How Many Academic Journals Are There? What the Numbers Really Show

When I first wrote about this question in 2021, I gave a tidy answer: about 30,000 journals, growing by 5 to 7% a year. Five years and a closer look at the evidence later, that answer does not hold up, and neither does the idea of a single number.

The short answer

There is no single count of academic journals. Curated indexes list about 22,700 (Web of Science Core Collection) to 29,800 (Scopus) active journals. Ulrich’s, a long-running global directory of periodicals, recorded more than 48,000 active peer-reviewed journals in 2020–21. Thousands more, many of them in the Global South, sit outside these lists altogether.

So a fair answer is “more than 48,000 peer-reviewed journals, and likely more today”. The rest of this article explains why each source gives a different figure and what the gaps tell us.

Why the counts disagree

Every count of journals rests on four choices about what to include, and each source makes them differently.

• Active or ever published. Some databases keep journals that have ceased or been dropped. Delta Think counted about 121,700 journals that were active at some point between 2000 and 2021, which is a very different number from those publishing today.
• Peer-reviewed or simply scholarly. Directories label journals by what publishers report. A journal may call itself peer-reviewed without being checked.
• Curated index or open directory. Scopus and Web of Science admit journals only after an editorial evaluation, and they remove journals that slip. A directory such as Ulrich’s aims to list everything, so it is larger but less selective.
• English or all languages. Many counts concentrate on English-language journals, which miss much of the scholarship published in Indonesian, Spanish, Portuguese and many other languages.

None of these choices is wrong. They answer different questions. “How many journals are good enough to be indexed?” has a smaller answer than “How many journals exist?”, and both differ from “How many journals publish in English?”

What the main sources say

Journal counts range from about 23,000 to 48,000, depending on who is counting

Active journals by source. Sources overlap, so the counts cannot be added.

Scopus. Elsevier’s citation database covered 29,780 active peer-reviewed journals in January 2026, according to Elsevier’s own training materials. Scopus has an independent selection board and regularly drops titles that no longer meet its criteria.

Web of Science. Clarivate’s Core Collection, the set behind the Journal Impact Factor, covers more than 22,704 journals. The wider Web of Science platform, which adds regional and specialist indexes, covers more than 34,950 (Clarivate, September 2025). Figures quoted for “Web of Science” often mix the two, so check which one a source means.

Ulrich’s. This long-running directory of periodicals is the closest thing to a census. It listed 42,491 active, peer-reviewed scholarly journals in mid-2018, 33,119 of them in English (STM Report 2018). By 2020–21 it held records for more than 48,000, with over 35,000 in English (STM Global Brief 2021).

A 2025 extraction from Ulrichsweb returned 99,347 entries for active peer-reviewed scholarly journals (Nazarovets, Laakso and Taşkın, 2026). The researchers warn that the directory’s peer-review flag is unreliable, so this is best read as an upper bound, not a count.

The gap between the directory and the indexes is the most telling part of the picture. Ulrich’s 48,000 and Scopus’s 29,780 are about 18,000 apart. The counts come from different years, and not every Scopus title will appear in Ulrich’s, so the gap is not exact. Even so, a large share of peer-reviewed journals clearly sit outside the index most universities use to judge research.

The journals the indexes miss

The biggest blind spot in journal counts is not small or obscure journals. It is entire publishing systems that run outside the commercial indexes.

One study traced 25,671 journals using Open Journal Systems, the free platform many universities and societies use to run their journals (Quantitative Science Studies, 2023). Only 1.2% were indexed in Web of Science and 5.7% in Scopus. Most (79.9%) were based in the Global South, and 84.2% followed the diamond open access model, charging neither authors nor readers.

Universities are a large part of this story. A 2026 study identified 19,414 active peer-reviewed journals published by universities in 148 countries (Nazarovets, Laakso and Taşkın). Only 35.4% of them publish exclusively in English.

Having managed university journals, I have seen this first-hand. A well-run journal can serve its field for decades without ever entering Scopus or Web of Science. Who pays to keep these journals going is its own question, which I looked at in Who Pays When Open Access Is Free?, and indexing has its own politics (The Hidden Politics of Journal Indexing).

How fast the number is growing

Journals are growing slowly; articles are not. According to Ulrich’s data, the number of active peer-reviewed journals grew by an average of 2.3% a year from 2015, slowing to 1.1% in 2020 (STM Global Brief 2021). My 2021 estimate of 5 to 7% a year was too high.

If growth had continued at 1.1 to 2.3% a year from 48,000, the total in 2026 would be roughly 51,000 to 55,000. That is simple arithmetic, not a count, and no published source has confirmed it.

Articles tell a different story. The number of articles indexed in Scopus and Web of Science was about 47% higher in 2022 than in 2016 (Hanson et al., 2024). The same study links much of that growth to a few publishers expanding special issues and fast turnaround.

