Independent, open-data ranking of the world's largest scholarly publishers by citation impact

README-gist.md

Most-cited publishers — independent measurement

Independent, reproducible ranking of the world's largest scholarly publishers by citation impact, in the spirit of open-impact-factor and open-h5: open data source, open computation logic, reproducible by anyone.

Publisher-level citation rankings are often self-reported by publishers themselves, computed on data and methodology nobody outside the company can inspect. This directory recomputes an analogous ranking from fully open data.

Data source

OpenAlex /publishers API — open, no key required, CC0 metadata aggregated from Crossref, PubMed, ROR, and other open sources. Each publisher entity carries works_count, cited_by_count, and summary_stats.2yr_mean_citedness (citations received, as of the snapshot date, to papers published in the prior two years, divided by the number of such papers — OpenAlex's own rolling analogue of a journal impact factor, applied here at publisher granularity).

Methodology

1. Fetch publisher entities sorted by works_count descending.
2. Exclude confirmed data-quality artifacts (see below).
3. Take the top 100 remaining publishers by volume.
4. Rank those 100 by 2yr_mean_citedness.

This is a live snapshot as of the date the script was run; rankings shift as the citation window rolls forward year to year.

Excluded anomalies

Two entries in OpenAlex's raw top-30-by-works_count list are not real large-scale publishers but data-quality artifacts, confirmed by drilling into each publisher's sources_api_url and finding a single niche journal absurdly holding millions of attributed works:

Publisher (as listed)	Works claimed	What it actually is
Abraham Lincoln Association	3,616,303	All attributed to The Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, a niche history journal — not a real multi-million-work publisher.
Japan Society of Medical Entomology and Zoology	3,297,225	All attributed to Medical Entomology and Zoology, a niche journal — same pattern.

Both are almost certainly OpenAlex ingestion bugs (a fallback/default host_organization absorbing misattributed records). Left in, they would have bumped real publishers out of the top-100-by-volume window.

