Journal Metrics
DORA: The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment
Springer Nature is a signatory of the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA). Because small numbers of highly cited articles can have outsized influence on certain citation measures like the 2-year Journal Impact Factor (JIF) (see below for definition), Springer Nature believes that these citation measures are not necessarily measures of journal quality, and that authors and readers should consider a range of metrics when evaluating journals to read and publish in.
Article metrics such as number of downloads, citations and online attention are available from each article page, and provide an overview of the attention received by a paper.
Speed
- Submission to first editorial decision (median days): 11
- Submission to acceptance (median days): 137
Usage 2025
- Downloads: 170,962
- Altmetric mentions: 157
Definitions
The metric definitions below are shared by all Springer Nature journals.
Usage
Downloads
Downloads reflect the number of times full text or PDF versions of articles are accessed directly from the journal website and Springer Link. Downloads are defined as HTML, LookInside, PDF, and Epub clicks. Please note that this does not include article downloads from mirror databases such as PubMed Central. These download counts comply with the COUNTER5 standard. COUNTER5 is the fifth iteration of the “Code of Practice,” from Counter Metrics, which is a not-for-profit organization financially sustained by its global community of members, including libraries, consortia, publishers, aggregators, and technology providers.
Altmetric mentions
Total number of mentions (e.g. X, Facebook, Reddit, Blogs, News articles, Policy documents, and Faculty of 1000 reviews) for articles published in the specified timeframe, as provided by Altmetric.
