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Exploring the characteristics of special issues: distribution, topicality, and citation impact

  • Published: 21 May 2022
  • Volume 127 , pages 5233–5256, ( 2022 )

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topicality of the research

  • Ruhua Huang   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-4250-1914 1 , 2 ,
  • Yuting Huang   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-2444-4856 1 ,
  • Fan Qi   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-1342-3371 1 ,
  • Leyi Shi   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-4725-6807 1 ,
  • Baiyang Li   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-5490-373X 1 &
  • Wei Yu   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-9290-233X 1  

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Special issues are a unique mode of scholarly communication designed to highlight essential or emerging research themes through high-quality manuscripts. Special issues are increasingly becoming a fixture across a wide range of disciplines. Yet whether publishing special issues is necessarily a beneficial practice remains controversial. In this paper, we explore whether the actual effect of special issues meets the academic community’s expectations, which is to enhance citation impact and highlight important research topics. Our sample, which comprises all special issue articles in all disciplines published between 2008 and 2017, reveals that there has been a proliferation of special issues across countries, institutions, and journals, with some differences among the disciplines. Opportunities to appear in special issues are more given to countries/institutions that achieved the highest overall research output. The effectiveness of special issues in promoting academic development varies across disciplines and even across journals. Honing in on library and information science as a case area to explore citation impacts and the topic distribution of special issues, we find that many special issues present high-impact manuscripts, especially those of the less prominent journals. However, the issue of publishing low impact manuscripts through special issues also exists in many fields. Special issues are also more likely to publish interdisciplinary or cross-disciplinary articles and rarely discussed research themes compared to regular issues. Further, such topics are seldom explored on a large scale in the normal editions of the journal. To ensure the quality of the manuscripts, we recommend optimizing the procedures for selecting special issue topics and reviewing submissions.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Science Fund for Creative Research Group of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 71921002).

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School of Information Management, Wuhan University, Wuhan, Hubei, China

Ruhua Huang, Yuting Huang, Fan Qi, Leyi Shi, Baiyang Li & Wei Yu

Wuhan University Libraries, Wuhan University, Wuhan, Hubei, China

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Correspondence to Baiyang Li or Wei Yu .

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Huang, R., Huang, Y., Qi, F. et al. Exploring the characteristics of special issues: distribution, topicality, and citation impact. Scientometrics 127 , 5233–5256 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-022-04384-9

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Received : 09 April 2021

Accepted : 11 April 2022

Published : 21 May 2022

Issue Date : September 2022

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-022-04384-9

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