about 100 different titles to its credit. They distribute books across India, Nepal, and Bhutan. There are only a couple of people working in the company, and they don’t accept any new hires or interns. They deal mostly with novels and adult non-fiction books, as well as some titles related to education  (exam preparation and skills development). Unfortunately, I could not find any information regarding the manuscript submissions. I’m afraid you’ll have to fill out their contact form or get in touch in some other way to get that info.

• Address: Graham Bazar, Dibrugarh, Assam 786001, India
• Submission guidelines (not provided)

23. Cinnamon Teal Design & Publishing

The company is based in Goa, but it can distribute and market books  all across the globe. It was set up in 2007, and since then it has achieved lots of success. In 2016, it got the “Business Goa Publisher of the Year” award, and in 2017 Cinnamon Teal started offering a wide range of other services. They deal mostly with self-publishers , so if you’re ready to spend your own money to get the book into the world, you can use their services. You’ll need to send the manuscript according to the details laid out in the publishing guidelines (link below). But they can also help you if you want to release a book only in digital form (typesetting, design, web development, distribution, etc.)

• Email: [email protected]
• Address: Plot No. 16, Housing Board Colony, Gogol, Margao, Goa 403601, India

24. OM Books International

As the name suggests, OM Books is a native-Indian company and one of the biggest English language trade publishers on the subcontinent. Recently, they were celebrating the 50th anniversary of operations, which makes them one of the most established and trustworthy companies in the industry. Over the years, they’ve published many best-selling titles, including Three Sisters by Bi Feiyu and The Kept Woman and Other Stories by Kamala Das. They also have some excellent titles related to Bollywood, as well as monographs on art and architecture. One of their imprints is Om Kids, which deals with all kinds of children’s books. The publishing house accepts submissions in a digital form around the genres of art, design, photography , architecture, fiction, non-fiction, children’s subjects, and cuisine. Your manuscript may take 8 to 12 weeks until it gets evaluated. So try to stay patient and wait for a positive response.

• Email: [email protected]
• Phone: +91 120 477 4100
• Address: A 12, Sector 64, Noida 201, 301, Uttar Pradesh, India

25. Become Shakespeare

Yet another self-publishing company on this list, which offers many service packages. You can start with a basic one (29,990 Rs) and go as high as the Pro+ package, which costs 1,99,990 Rs. It all depends on what kinds of services you require. Just like Shakespeare, who didn’t receive formal schooling, you too can become a famous author. You just need a couple of rupees to spare on publishing… The services of Become Shakespeare include mentoring, critiquing, assisted writing, proofreading , cover design, standard pagination, digital proof, advance copy, bulk printing, ISBN code, ebook conversion, distribution, marketing, book previews, and many others.

• Email: [email protected]
• Phone: +91 8080336688
• Address: Unit -26, Building A-1, Nr Wadala RTO, Wadala (East), Mumbai, MH, India. Pin: 400037.

26. Petals Publishers

This is another small self-publishing company that will allow you to claim the title of a “published author” if you’re willing to pay for printing and associated services. The company was founded in 2013 and helped to release many bestsellers that came from little-known authors. They work with over 40 different distributors across the country to make sure the books gain a wide enough readership. They are  investing heavily in online  marketing and digital distribution of their titles, using new technology trends to increase their reach. They offer literary services (editing, proofreading), marketing services (book promotion), distribution (physical and online), and, of course, self-publishing .

• Email: [email protected]
• Phone: +91-99140-27845
• Address: 2695/1, Kidwai Nagar MarketLudhiana – 141008, Punjab

27. APK Publishers

APK is a young, modern publishing house based in Pune. Founded in July 2008 by Prashant Karhade and Anagha Karhade, it’s concentrated on releasing only English-language titles right now. So far they only have around 50 titles in print, but they’re always open to signing up new writers, and some of their books became best sellers. APK is happy to receive your manuscript as long as it’s in English and it’s in the genres of fiction/non-fiction written for adults, young adults, and children. So, whether you have true-to-life stories or tales set in a fantastical world , you may get a shot here. All you’ll need is a detailed synopsis and the first three chapters of the work. They respond faster than your usual publishers and it will take them only around two weeks to get back to you.

