Editorial |
Corresponding author: Jürgen Dengler ( dr.juergen.dengler@gmail.com ) © 2024 Jürgen Dengler, Idoia Biurrun, Florian Jansen, Wolfgang Willner.
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Citation:
Dengler J, Biurrun I, Jansen F, Willner W (2024) Vegetation Classification and Survey is performing well. Vegetation Classification and Survey 5: 1-10. https://doi.org/10.3897/VCS.118454
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On the occasion of the completion of the fourth volume of Vegetation Classification and Survey (VCS), we have analysed the performance of the journal since its inception. The number of papers and pages show a moderate increase over the years. VCS has been included in the Scopus database for more than a year and received its first CiteScore of 2.0 in summer 2023 but is not yet included in the Web of Science Core Edition. We therefore used data from the Scopus database to compare the citation impact of articles in VCS with that of 29 other ecological journals. By calculating normalized citation rates per journal and publication year, we found that VCS started at the bottom of the rankings in the first two years (28th out of 30) but improved to 26th in 2022 and 14th in 2023. Together with the known time lag and the strong positive relationships between the different citation metrics, this allows a projection of the future development of the CiteScores and, after inclusion in the Web of Science, the Journal Impact Factor (JIF). Using the Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI) from the Scopus database, we identified the top 12 out of 95 VCS articles published in the first four years that received more citations than expected for their age and field. We also present the four Editors’ Choice papers of 2023, among which
Abbreviations: APC = article processing charge; IAVS = International Association for Vegetation Science; JIF = Journal Impact Factor; OA = open access; VCS = Vegetation Classification and Survey; WoS = Web of Science Core Edition.
article processing charge (APC), bibliometry, CiteScore, Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI), gold open access, high-impact paper, International Association for Vegetation Science (IAVS), normalized citation rate, publication trend, Scopus, vegetation classification, Web of Science
With this editorial, we start the fifth volume of Vegetation Classification and Survey (VCS), a gold open access journal of the International Association for Vegetation Science (IAVS). The fourth volume was successfully completed due to the efforts of Subject Editors, Linguistic Editors, reviewers, publisher and, of course, the authors. On this occasion we reflect on the challenges and constraints of the “gold open access” path and how we can deal with them. We assess the performance of VCS using bibliometric analyses in the context of general developments in the publishing landscape, both in terms of published papers and of citation rates. We use this information to make projections of the widely used journal-based citation metrics for VCS in the next few years. Further, we highlight the particularly well-cited articles that have been published since the start of the journal, present the Editors’ Choice papers of 2023, and provide an outlook for the new year.
VCS was founded as a gold open access (OA) journal, which means that authors must pay article processing charges (APCs) for the publication once a manuscript is accepted, while the content of the journal is freely available to everybody without payment. In the current publishing landscape, gold OA is essentially the only viable model for new journals as hardly any library or private person would pay for a new subscription journal because there is a strong tendency to reduce the number of existing subscriptions. We have previously argued that a diamond OA solution, where the publication is free for both authors and readers, would be advantageous (
For a new journal in a relatively narrow research field like VCS, authors are generally reluctant to submit papers to journals that are not yet included in the two major bibliometric databases, Web of Science and Scopus. If, in addition, they have to pay considerable APCs, while most other journals in the field (Journal of Vegetation Science, Applied Vegetation Science, Phytocoenologia, Tuexenia) are subscription journals without obligatory APCs and have a Journal Impact Factor (JIF; i.e. are included in the Web of Science Core Edition), this could diminish the willingness to submit manuscripts considerably. We are therefore very grateful that our mother organisation, the International Association for Vegetation Science (IAVS), waived the APCs for its members during the initial years. This generous support helped to attract good papers during the past four years, but it was always clear that these subsidies could not last forever, and ultimately IAVS expects VCS to generate some profit to be used for activities of the association, as do the two other IAVS journals, Journal of Vegetation Science and Applied Vegetation Science (
The fourth volume of VCS is the most content-rich so far. With 25 articles it equalised the previous maximum in 2021. However, as the articles were on average longer than in the first three years, the page number reached a new maximum of 360 (+ 16% compared to the previous maximum). After four years, VCS shows a non-significant positive trend, which contrasts with most other journals in the field (Table
Development of article numbers in 30 selected ecological journals over the past 10 years, including VCS (marked blue) and the two other IAVS journals (marked green). Likewise, the five years when Phytocoenologia was published in collaboration with IAVS are marked in green. The article numbers were taken from Web of Science (WoS) except for 2023 (databasing incomplete) and Tuexenia (data erroneous in several years). Data for journals or years within journals not covered by WoS were retrieved from Scopus. Data for VCS, Tuexenia and all journals in 2023 were taken from the respective journal website. Data extraction for the years until 2022 was done on 23 December 2023, that for 2023 on 8 January 2024. The change rates are based on an exponential regression model applied to all years as well as 2014–2020 and 2020–2023 separately, but considering only the years after foundation of a journal (i.e. without the NA’s). The table is sorted according to decreasing growth in the recent four years.
