Analysis of the 2016 CiteScore metrics shows Frontiers journals lead in citations in their fields and rank in the top CiteScore percentiles.

— by Mirjam Curno and Stephanie Oeben

In the CiteScore 2016 release, 32 Frontiers journals received a CiteScore covering 51 different subject categories. In total, Scopus included 22,618 journal titles across 334 categories in the CiteScore 2016 edition.

Our analysis of the 2016 CiteScore metrics shows that Frontiers journals are consistently ranked among the best performing journals in their categories. Frontiers CiteScores rank, on average, at the 85th percentile and as high as the 94th percentile (Fig. 1).

The key findings with regards to CiteScore ranking and total citation count ranking are:

• Ranked by CiteScore:

  • 9 Frontiers journals rank in the top 10% most impactful journals of their categories according to their CiteScore value.

  • Frontiers in Immunology has the highest CiteScore of all Frontiers journals with 5.37.

  • Frontiers in Plant Science ranks as high as the 94th CiteScore percentile.

  • On average, Frontiers journals rank at the 85th CiteScore percentile.

• Ranked by Total Citations:

  • In 6 categories, Frontiers journals are the highest cited journals.

  • In 21 categories, Frontiers journals are among the top 10 most cited journals.

  • 80% of the Frontiers articles on average by journal had at least one citation — nearly double the 41% cited rate across all journals listed in Scopus.

Figure 1: Journals ranked by their 2016 CiteScore percentiles within the Scopus discipline categories. Displayed are the 37 categories in which 27 different Frontiers journals (red dots) are indexed in [see Box 1 for the methodology]. Frontiers journals are ranked as highly as the 94th percentile according to the CiteScore 2016 edition, based on the Scopus database.

Launched in December 2016, CiteScore metrics are a set of free journal citation metrics that cover over 22,600 titles in Elsevier’s Scopus database. CiteScore values are officially released once a year. The CiteScore number represents the average citations received in a specific year to articles published in the previous three years — and, similarly to the Impact Factor published by Clarivate Analytics, is a metric of journal quality. The total number of citations captures how much research is built on the papers published in a journal and is therefore a measure of influence of a journal on a field. The CiteScore 2016 edition is based on citations in 2016 to articles published in 2013, 2014 and 2015.

Frontiers journals are among the most cited in their fields

Frontiers journals also rank among the most influential in their fields in terms of total citations received in 2016 to articles published in 2013, 2014 and 2015 (Fig. 2). 

15 Frontiers journals ranked amongst the top 10 most cited journals in 21 categories.

Frontiers journals are the top most cited in 6 categories Frontiers, namely in Plant Science, General Psychology, Behavioral Neuroscience, Neuropsychology and Physiological Psychology, Biological Psychiatry, and Psychiatry and Mental Health.

Frontiers journals also ranked 2nd most cited in the categories Neurology and Microbiology (medical), 3rd most cited in General Microbiology and 4th most cited in Immunology & Allergy.

Overall, 80% of the Frontiers articles per journal included in our CiteScore analysis had at least one citation on average. This is almost double the 41% cited rate across all journals listed in Scopus.

Figure 2: Total number of citations in 2016 to articles published in 2013, 2014 and 2015, for the top 10 most cited journals in several Scopus categories. Bar plots show Frontiers journals’ rank (in red). The results are based on the CiteScore 2016 edition based on the Scopus database.

Scientific excellence at scale

The high performance of Frontiers journals in the Scopus database mirrors the results of Frontiers journals in the 2016 Journal Citation Report (JCR, Clarivate Analytics, 2017). In the 2016 JCR edition, Frontiers journals ranked as the most cited in 4 categories, namely Neurosciences, Psychology, Multidisciplinary Psychology, and Plant Sciences. Frontiers journals also ranked 2nd most cited in the category of Physiology, 3rd most cited in Microbiology and 5th most cited in Immunology.

Frontiers has become one of the largest open-access publishers in the world and is leading many of the technological innovations serviced our Open Science Platform. We engineered our Collaborative Peer Review with a review mandate focused on enhancing article quality by means of rigorous and constructive feedback from expert reviewers, quick and direct interactions between authors, reviewers and the editor. We enable their work with our unique review forum platform, and we introduced transparency and accountability by acknowledging reviewers and editors on the published articles.