• Email: [email protected]
• Phone: + (91) 982 279 6490
• Address: 5/301 Ved Vihar, Paud Road, Pune-411038.

28. Fingerprint Publishing

This is one of the youngest publishing houses out there as it only started in 2015. As far as I know, they don’t have a working website yet, but you can get in touch with them through their Facebook page. They deal with commercial fiction, non-fiction, and the distribution of ebooks on the major bookstore platforms.

Here’s a rundown of their genres:

• Commercial fiction ( romance , mystery, thrillers, humor, fantasy, young adult)
• General and narrative non-fiction
• Autobiographies and biographies
• Self-help, health, and fitness
• Spirituality

I couldn’t find any info about submissions, so you’ll have to get in touch with them directly.

• Email: Not Provided
• Phone: +91 11 2326 5358
• Address: 113-A, First Floor, Ansari Road, Darya Ganj, New Delhi-110002, New Delhi 110002

29. Pustak Mahal

Little is known about this publisher. Unfortunately, the information available on their website is scant, but you can check their profile on Wikipedia which has a bit more information. The company started in 1974 and since 2010 it’s been run by Ram Avatar Gupta. It has a few branches all over India and mainly publishes low-cost paperbacks. The subjects of the books they publish are related to English learning, dictionaries, astrology, tarot , numerology, beauty care, and many others. They were the first publisher in India to release books on Amazon Kindle. So far they have digitized over 300 of their titles. They are also known for their “World Famous” series, which talks about topics of general interest. They published 48 titles around this series in total. I couldn’t find any info regarding submissions on their website.

• Email: Not available (contact form available on the website)
• Phone: 011 2327 2783
• Address: Office No. J-3/16, Ansari Rd, Dariya Ganj, New Delhi, Delhi 110002
• Submission guidelines (not available)

30. Notion Press

The last company on this list is a self-publishing house with a technological twist on it. Notion Press is based in Chennai. Since it started in 2012, it has grown incredibly fast and in 2016 it received 1 million dollars to further fuel the expansion. It’s a free publishing platform where you can upload your manuscript and then share it with thousands of readers from all around the world. The company also focuses on book printing and distribution services. Now it’s the largest online publishing platform in India, as it published over 4,000 books by authors from 65 different countries. What’s amazing is that it fosters a community of over 100,000 authors and readers who already joined the platform. All you need to do to get started is to create a free account, and then follow the instructions. It’s a perfect service to try out if you’re just beginning your writing career.

• Email: [email protected]
• Phone: +91 44 42524252
• Address: Old No. 38, New No. 6, McNichols Road, Chetpet, Chennai, Tamil Nadu 600031

As you can see, there are dozens of great publishing houses you can depend on. I hope this resource will be helpful to you if you’re looking for books in your favorite genre, have a manuscript, or want to apply for work in one of these companies. With thousands of new titles published every year, you too have a chance of becoming a well-respected author and sharing your opinions and stories with the world. You may also want to consider self-publishing or building a social media presence to increase your chances of success. Keep on trying until you achieve your goal. Next, you may want to check the list of the top book publishers in the Philippines .

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Rafal Reyzer

Hey there, welcome to my blog! I'm a full-time entrepreneur building two companies, a digital marketer, and a content creator with 10+ years of experience. I started RafalReyzer.com to provide you with great tools and strategies you can use to become a proficient digital marketer and achieve freedom through online creativity. My site is a one-stop shop for digital marketers, and content enthusiasts who want to be independent, earn more money, and create beautiful things. Explore my journey here , and don't miss out on my AI Marketing Mastery online course.