Journal | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | Annual change full period | Annual change until 2020 | Annual change since 2020 |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Diversity [MDPI] | NA | NA | 31 | 54 | 129 | 246 | 487 | 684 | 1141 | 1225 | 74.3% | 101.9% | 38.8% |
Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution | 79 | 151 | 155 | 166 | 238 | 503 | 499 | 1005 | 1315 | 1131 | 37.5% | 34.8% | 31.3% |
Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment | 346 | 303 | 498 | 360 | 378 | 286 | 322 | 457 | 386 | 420 | 1.5% | -2.1% | 6.5% |
Vegetation Classification and Survey | NA | NA | NA | NA | NA | NA | 22 | 25 | 23 | 25 | 3.0% | NA | 3.0% |
Nature Ecology and Evolution | NA | NA | NA | 354 | 344 | 308 | 317 | 278 | 293 | 326 | -2.4% | -4.3% | 1.4% |
Global Ecology and Biogeography | 137 | 137 | 134 | 127 | 126 | 189 | 178 | 187 | 167 | 184 | 4.4% | 5.0% | -0.1% |
Biodiversity and Conservation | 211 | 214 | 179 | 200 | 219 | 267 | 211 | 247 | 193 | 225 | 1.1% | 2.3% | -0.5% |
Journal of Biogeography | 203 | 219 | 213 | 257 | 234 | 275 | 230 | 203 | 207 | 224 | 0.0% | 3.4% | -0.6% |
Oikos | 162 | 178 | 187 | 179 | 167 | 185 | 161 | 220 | 168 | 170 | 0.4% | -0.2% | -1.1% |
Ecology and Evolution | 391 | 497 | 730 | 981 | 1081 | 1191 | 1156 | 1325 | 1179 | 1153 | 12.4% | 21.2% | -1.2% |
NeoBiota | NA | 17 | 24 | 24 | 19 | 62 | 84 | 73 | 56 | 88 | 23.8% | 35.4% | -1.2% |
Global Change Biology | 322 | 379 | 323 | 451 | 516 | 433 | 548 | 541 | 497 | 537 | 5.9% | 8.7% | -1.4% |
Biological Conservation | 332 | 417 | 371 | 425 | 434 | 402 | 449 | 449 | 325 | 466 | 1.4% | 3.6% | -2.1% |
Preslia | 21 | 18 | 16 | 12 | 16 | 14 | 16 | 14 | 16 | 14 | -2.6% | -4.6% | -2.6% |
Basic and Applied Ecology | 79 | 79 | 76 | 62 | 78 | 57 | 73 | 144 | 98 | 72 | 2.5% | -3.0% | -4.2% |
Plant Sociology | 23 | 10 | 11 | 41 | 10 | 13 | 15 | 17 | 13 | 14 | -1.9% | -3.0% | -4.6% |
Restoration Ecology | 103 | 113 | 111 | 129 | 172 | 214 | 239 | 272 | 227 | 214 | 11.5% | 16.4% | -5.0% |
Forest Ecology and Management | 556 | 455 | 606 | 611 | 625 | 736 | 696 | 1155 | 582 | 737 | 5.0% | 6.1% | -5.0% |
Hacquetia | 17 | 17 | 19 | 11 | 15 | 23 | 17 | 26 | 20 | 15 | 2.0% | 1.3% | -6.2% |
Ecography | 129 | 128 | 127 | 136 | 177 | 235 | 156 | 144 | 133 | 128 | 0.9% | 7.9% | -6.5% |
Plant Ecology | 130 | 131 | 128 | 106 | 119 | 97 | 110 | 110 | 74 | 99 | -4.3% | -4.1% | -6.9% |
Journal of Ecology | 159 | 157 | 166 | 167 | 200 | 284 | 246 | 245 | 222 | 183 | 4.4% | 10.0% | -9.4% |
