With the last of the 2020 metrics now released and Peer Review Week in our sights, we have taken this opportunity to look back at the year in numbers for our Journals.

Ella Colvin, Director of Publishing, Academic Journals had this to say when reflecting on last year:

“It is heartening to see such exceptional results across our journals portfolio despite it having been another challenging year for so many across professional, personal and domestic spheres. This is a true testament to the commitment to quality and to collaboration across the academic community.

We particularly recognise the tireless work of our society partners, editors, authors and peer reviewers and thank them for their efforts and support. We also call out the growing network of researchers and readers who access and cite our content. Thank you all!”

A highlight for the Journals team has been the response to the pandemic, particularly our Coronavirus collection which ensured that all papers relating to the virus were made Open Access under a fee waiver programme. Papers in the collection had over 3.2 million views in 2020 and continue to be accessed with over 3 million views being added in 2021.
This collection also supported our move towards open research, which saw an 8% increase in our Open Access publishing output compared to 2019. This was supported by our growing number of global Read & Publish agreements.

Our impact was also supported by our performance in the 2021 Journal Citation Reports, with a 33%* increase to our publications’ Impact Factors. Congratulations to the following journals which ranked number one in their category: Acta Numerica, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Journal of Economic History, Journal of Global History, Political Analysis, Review of Symbolic Logic.

We were also delighted that 38 of our journals were included in the top 10 of their subject category in the new Journal Citation Index metric, with the following journals ranking first in their category: Acta Numerica, American Political Science Review, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Journal of Economic History, Journal of Chinese History.

Finally, 2020 saw an increase in attention around our papers, with a 43% increase in Altmetric mentions driven by news stories and social mentions and illustrating that the articles published with Cambridge are driving real-world conversations.

Discover more about our 2020 performance in numbers

*the calculation of the Impact Factor in 2021 has changed and is now based on the online rather than print publication date.