The editorial boards of scientific journals play a central role in the formal communication of the various branches of science. Their members select reviewers, oversee the evaluation of manuscripts, and make decisions that determine which works are suitable for publication and ultimately become part of the scientific literature.

For this reason, it is of great interest to understand their composition because these boards influence the direction and legitimization of scientific knowledge and may prioritize certain topics over others. For this reason, researchers at the Institute for Advanced Social Studies, part of the Spanish National Research Council, have conducted an analysis of 10,504 journals belonging to the four major commercial publishing groups: Elsevier, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley; three open-access platforms: MDPI, Frontiers, and PLOS; four publishers affiliated with scientific societies: ACS, AIP, IOP, and RSC; the Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press; and two other publishers with a significant international portfolio, De Gruyter and SAGE. “The rationale behind this selection was to combine the diversity of publishing models with the size of the portfolios, the consistency of the information, and technical feasibility. This is not a random sample of all scientific journals, but rather a selection designed to offer a broad, comparable, and international overview,” explained Evangelina Becerra-Rodero — a researcher at the Institute of Advanced Social Studies,Córdoba, Spain, and a doctoral candidate in the Doctoral Program in Sociology, Political Science, and Anthropology at the University of Córdoba — to Univadis Spain, part of the Medscape Professional Network.

The results were recently published in the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology.

The Study in Numbers

The selection of journals to be analyzed was based “on publishers, not individual journals, with the aim of representing different publishing models. To this end, it was essential that the publishers analyzed have a relatively broad portfolio of journals and present information about their editorial boards in a sufficiently uniform format within their own platforms. This allowed us to automate data collection, standardize positions, and work on a large scale without having to design a different procedure for each journal,” explained Becerra-Rodero.

The investigation into the composition and structure of these 10,504 journals led to the identification of 811,660 editorial positions. “It is important to note that we are talking about distinct positions, not distinct individuals, because the same person can serve on the editorial board of several journals,” explained Becerra-Rodero.

These 10,504 journals represent a significant portion of all existing scientific journals, although “it is difficult to determine what percentage of the total they represent because there is no universal census, and different databases apply different inclusion criteria. In our sample, 8968 journals — about 85% — were indexed in Scopus according to the information available in SCImago Journal Rank (SJR), a publicly available metric that evaluates the scientific prestige and influence of academic journals using citation data from the Scopus database. As a reference, Scopus includes more than 25,000 active journals. Therefore, the indexed journals in our sample would represent approximately one out of every three active journals included in Scopus,” continued Becerra-Rodero.

The Most Represented Subject Categories

The subject classification was derived from SJR data available for the indexed journals. Within this set, Medicine was the most represented subject category, accounting for approximately 19% of the journals — well above the next disciplines, Arts and Humanities and Social Sciences, both at around 9%.

If the scope is expanded to include the broader field of Health Sciences, the percentage rises to approximately 23%. In addition to Medicine, this area includes Health Professions, accounting for nearly 2% of all indexed journals; Dentistry, approximately 0.8%; Nursing, 0.7%; and Veterinary Medicine, around 0.3%. Therefore, nearly 1 in 4 of the journals classified belonged to the health field or to directly related fields.

Highly Hierarchical Structures

According to Becerra-Rodero, the study allows us to draw several main conclusions:

The first is that editorial boards are not merely honorary lists, but genuine working structures whose size is related to the volume of articles they manage. Generally speaking, as a journal’s output increases, so does the number of editors, although at a slower rate: a 10% increase in the number of articles is associated with, approximately, a 3% increase in editorial positions.

The second conclusion is that these structures are highly hierarchical. Most of the work falls on broad layers of review editors, board members, and associate editors, whereas positions at the top are very scarce. Among the positions whose roles could be classified, the most common categories are review editor (38.5%), general editorial board member (37.6%), and associate editor (21%), whereas editors-in-chief account for only 0.9% of the total.

The third conclusion is that access to these positions of influence does not reflect the diversity of the scientific community. Women account for only 33.2% of the positions for which gender could be identified. There is also a very strong geographic concentration centered on Western, primarily English-speaking countries, led by the US (28.03%), followed by the UK (7.68%), Italy (7.56%), and Germany (3.81%), while major scientific systems in Asia — such as those in China (10.95%), Japan (2.56%), and India (2.63%) — and other regions are underrepresented relative to their number of researchers. In this ranking, Spain ranks 7th with 3.42%.