Flora | 86 | 85 | 121 | 157 | 180 | 210 | 213 | 245 | 219 | 157 | 10.6% | 19.2% | -9.8% |
Applied Vegetation Science | 74 | 72 | 72 | 65 | 62 | 61 | 78 | 77 | 73 | 56 | -0.9% | -1.1% | -9.9% |
Alpine Botany | 19 | 14 | 16 | 17 | 17 | 17 | 15 | 32 | 16 | 13 | 0.4% | -0.9% | -10.6% |
Global Ecology and Conservation | 46 | 138 | 87 | 87 | 146 | 285 | 589 | 548 | 397 | 417 | 29.6% | 41.0% | -12.7% |
Folia Geobotanica | 33 | 36 | 31 | 36 | 32 | 24 | 23 | 21 | 23 | 12 | -9.1% | -6.4% | -17.0% |
Phytocoenologia | 17 | 23 | 28 | 26 | 29 | 22 | 16 | 8 | 11 | 6 | -12.8% | -0.8% | -23.1% |
Tuexenia | 25 | 21 | 23 | 26 | 26 | 20 | 30 | 23 | 16 | 14 | -4.1% | 2.1% | -23.3% |
Journal of Vegetation Science | 144 | 118 | 129 | 120 | 105 | 131 | 131 | 126 | 63 | 49 | -8.0% | -1.0% | -30.5% |
Total | 3844 | 4127 | 4612 | 5387 | 5894 | 6790 | 7327 | 8901 | 8153 | 8374 | 10.3% | 12.0% | 3.2% |
Mega-journals from MDPI and Frontiers | 79 | 151 | 186 | 220 | 367 | 749 | 986 | 1689 | 2456 | 2356 | 49.5% | 50.5% | 34.8% |
Other journals | 3765 | 3976 | 4426 | 5167 | 5527 | 6041 | 6341 | 7212 | 5697 | 6018 | 6.2% | 9.8% | -3.9% |
The sheer quantity of articles, of course, does not tell anything about the relevance of the published content. If one is to compare the relative position of a journal in the field, then journal-based citation metrics are needed, in particular the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) from the Web of Science Core Edition (WoS) and the CiteScore from the Scopus database. The challenge with this approach is that new journals get included in the relevant databases and thus receive the respective metrics only after a couple of years. The criteria for inclusion and the timeline are relatively transparent and straightforward in the case of Scopus, but not so much in the case of WoS. Before inclusion into the two main bibliometric databases, there were only the VCS profiles on Google Scholar (https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=de&user=XsKKBm0AAAAJ) and Research Gate (https://www.researchgate.net/journal/Vegetation-Classification-and-Survey-2683-0671) that delivered a rough idea which articles were cited and how often. Fortunately, in 2022 VCS was included in the Scopus database and thus received its first CiteScore2022 of 2.0 in summer 2023, with monthly updated CiteScoreTracker since then. However, it is unclear when the inclusion in the WoS will follow.
