Who are the 100 Largest Scientific Publishers by Journal Count? A Webscraping Approach
Andreas Pacher · 2021
Meta-scientific surveys at the publisher- and journal-level cannot attain comprehensiveness if they omit large and middle-sized publishers. To hedge against this risk of biased omissions, one would need an exhaustive list of major scientific presses and their journals. This paper explores whether webscraping multiple heterogeneous research-related platforms could attain this goal. In a first step, the project draws from the content coverages of Scopus, Publons, DOAJ and SherpaRomeo to extract a preliminary list of publishers that supposedly possess at least 15 journals. In a second step, the project scrapes each of the publisher’s website to fetch their respective journal portfolios. The outcome is a list of 100 publishers comprising 28.060 journals. Many of the publishers, especially university presses from the Global South, would have been overlooked if one had drawn from merely one or two sources. Surprisingly, almost a third of the major publishers (32 out of 100) covering 4.744 journals seems predatory. Despite some limitations (e.g., the non-uniform distribution of the data, or the difficulty of disambiguating publisher names and their imprints), the dataset can serve as a useful basis for large-scale scientometrics analyses investigating the landscape of academic publishers and scholarly journals.