Results

Rank	Publisher	Works (all-time)	Citations (all-time)	2yr mean citedness	h-index
1	Massachusetts Medical Society	242,057	12,406,237	29.8295	1507
2	American Association for the Advancement of Science	447,752	25,362,845	14.1703	1769
3	Nature Portfolio	1,195,358	77,480,186	9.4290	2353
4	National Academy of Sciences	172,468	22,939,460	8.2173	1175
5	American Medical Association	683,297	18,505,684	7.7742	1180
6	American Chemical Society	2,172,676	89,743,573	6.8561	1584
7	Royal Society of Chemistry	953,222	29,791,378	5.8444	1020
8	Association for Computing Machinery	166,827	5,797,868	4.6939	799
9	BioMed Central	813,973	24,944,662	4.5688	886
10	Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers	1,497,452	45,972,308	4.5384	1401
11	American Physical Society	788,909	40,416,992	4.5315	1337
12	Elsevier BV	24,198,082	646,966,260	4.3416	2893
13	Royal Society	112,787	5,786,131	4.2865	688
14	Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute	1,978,862	34,819,542	4.2497	770
15	American Geophysical Union	186,053	10,388,034	4.1006	744
16	Pergamon Press	137,795	2,721,458	4.0486	392
17	American Society for Microbiology	318,132	18,273,854	3.9372	821
18	Portland Press	120,320	4,202,109	3.9153	504
19	Frontiers Media	756,683	15,888,060	3.5923	651
20	Wiley	11,161,935	254,082,070	3.4821	2312
21	Dove Medical Press	118,457	2,549,682	3.3668	357
22	Public Library of Science	417,487	17,267,780	3.3378	760
23	Emerald Publishing Limited	547,940	10,121,158	3.3024	656
24	Optica Publishing Group	265,885	7,330,535	3.0981	562
25	Informa	157,075	2,925,731	2.9747	355
26	OMICS Publishing Group	189,024	613,649	2.8898	169
27	Springer Science+Business Media	8,347,385	159,644,715	2.7494	1651
28	Springer Nature	2,800,746	39,620,128	2.6799	1184
29	American Society of Civil Engineers	192,554	3,662,288	2.5649	447
30	BMJ	579,673	13,868,957	2.4510	752
31	Oxford University Press	4,874,265	109,487,416	2.3114	2017
32	American Meteorological Society	131,820	5,095,501	2.2471	669
33	Taylor & Francis	4,876,286	79,332,053	2.1963	1377
34	Trans Tech Publications	420,223	958,027	2.1908	126
35	IOP Publishing	1,149,730	21,338,356	2.1815	904
36	Institute of Physics	540,872	9,921,089	2.1617	738
37	American Institute of Physics	1,115,393	30,321,312	2.0278	1176
38	SAGE Publishing	3,178,629	63,101,365	1.9807	1639
39	NRC Research Press	122,409	2,935,744	1.9544	352
40	Wolters Kluwer	248,534	4,546,496	1.9403	536
41	Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.	228,015	5,712,921	1.9051	496
42	ASM International	166,728	3,222,333	1.8972	488
43	Bentham Science Publishers	168,335	3,266,027	1.8928	393
44	Karger Publishers	386,035	7,092,414	1.7930	479
45	IGI Global	249,072	860,804	1.7374	187
46	American Psychological Association	381,159	21,313,405	1.6435	1435
47	American Mathematical Society	159,141	2,867,155	1.6398	513
48	Routledge	482,854	6,502,799	1.6103	586
49	EDP Sciences	377,286	4,189,526	1.6053	447
50	Lippincott Williams & Wilkins	3,006,130	67,120,808	1.5683	1403
51	Hindawi Publishing Corporation	392,511	7,089,825	1.5619	490
52	The MIT Press	173,419	4,732,777	1.4334	766
53	SPIE	515,631	2,783,017	1.4076	324
54	American Physiological Society	132,854	7,578,480	1.3992	742
55	Institution of Engineering and Technology	193,894	2,315,116	1.3016	316
56	IOS Press	182,852	1,923,338	1.2878	301
57	John Benjamins Publishing Company	136,277	1,419,824	1.2272	338
58	De Gruyter	780,907	4,954,395	1.1969	408
59	De Gruyter Open	173,198	1,154,905	1.1581	183
60	American Association for Cancer Research	239,770	5,372,389	1.1216	614
61	World Scientific	389,267	3,273,809	1.1148	441
62	Cambridge University Press	3,050,682	33,990,748	1.0881	1336
63	Cureus, Inc.	115,634	428,097	1.0742	132
64	University of Chicago Press	470,933	7,232,307	1.0549	852
65	Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development	178,389	508,883	1.0500	285
66	Science Press	298,214	816,050	0.9416	154
67	Springer Nature (Netherlands)	231,583	2,115,598	0.9393	405
68	Medknow	399,359	3,099,688	0.9005	314
69	Springer VS	178,598	735,110	0.8518	207
70	Palgrave Macmillan	419,505	2,936,451	0.8414	477
71	Acoustical Society of America	179,358	1,764,816	0.8223	374
72	Adis, Springer Healthcare	368,836	2,121,953	0.7990	366
73	Pleiades Publishing	634,603	3,060,245	0.7523	238
74	Scientific Research Publishing	142,467	883,410	0.7275	182
75	Duke University Press	190,757	2,262,820	0.7172	455
76	Association of College and Research Libraries	214,813	12,989,807	0.6957	1180
77	Springer International Publishing	553,272	2,367,495	0.6868	335
78	Thieme Medical Publishers (Germany)	661,106	5,237,275	0.6229	404
79	Johns Hopkins University Press	214,926	2,435,385	0.5529	426
80	Edward Elgar Publishing	197,359	815,558	0.5451	248
81	University of California Press	147,967	524,528	0.5410	193
82	Peter Lang	123,849	102,879	0.4423	96
83	Inderscience Publishers	195,332	1,096,157	0.3987	209
84	Brill	313,981	1,687,942	0.3882	264
85	United Nations	173,029	164,731	0.2788	159
86	Princeton University Press	353,140	2,005,595	0.2626	584
87	Royal College of Nursing	137,242	190,311	0.2614	126
88	Chinese Medical Association	328,305	44,588	0.2353	40
89	University of Toronto Press	221,246	1,157,009	0.2203	331
90	Philosophy Documentation Center	129,222	849,197	0.1923	363
91	Harvard University Press	158,311	1,235,379	0.1798	449
92	Georg Thieme Verlag	257,945	383,313	0.1765	157
93	Liverpool University Press	113,903	214,317	0.1081	133
94	Japan Society Mechanical Engineers	305,102	255,625	0.0993	95
95	Ternopil Volodymyr Hnatiuk National Pedagogical University	150,738	34,127	0.0968	40
96	Edinburgh University Press	166,803	315,406	0.0907	168
97	Yale University Press	153,577	356,319	0.0891	231
98	Nomos	234,654	270,176	0.0827	120
99	Transcript Verlag	256,827	200,798	0.0592	119
100	Japan Neurosurgical Society	159,550	147,990	0.0000	132

Caveats

• Corporate-family fragmentation: OpenAlex lists "Springer Nature", "Springer Science+Business Media", "Springer International Publishing", and "BioMed Central" as four separate entities, though they are one corporate group. Merging them would push a combined "Springer Nature Group" far up the volume ranking and pull its citedness down somewhat toward BioMed Central's lower rate, but is not done here — this script reports OpenAlex's entities as-is to keep the computation from injecting editorial judgment about what counts as "one publisher."
• 2yr_mean_citedness vs "average citations per article": OpenAlex's 2-year window is one reasonable operationalization of "average citations per article"; other formulas (different window, different citation-year anchor) would shift ranks somewhat.
• OpenAlex citation and venue-attribution coverage, like any bibliometric database, is imperfect and skews toward more recent/indexed literature.

Reproduce

python3 measure_publishers.py

Outputs data/openalex_publishers_raw.json (raw API cache), results.json, and regenerates this README's Results section. Delete data/openalex_publishers_raw.json to force a fresh fetch.

---

Contact Martin Monperrus for the script.