From communication with potential authors, we know that the lack of a JIF and the relatively low first CiteScore are major reasons not to select VCS as a publication outlet. The challenge is not only that JIF and CiteScore are not available at all in the initial years of a journal, but when they are finally published, they reflect the citation performance of articles several years back. For example, the JIF published in year x evaluates the papers published in years x – 3 and x – 2, the CiteScore refers to years x –1, x – 2, x – 3 and x – 4 and the CiteScoreTracker to the years x, x – 1, x – 2 and x – 3. As it is normal that with time the reputation of a journal grows and thus better articles can be attracted, the lag-phase of the usual bibliometric indices is a challenge. To overcome this, we used the Scopus database to assess the specific performance of articles of individual years, namely the initial four years of VCS, and compared them to that of the same 29 other ecological journals as above (Table
Citation rates of 30 selected ecological journals in 2023 for their content in the years 2020 to 2023. The values were extracted from the Scopus database (https://www.scopus.com/) on 23 December 2023, which could mean that the latest papers and citations in various journals were likely missed. Nonetheless, the effect on the normalized citation rate should be minimal. VCS is highlighted in blue and the two other IAVS journals in green. The citation rate is the ratio of received citations to the number of articles published. The normalized citation rate results from the division of the citation rate by the average citation rate of all articles of all 30 journals in that year. The annual trend in the last column is the slope of a linear regression applied to the normalized citation rates. The table is sorted by decreasing normalized citation rate for the articles of 2023. The underlying raw data (number of papers and citations to these per publication year) as well as further common citation metrics from Scopus and Web of Science are provided in Suppl. material
Journal | Citation rate 2023 for papers of… | Normalized citation rate 2023 for papers of… | Annual linear trend of normalized citation rate | ||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | ||
Global Change Biology | 14.48 | 12.62 | 9.20 | 2.50 | 2.40 | 2.65 | 2.76 | 2.82 | 0.14 |
Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment | 8.27 | 7.49 | 5.54 | 1.72 | 1.37 | 1.57 | 1.66 | 1.94 | 0.18 |
Nature Ecology & Evolution | 13.94 | 10.72 | 5.92 | 1.71 | 2.31 | 2.25 | 1.77 | 1.93 | -0.16 |
Ecology Letters | 11.86 | 8.17 | 7.43 | 1.26 | 1.97 | 1.72 | 2.23 | 1.41 | -0.11 |
Ecography | 7.65 | 6.79 | 4.98 | 1.13 | 1.27 | 1.43 | 1.49 | 1.27 | 0.01 |
Journal of Biogeography | 4.99 | 3.93 | 3.12 | 1.09 | 0.83 | 0.83 | 0.94 | 1.22 | 0.13 |
Global Ecology and Biogeography | 8.67 | 7.54 | 5.91 | 0.97 | 1.44 | 1.59 | 1.77 | 1.10 | -0.08 |
Biological Conservation | 7.11 | 5.77 | 4.02 | 0.96 | 1.18 | 1.21 | 1.20 | 1.09 | -0.03 |
Journal of Ecology | 7.01 | 6.38 | 4.99 | 0.95 | 1.16 | 1.34 | 1.50 | 1.07 | -0.01 |
Restoration Ecology | 5.35 | 4.26 | 2.91 | 0.93 | 0.89 | 0.90 | 0.87 | 1.04 | 0.04 |
Forest Ecology and Management | 4.67 | 4.35 | 3.39 | 0.85 | 0.77 | 0.91 | 1.02 | 0.96 | 0.06 |
Neobiota | 5.04 | 5.39 | 2.32 | 0.85 | 0.84 | 1.13 | 0.69 | 0.96 | -0.01 |
Alpine Botany | 2.40 | 4.00 | 1.68 | 0.76 | 0.40 | 0.84 | 0.50 | 0.86 | 0.11 |
Vegetation Classification and Survey | 1.27 | 0.92 | 1.14 | 0.76 | 0.21 | 0.19 | 0.34 | 0.86 | 0.21 |
Biodiversity and Conservation | 4.45 | 3.32 | 2.59 | 0.67 | 0.74 | 0.70 | 0.78 | 0.75 | 0.01 |
