Nature, Science, and PNAS -- Disciplinary profiles and impact

TL;DR

This study analyzes the disciplinary composition and impact factors of Nature, Science, and PNAS, revealing over-representation of biosciences and significant variation in field-specific impact factors across these prestigious journals.

Contribution

It introduces an automatic classification method for analyzing large-scale publication data to profile disciplinary representation and impact in top general science journals.

Findings

Bioscience, Astronomy, and Geosciences are over-represented in these journals.

Discipline-specific impact factors vary greatly, e.g., Nature's IF ranges from 18 to 46.

Publishing in these journals confers prestige across fields, with variations in impact.

Abstract

Nature, Science, and PNAS are the three most prestigious general-science journals, and Nature and Science are among the most influential journals overall, based on the journal Impact Factor (IF). In this paper we perform automatic classification of ~50,000 articles in these journals (published in the period 2005-2015) into 14 broad areas, to explore disciplinary profiles and to determine their field-specific IFs. We find that in all three journals the articles from Bioscience, Astronomy, and Geosciences are over-represented, with other areas being under-represented, some of them severely. Discipline-specific IFs in these journals vary greatly, for example, between 18 and 46 for Nature. We find that the areas that have the highest disciplinary IFs are not the ones that contribute the most articles. We also find that publishing articles in these three journals brings prestige for articles in all areas, but at different levels, the least being for Astronomy. Comparing field-specific IFs of Nature, Science and PNAS to other top journals in six largest areas (Bioscience, Medicine, Geosciences, Physics, Astronomy, and Chemistry) these three journals are always among the top seven journals, with Nature being at the very top for all fields except in Medicine.