With journals listed across 51 academic categories in the CiteScore 2016 edition, Frontiers journals rank in the top percentiles of CiteScore values and total citations. This demonstrates the rapidly growing success and influence of the Frontiers Open Science model, that consistently delivers scientific excellence at scale.

All of this is only possible with a world-class Editorial Board of over 75,000 researchers, the diligent and committed work of our Associate and Review Editors, and the dedication of the Frontiers Teams. A heartfelt “congratulations and thank you” to them all.

Leading journals in their fields

Below we summarize the exceptional results for individual Frontiers journals in the CiteScore 2016 edition.

Frontiers in Neuroscience journal series

In the category Neuroscience (miscellaneous), 5 out of the top 10 cited journals are from the Frontiers in Neuroscience journal series (Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience, Frontiers in Neural Circuits, Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience, Frontiers in Neuroanatomy and Frontiers in Neuroinformatics). In addition, Frontiers in Neuroinformatics and Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience are in the top 10% of their categories according to their CiteScore values of 3.92 and 3.56, respectively.

Frontiers in Neuroscience

With a CiteScore of 3.85, Frontiers in Neuroscience ranks in the 81st percentile in the category General Neuroscience, placing it 19th out of a 100 journals.

Frontiers in Human Neuroscience

With a CiteScore of 3.38, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience is the most-cited journal in 4 categories, namely Behavioral Neuroscience, Psychiatry and Mental Health, Neuropsychology and Physiological Psychology and Biological Psychiatry, as well as the 2nd most-cited in the Neurology category.

Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience

With a CiteScore of 3.10, Frontiers in Behavioural Neuroscience is the 4th most-cited journal in the category Neuropsychology and Physiological Psychology, the 6th most-cited journal in the category Behavioral Neuroscience and the 7th most-cited journal in the category Cognitive Neuroscience.

Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience

With a CiteScore of 4.38, Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience is the 4th most-cited journal in the category Ageing and the 9th most-cited journal in the category Cognitive Neuroscience as well as ranking in the top 10% of the Cognitive Neuroscience category (84 journals).

Frontiers in Cellular Neuroscience

With a CiteScore of 4.53, Frontiers in Cellular Neuroscience is the 6th most-cited journal in the category Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience.

Frontiers in Psychology

With a CiteScore of 2.38, Frontiers in Psychology is the most-cited journal in the General Psychology category.

Frontiers in Plant Science

With a CiteScore of 4.52, Frontiers in Plant Science is in the top 10% in the Plant Science category (379 journals) and the most-cited journal by total citations.

Frontiers in Physiology

With a CiteScore of 3.89, Frontiers in Physiology is the 3rd most-cited journal in the category Physiology (medical) and the 9th most-cited journal in the general Physiology category.

Frontiers in Microbiology

With a CiteScore of 4.16, Frontiers in Microbiology is the 2nd most-cited journal in the Microbiology (medical) category and the 3rd most-cited journal in the general Microbiology category.

Frontiers in Immunology

With a CiteScore of 5.37, Frontiers in Immunology is the 4th most-cited journal in the category Immunology and Allergy as well as the 8th most-cited Immunology journal.

Frontiers in Pharmacology

With a CiteScore of 3.93, Frontiers in Pharmacology is in the top 10% of its category Pharmacology (medical) (232 journals).

Frontiers in Genetics

With a CiteScore of 3.44, Frontiers in Genetics, is the 6th most-cited journal in the category Genetics (clinical).

Frontiers in Cellular and Infection Microbiology

With a Citescore of 4.07, Frontiers in Cellular and Infection Microbiology ranks in the top 10% the categories Microbiology (medical) (107 journals) and Infectious Diseases (250 journals).

Frontiers in Psychiatry

With a CiteScore of 3.52, Frontiers in Psychiatry ranks in the top 10% of its category Psychiatry and Mental health (476 journals).

Table 1: Frontiers journals included in the CiteScore 2016 edition.

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