Basic and Applied Ecology | 5.27 | 3.61 | 2.75 | 0.67 | 0.87 | 0.76 | 0.82 | 0.75 | -0.03 |
Journal of Vegetation Science | 2.94 | 3.17 | 1.40 | 0.64 | 0.49 | 0.67 | 0.42 | 0.73 | 0.05 |
Diversity | 2.88 | 2.43 | 1.95 | 0.60 | 0.48 | 0.51 | 0.59 | 0.68 | 0.07 |
Hacquetia | 0.53 | 0.62 | 0.68 | 0.60 | 0.09 | 0.13 | 0.21 | 0.68 | 0.18 |
Preslia | 1.46 | 4.22 | 2.94 | 0.55 | 0.24 | 0.89 | 0.88 | 0.61 | 0.11 |
Global Ecology and Conservation | 5.61 | 4.21 | 3.07 | 0.54 | 0.93 | 0.89 | 0.92 | 0.61 | -0.09 |
Flora | 2.21 | 1.86 | 1.47 | 0.52 | 0.37 | 0.39 | 0.44 | 0.59 | 0.07 |
Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution | 4.06 | 3.14 | 1.77 | 0.51 | 0.67 | 0.66 | 0.53 | 0.57 | -0.04 |
Applied Vegetation Science | 4.09 | 2.87 | 1.64 | 0.42 | 0.68 | 0.60 | 0.49 | 0.47 | -0.07 |
Ecology and Evolution | 3.26 | 2.72 | 1.76 | 0.40 | 0.54 | 0.57 | 0.53 | 0.45 | -0.03 |
Plant Ecology | 1.95 | 2.07 | 1.98 | 0.37 | 0.32 | 0.43 | 0.59 | 0.42 | 0.04 |
Phytocoenologia | 1.69 | 0.89 | 0.45 | 0.33 | 0.28 | 0.19 | 0.14 | 0.38 | 0.02 |
Plant Sociology | 1.93 | 3.24 | 1.23 | 0.10 | 0.32 | 0.68 | 0.37 | 0.11 | -0.09 |
Folia Geobotanica | 1.44 | 1.80 | 0.81 | 0.00 | 0.24 | 0.38 | 0.24 | 0.00 | -0.09 |
Tuexenia | 1.07 | 1.17 | 0.14 | 0.00 | 0.18 | 0.25 | 0.04 | 0.00 | -0.07 |
All | 6.03 | 4.76 | 3.33 | 0.89 | 1.00 | 1.00 | 1.00 | 1.00 | 0.00 |
We found that the normalized citation rate of VCS was around 0.2 in the first two years, i.e. articles from 2020 and 2021 received only one fifth of the citations of average ecological papers (Table
Development of the normalized citation rate for selected ecological journals over the past four years. Citations refer to citations in any journal included in the Scopus database in the year 2023 to articles of the year on the x-axis in the given journal. Normalization was done over all articles published in the 30 journals of Table
We present the above analyses because we feel that normalized citation rates are meaningful measures by which to compare the citation impact of different journals, whether these measures be Web of Science’ Journal Citation Indicator (JCI), the Scopus’ Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) for multiple years, or our ad hoc normalized citation rate for individual years. Nonetheless, most researchers probably still rely on the “traditional” metrics, namely Web of Science’ Journal Impact Factor (JIF) and Scopus’ CiteScore. These metrics are all strongly correlated as they measure similar things, even though they vary in the number of citing journals considered, the years included in the calculations, and the delimitation of the subject fields. For example, the JIF2022 can be well predicted by a linear function of the CiteScore2022 for the 28 journals in our selection that were included in WoS (based on the numbers in Suppl. material
(1) JIF = –0.398 + 0.626 ∙ CiteScore (R2 = 0.968)
Taking this formula and VCS’ CiteScore of 2.0 in 2022, this would result in an approximate JIF2022 of 0.9 if VCS had been included in the WoS. As the values of the CiteScore2023 and JIF2023 to be released in summer 2024 are based on the citation performance of articles published 2020–2023 and 2021–2022, respectively, there is a solid basis for forecasts as the citation rates of the relevant articles are accessible. The CiteScoreTracker2023 provides one such estimate for the CiteScore2023 as it approaches this value asymptotically until summer 2024. For VCS the CiteScoreTracker stands at 2.4 as of December 2023. Inserting this value into formula (1) would result in a JIF2023 of 1.1 if VCS is included into WoS by summer 2024.