Added to this is the almost exclusive dominance of the academic sphere: around 90% of affiliations are with universities, a proportion clearly higher than that of these institutions among those who publish research.

These results were as expected because “we anticipated finding gender inequalities and a geographic concentration in the US and Western Europe, although we were surprised by the magnitude of these gaps. However, what caught our attention most was an apparent paradox observed when comparing open-access platform publishers with traditional commercial or university publishers: open-access platforms have more international editorial boards and a lower concentration of editors from the US. However, this greater geographic diversity does not necessarily translate into greater gender equality: among editors whose gender could be identified, Frontiers, MDPI, and PLOS were among the publishers with the lowest representation of women. This shows that the different dimensions of diversity do not always advance together and that publishing in open access does not, by itself, guarantee more equitable editorial governance,” said Becerra-Rodero, elaborating on the results.

Overall, “the study made it possible to observe not only who serves on the editorial boards, but also how work, prestige, and decision-making power are distributed within them,” summarized Becerra-Rodero.

Gender Gap in High-Impact Journals

Although this study did not analyze gender inequality based on journal quartiles, Becerra-Rodero shared with Univadis Spain some findings from a new study currently under review that specifically examined gender inequalities: “If we consider only the positions for which gender could be identified, women account for approximately 35.3% in Q1 journals compared to 31.8% in Q2, 29.7% in Q3, and 30.2% in Q4. Therefore, journals in the first quartile have a somewhat more balanced composition, although the differences are moderate and there is no completely linear progression across the different quartiles. This relationship between gender and quartile is statistically significant, but its magnitude is small. The greater presence of women on the editorial boards of Q1 journals could be interpreted as an indication that high-impact journals pay more attention to diversity and inclusion policies or have more formalized selection procedures.”

Implications of the Results

The main implication of the lack of diversity on editorial boards is that they “may create blind spots in the evaluation of knowledge. When their members share similar career paths, academic networks, and contexts, they may more easily recognize certain topics, methodologies, or references, while research originating from other countries, institutions, or sectors may be less familiar to them, and they may be less inclined to publish it. This does not mean that deliberate exclusion necessarily exists, nor that we can attribute bias to every editorial decision, since our study did not analyze accepted or rejected manuscripts and, therefore, does not allow us to establish a causal relationship. However, homogeneity may limit the range of perspectives from which it is assessed which problems are relevant and which forms of knowledge production are considered legitimate.”

“For this reason, we believe that our results provide an empirical basis for future research into whether the imbalances detected translate into the diversity of authors, topics, and approaches that ultimately achieve scientific visibility,” reflected Becerra-Rodero.

A Snapshot of the Current State as a Starting Point

The results provide an overview of the state of editorial boards of scientific journals as of November 2023, when the data analyzed for this study were collected. However, Becerra-Rodero’s stated goal is to be able to track the future evolution of these boards: This article seeks to establish a baseline and the methodology so that the data collection can be repeated in the future. It also constitutes an initial general mapping and opens up several lines of research. The most advanced is an article currently under review that focuses specifically on gender distribution, in which we analyze not only the presence of women but also their access to executive positions, their relationship with female authorship and with journal impact factors, as well as differences by publisher, discipline, country, and quartile.

Another aspect we wish to study is whether certain characteristics of editorial boards are associated with retractions and the appearance of comments or alerts on PubPeer — always from an associative perspective and without attributing causality. Another line of research will involve reconstructing collaboration networks and instances of simultaneous membership on multiple boards, to determine the extent to which editorial influence is concentrated among certain researchers, institutions, or groups.

Finally, “we are interested in repeating the data collection to conduct a longitudinal analysis of changes and delve deeper into the profiles of those who hold executive positions: their career paths, affiliations, scientific output, and presence in various journals. The goal is to move beyond simply describing who serves on the boards to understanding how networks of editorial authority are constructed and evolve,” concluded Becerra-Rodero.

Becerra-Rodero stated that her work falls within the framework of the Generation D initiative, promoted by Red.es — an entity attached to the Ministry of Digital Transformation and Public Service — which aims to attract and retain talent through scholarships and training contracts, financed by the Recovery, Transformation, and Resilience Plan using the European Union’s Next Generation funds.

This story was translated from Univadis Spain, part of the Medscape Professional Network.