Open Access Mega Journals: Citation Analysis of the Scientific Publications of Selected Middle East Countries

Abstract:  Mega journals are growing rapidly, and nowadays, they have become new portals for the publication of scientific outputs. The purpose of this study is to analyze the citations of the scientific outputs of Iran, Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Israel in eight mega journals. This applied research, which is a descriptive-analytical study, was conducted by employing a scientometric approach. In this study, eight mega journals were identified and selected based on Bjork's criteria. In each journal, the studies conducted by the researchers of selected countries of the Middle East, and indexed in the Scopus database were searched and extracted from the time the journal was launched as a mega journal to the end of 2019. The total number of studies imported to Excel, SPSS, and VosViewer software for analysis and illustration of the data was 10935. The results showed that approximately 84 percent of the studies performed by the researchers of the selected countries were published in PLOS ONE and Scientific Reports, and the share of the publication for the other six journals accounted for only six percent of the articles. Of the 262696 citations received by these articles, 57.86 percent belonged to the studies published in PLOS ONE. Moreover, PLOS ONE and Scientific Reports were among the most cited sources of the studies carried out in the Middle East. The most active institutes of the Middle East in the eight selected mega journals were Tel Aviv University, King Saud University, Cairo University, and Tehran University of Medical Sciences, respectively. Most of the international collaborations of the selected countries for publication of studies were with the researchers of Medical Sciences of the USA, the UK, and Germany. A considerable share of publications of the selected Middle East countries in the mega journals belonged to PLOS ONE and Scientific Reports. Although the trend of publication in the other journals is also rising, they are not comparable with those two journals. As conducting international studies could increase the rate of citations, it is recommended that researchers increase the impact of their publications via international collaboration.