However, as discussed above, the citation metrics released in 2024 do not reflect where a journal stands in 2024, but where it stood a couple of years ago, which can make a big difference for journals that develop dynamically like VCS (see Table
(2) CiteScorex = 0.342 + 8.499 ∙ normalized citation ratex-2 (R2 = 0.922)
This means that the 2024 edition of the CiteScores/JIFs released in 2025 will be dominated by the quality of the papers published in 2022, and the 2025 edition released in 2026 by the papers from 2023. Applying our formulas (1) and (2), assuming that they are largely time-invariant, the normalized citation rates of VCS in 2022 and 2023 (0.34 and 0.86), yields the following predictions:
CiteScore2024, predicted = 3.2
CiteScore2025, predicted = 7.5
JIF 2024, predicted = 1.6
JIF 2025, predicted = 4.3
These predictions are of course associated with some errors due to the application of one or, in the case of JIF, even two regressions, albeit both R2 values are well above 0.9. However, being aware that the publications in the past are the sole source of the citation metrics in the future makes this whole exercise far less speculative than it might appear at first glance. We shall come back to these predictions in future editorials when we know the actual outcome.
Although it is possible to see which papers of VCS received the most citations to date in Scopus (https://www.scopus.com/sourceid/21101083451) and in Google Scholar (https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=de&user=XsKKBm0AAAAJ) based on their respective databases, a simple ranking would ignore that every article over time collects more and more citations. To find out which papers in VCS were cited above average thus requires a standardisation like the SNIPs for journals. In Scopus such values are called Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI) and are available for all papers. As in the case of SNIPs and our own normalized citation rates for journals, a FWCI value above 1 means above-average citation rate. Using this criterion, we selected the 12 out of the hitherto 95 published VCS articles that were cited more than average from the subject fields in which Scopus has placed VCS (namely “Agricultural and Biological Sciences (miscellaneous)”; “Plant Science”; “Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics”) (Table
The 12 articles in VCS that had been cited above average compared to the subject fields of VCS until December 2023 (based on the Scopus database; https://www.scopus.com). The table is sorted by decreasing Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI).
FWCI | Citations | VCS category | Citation | Year | Title |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
15.20 | 8 | VCS Methods |
|
2023 | Ecological Indicator Values for Europe (EIVE) 1.0 |
3.02 | 7 | Research Paper | 2022 | The vegetation of Chile and the EcoVeg approach in the context of the International Vegetation Classification project | |
2.28 | 18 | Research Paper |
|
2020 | The lowland seasonally dry subtropical forests in central Argentina: vegetation types and a call for conservation |
2.03 | 17 | Research Paper |
|
2020 | Classification of tall-forb vegetation in the Pamir-Alai and western Tian Shan Mountains (Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, Middle Asia) |
1.90 | 1 | VCS Methods | 2023 | Should we estimate plant cover in percent or on ordinal scales? | |
1.90 | 1 | Research Paper |
|
2023 | Plant diversity in traditional agroecosystems of North Morocco |
1.72 | 4 | Research Paper |
|
2022 | Vegetation classification of Stipa steppes in China, with reference to the International Vegetation Classification |
1.38 | 8 | VCS Methods | 2021 | Grassland with tradition: sampling across several scientific disciplines | |
1.29 | 4 | Review and Synthesis |
|
2022 | Climatic definitions of the world’s terrestrial biomes |
1.29 | 3 | Research Paper |
|
2022 | Plant diversity and structure in desert communities of the Andean piedmont in Ica, Peru |
1.26 | 12 | Forum Paper |
|
2020 | What is an alliance? |
1.01 | 8 | Research Paper | 2020 | Montane mire vegetation of the New England Tablelands Bioregion of Eastern Australia |
As in every year, to highlight outstand papers, we selected one Editors’ Choice paper per quarter and from these four papers, we selected one for the annual Editors’ Award (
The Editors’ Award 2023 goes to the Editors’ Choice paper of the fourth quarter by Ben and Marianne Strohbach. They provided a comprehensive syntaxonomic description of the Karstelveld vegetation in Namibia (
The Editors’ Choice of the first quarter went to Elvira Casagranda and Andrea Izquierdo. This article (
The Editors’ Choice of the second quarter went to Gonzalo Navarro and colleagues for their “Review and Synthesis” article in the same ongoing Special Collection “Neotropical vegetation” (
The Editors’ Choice of the third quarter went to Sebastián Zeballos and colleagues for another paper in the Special Collection “Neotropical Vegetation” (
The Editorial Board of VCS consists of the Chief Editors, the Associate Editors, the Guest Editors, the Linguistic Editors and the Editorial Review Board. While the Associate and Guest Editors manage the peer review of a paper and make the editorial decisions, the members of the Editorial Review Board are those experts from around the world who serve as the primary pool of reviewers. These members know the journal and are committed to it; thus, they usually provide better and faster reviews than external reviewers. We are happy to announce that as of 2024 we have appointed two new Associate Editors with broad expertise in Asia and Africa: Alireza Naqinezhad (University of Mazandaran, Babolsar, Iran) and Gaolathe Tsheboeng (University of Botswana, Gaborone, Botswana). They previously did and are still doing an excellent job as Guest Editors in one of our Special Collections. Further we appointed four new members to the Editorial Review Board: Angie Montenegro-Hoyos (University of La Serena, Chile), Cloe Xochitl Pérez Valladares (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico), Jean-Paul Theurillat (University of Geneva, Switzerland) and Denys Vynokurov (M.G. Kholodny Institute of Botany, Kyiv, Ukraine). Welcome to the team!
