The number of most-cited papers published outside the elite journals in all subjects has increased by 64 per cent between 1995 and 2013, according to the paper “Rise of the rest: the growing impact of non-elite journals”.
When broken down by subject area, six of nine fields saw the number of the 1,000 most-cited papers published in non-elite journals grow by 45 per cent or more. Physics and mathematics subjects have seen the biggest change in publishing patterns, while publishing habits of scholars in the humanities, literature and the arts have changed the least, according to the research published on the arXiv preprint server on 9 October.
The researchers stress that a substantial proportion of top research articles are still published in elite journals, which for the purposes of the research were considered to be the 10 journals with the most citations in each field.