In 13% of special issues produced by several major publishers over the past decade, the guest editor contributed more than one-third of the papers themselves, according to the study, posted on 12 January, 2026 as a preprint on arXiv.

Paolo Crosetto and his colleagues looked at the authorship of close to 1 million articles published across nearly 111,000 special issues by five publishers since 2015. Many of the articles appeared in journals published by MDPI and Frontiers, two for-profit, open-access publishers whose journals run large numbers of special issues and charge authors to publish in them. The researchers also included special issues in journals owned by the for-profit publishing giant Springer Nature, and the nonprofit Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A and B, which only publish special issues.

Overall, one in seven papers was authored by the special issue’s editor. And about 13% of the special issues surpassed the 33% PISS level. MDPI stood out by sheer volume, accounting for 87% of the issues that exceeded the PISS threshold. In about 1% of special issues, nearly all the papers were authored by the guest editor.

Source https://www.science.org/content/article/some-guest-editors-pack-special-issues-their-own-articles

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