Starting a new OA journal within a narrow field of science remains a challenge, even after four years. However, we are doing quite well, thanks to the exciting manuscripts submitted by our authors, the great service provided by our dedicated Editorial Board, the financial support by IAVS and the technical support by our publisher Pensoft. Numbers of articles and pages show a positive trend – unlike the majority of ecological and particularly vegetation ecological journals. VCS has already been included in the Scopus bibliometric database in 2022 and received its first CiteScore in summer 2023. Projections based on annual normalized citation rates demonstrated that VCS is improving its relative position compared to other journals in the field – due to articles that attract above-average citations. We provided an overview of articles that are particularly used by other scientists, which might inspire potential authors how to write their articles if they wish to receive many citations. We hope to continue this road of success together with you and thus invite you to submit exciting manuscripts from the fields of vegetation classification and ecoinformatics – which is facilitated by the fact that during 2024, due to IAVS and our innovative APC pricing model, most authors can still publish for free or a very low fee if they are members of IAVS.
J.D. planned and drafted this editorial while all other authors revised and approved it.
We thank Don Faber-Langendoen for linguistic review.
We thank the following colleagues for their invaluable contribution as Linguistic Editors for VCS (number of edited papers in brackets):
Stephen Bell (2)
Don Faber-Langendoen (1)
Michael Glaser (4)
Jim Martin (2)
Meghan J. McNellie (3)
Hallie Seiler (3)
Lynda Weekes (2)
We thank the following colleagues who served during the last year (November 2022 – October 2023) as reviewers for VCS (number of reviews in brackets).
Erwin Bergmeier (2)
Idoia Biurrun (1)
Jorge Capelo (5)
Andraz Carni (2)
Victor Chepinoga (1)
Timo Conradi (3)
Romeo Di Pietro (1)
Federico Fernández-González (1)
Scott Franklin (2)
Antonio Galán de Mera (3)
François Gillet (2)
Joaquín Giménez de Azcárate (2)
Melisa A. Giorgis (1)
Riccardo Guarino (2)
Behlül Güler (1)
Rense Haveman (2)
Katarína Hegedüšová (1)
Florian Jansen (2)
Attila Lengyel (2)
Federico Luebert (1)
Isolda Luna-Vega (1)
Angie Montenegro Hoyos (1)
Alireza Naqinezhad (2)
Gonzalo Navarro-Sánchez (1)
Michael P. Nobis (1)
Jalil Noroozi (1)
Pavel Novák (1)
Bianca Ott Andrade (1)
Jens Pallas (1)
Cloe Peréz Valladares (1)
Rasmus Revermann (4)
Jan Roleček (1)
Simona Sarmati (1)
Ute Schmiedel (1)
Urban Šilc (1)
Sebastian Świerszcz (1)
Amir Talebi (2)
Jean Paul Theurillat (3)
Gaolathe Tsheboeng (3)
Kiril Vassilev (1)
Jose Alejandro Velazques Montes (1)
Denys Vynokurov (4)
Viktoria Wagner (2)
Wolfgang Willner (2)
David Zelený (1)
Publication and citation numbers, citation rates and normalized citation rates 2020–2023 as well as some current citation metrics from Scopus and Web of Science for the 30 ecological journals compared in this study (*.xlsx)