Journal Trends — Where Should I Publish? Free Journal Statistics, Publication Trends & PPS Flags
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Data Sources & About
journal-trends is a small, free, open-data tool that<br>visualises publication-trend statistics for any academic journal indexed<br>in OpenAlex.<br>Paste an ISSN and the page fetches the journal's publication metadata<br>from OpenAlex and renders interactive country, institution, author,<br>and Problematic-Paper-Screener (PPS) flag trends.
How it works
The browser hits the OpenAlex API directly to fetch the journal's<br>works (a few seconds for small journals, longer for very large ones).
A small companion backend caches the rolled-up aggregations per<br>ISSN so subsequent visitors get the same view instantly.
The backend also joins per-paper DOIs against a copy of the<br>Problematic Paper Screener dataset and stores per-journal PPS<br>roll-ups alongside the OpenAlex aggregation.
Loaded journals deep-link via ?issn= in the<br>URL — bookmark or share the link.
Data sources & citations
Publication data — OpenAlex
Priem, J., Piwowar, H., & Orr, R. (2022). OpenAlex:<br>A fully-open index of scholarly works, authors, venues, institutions,<br>and concepts. ArXiv.<br>arxiv.org/abs/2205.01833
Problematic-paper flags — The Problematic Paper Screener
Cabanac, G., Labbé, C., & Magazinov, A. (2022).<br>The 'Problematic Paper Screener' automatically selects suspect<br>publications for post-publication (re)assessment. arXiv.<br>arxiv.org/abs/2210.04895
Journal indexing & delist status — Scopus Source List (Elsevier)
Used for the "Scopus indexing" card on each journal page<br>and the dashed "Delisted by Scopus" marker on the trend charts. The Scopus<br>source list is published as an Excel workbook and updated monthly by Elsevier;<br>we mirror the latest snapshot into our backend. Visit<br>elsevier.com/en-in/products/scopus/content<br>for the authoritative list at any moment.
License & source code
Journal Trends is free, open-source software released under the<br>MIT License.<br>The codebase lives at<br>github.com/Journal-Trends<br>— bug reports, feature requests, and pull requests are welcome.
Disclaimer
This site is based on third-party data — primarily<br>OpenAlex , a community-maintained open dataset that may<br>contain inaccuracies, omissions, or out-of-date records — and on the<br>Problematic Paper Screener, whose flags are best-effort indicators of<br>suspect publications. A flag is not proof of misconduct, and<br>the absence of a flag is not proof of correctness. The<br>information shown here is provided for research and educational<br>purposes only. We make no warranty as to its accuracy,<br>completeness, or fitness for any purpose, and accept no<br>responsibility or liability for any decisions or conclusions<br>drawn from the information presented.
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Country trends<br>Institution trends<br>Author trends<br>PPS
View:<br>Stacked %<br>Absolute
Infer Unknown
✕ Clear pins
Country share per year — fractional counting
Papers published per year
✕ Clear pins
Country:
View:<br>Stacked %<br>Absolute
Top 20 institutions per year — stacked, fractional counting
Top 20 institutions per year — trendlines
This source has no PPS data attached.
That happens when the journal was cached before the PPS dataset was loaded<br>on the backend. Re-running a fresh fetch (clear local cache, re-Lookup) will<br>populate it.
Flagged share, year on year
Detector composition, year on year (top 15)
Stacked %<br>Absolute
Country share of flagged papers, year on year (top 15 + Other)
Stacked %<br>Absolute
Institution share of flagged papers, year on year (top 15 + Other)
Country:
Stacked %<br>Absolute
Show top:<br>10<br>20<br>30
Top authors by paper count — presence counting
journals containing<br>papers analyzed using Journal Trends.
Recently checked
Visit our sister site
AuthorTrends
for author publication statistics.
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Send us
— bug reports, requests, ideas.
Contribute on
— pull requests welcome.
Journal Trends is free, open-source software released under the<br>MIT License.
accordions<br>keep the page tidy while remaining crawlable in their collapsed<br>state. Targets common search-engine queries:<br>"who is behind journal trends" / "India Research Watch"<br>"which journal should I publish in"<br>"is journal trends free"<br>"compare journals before submitting"<br>"is this journal predatory"<br>"problematic paper screener" / "PPS flags"<br>"journal trends vs Scopus / Web of Science / Dimensions" -->
Common questions
Who is the team behind this?<br>This is an open-source project led by<br>India Research Watch (IRW)<br>and its founder<br>Achal Agrawal, part of<br>Nature's 10 — the list of people who impacted science the<br>most in 2025. It builds on the expertise of the sleuth community<br>in reading research-integrity signals in journals. Achal maintains<br>the codebase with (more than) a little help from<br>Claude Code.
Which journal should I publish in?<br>Choosing where to publish is one of the most consequential<br>decisions in...