Publisher Impact Intelligence

What moves an impact factor — and what is moving yours

Each report reverse-engineers the citation economics of a major publisher's journal portfolio — revealing which topics, article formats, and institutional relationships are improving or eroding their impact, and what to do about it.

Methodology

How These Reports Are Built

Each report analyses open bibliometric metadata from OpenAlex — a free, comprehensive index of the world's scholarly literature. We query works by publisher, filter to the target domain, and compute citation-density metrics, article-type mix, topic distribution, and institutional presence.

Data collection

OpenAlex API queried by publisher, date range, and domain. Titles, abstracts, citation counts, open-access status, article type, topics, authors, and institutions are captured and stored in DuckDB for reproducible analysis.

Citation economics

Impact factor is treated as a numerator/denominator problem. We identify which journals, topics, and article types are adding citations efficiently versus expanding the denominator without return.

Competitive benchmarking

Every publisher's portfolio is measured against the full market across the same domain — surfacing topic market share, institutional gaps, and format mix differences that explain performance divergence.

Narrative framing

Findings are structured as editorial intelligence stories — specific enough to act on, honest about data limitations, and anchored in concrete examples from the dataset rather than generalised advice.

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Citation counts reflect OpenAlex data at time of analysis. Early-year papers have naturally lower counts due to citation lag — all comparisons account for publication year where noted. These reports use a citation-density proxy for impact factor, not the formally certified JIF from Clarivate.

What moves an impact factor — and what is moving yours

Editorial Intelligence, Publisher by Publisher

How These Reports Are Built