So the real expansion is in how much each journal publishes, not in how many journals exist. Much of that growth came from a small number of high-volume publishers. I look at the article side of the question in How Many Journal Articles Have Been Published? and Over 6 Million Research Articles Will Be Published in 2026.

Journals by discipline

Counting by discipline is harder than counting overall, because many journals cover more than one field. Clarivate’s own figures show the problem clearly. A 2022 Clarivate presentation counted 21,973 Web of Science journals: 14,144 in science, 7,375 in the social sciences and 3,340 in the arts and humanities (Clarivate via FECYT). Those parts add up to 24,859, nearly 2,900 more than the total, because some journals sit in more than one index.

Two patterns hold across sources:

• Science, technology and medicine dominate. In Web of Science, science journals outnumber arts and humanities journals by about four to one.
• The humanities are probably under-counted. Curated indexes hold relatively few humanities titles, and no source I found gives a reliable global count for the humanities alone. Treat any single humanities figure with caution.

This replaces two earlier articles on this site that estimated science and humanities journals separately. Those estimates did not share a definition, and together they exceeded the overall total.

Open access journals

The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) lists 23,672 journals from 142 countries, publishing in 92 languages (DOAJ, October 2026). Of these, 14,559 charge authors no publication fees. DOAJ includes only fully open access journals that pass its checks, so subscription journals with an open access option are not in this count.

Scopus, by comparison, covered 8,905 active open access journals in January 2026. The two lists overlap only partly, so neither figure can be read as a share of the totals above.

The growth is striking. DOAJ listed 10,091 journals in December 2014 (STM Report 2015), so its list has more than doubled in under 12 years.

Predatory journals

Any honest count of journals has to account for the ones that only pretend to be journals. Cabells’ Predatory Reports database listed 20,274 deceptive journals on 30 January 2026, up from 10,000 in 2019 and 15,000 in 2021 (Research Information). A journal is listed when it meets some of Cabells’ more than 70 criteria for deceptive practice.

For comparison, Cabells’ lists of journals it has verified as reputable cover more than 13,000 academic titles and more than 9,000 medical titles. These figures are not a measure of the whole market, because Cabells assesses only the journals it reviews. They do show that predatory titles are now numerous enough to distort any loose count of “journals”.

I estimated about 12,000 predatory journals in 2023 by applying a percentage to my old total. That method was weak, and Cabells’ direct count has replaced it. For the outlook, see How Many Predatory Journals Will We See in 2026?, and for how to judge a journal, How Many Academic Journals Can We Trust?

What this means for authors and editors

For an author choosing where to publish, the global total matters far less than three questions about the journal in front of you:

1. Is it indexed where your institution looks? Many universities and funders count only Scopus or Web of Science journals. With roughly 23,000 to 30,000 journals in those indexes, that still leaves plenty of choice, but check the current listing rather than the journal’s own claims.
2. Does its editorial practice hold up? Look for a named editorial board, a described peer review process, clear policies on fees and ethics, and a record of corrections and retractions.
3. Does your work fit its scope? In a field with hundreds of journals, fit matters more than prestige for getting reviewed fairly and read by the right people.

For editors, the numbers carry a different lesson. Being outside Scopus or Web of Science is the normal condition for a large share of peer-reviewed journals, not a mark of failure. Indexing is worth pursuing when your authors need it, and the criteria are public: see how journals get indexed in Scopus and Web of Science.

How these figures were compiled

Every figure in this article comes from a published source, with the date that source gives. Where sources disagree, I report each one rather than averaging them. I checked the DOAJ count on its website on 28 October 2026.

The Scopus figure comes from Elsevier’s training materials for libraries, because Elsevier’s public coverage page shows its numbers only as an image. Web of Science figures come from Clarivate’s coverage guide for librarians.

Sources

• Clarivate. Web of Science coverage, September 2025.
• Clarivate. Journal Citation Reports introduction (FECYT), 2022 figures.
• Directory of Open Access Journals. DOAJ in numbers, accessed 28 October 2026.
• Elsevier. Introduction to Scopus (KMITL), January 2026.
• Hanson, M. A., Gómez Barreiro, P., Crosetto, P. and Brockington, D. The strain on scientific publishing. Quantitative Science Studies 5(4), 2024.
• Nazarovets, M., Laakso, M. and Taşkın, Z. University journals in the global academic publishing landscape. Scientometrics, 2026.
• Recalibrating the scope of scholarly publishing: A modest step in a vast decolonization process. Quantitative Science Studies, 2023.
• Research Information. Cabells’ Predatory Reports database passes 20,000-journal milestone, February 2026.
• STM. The STM Report, fourth edition, 2015.
• STM. The STM Report, fifth edition, 2018.
• STM. STM Global Brief 2021: Economics and Market Size, 2021.
• Delta Think. Publishers and market consolidation (summary via infoDOCKET), 2022.

Update log

• October 2021: First published, with an estimate of about 30,000 journals.
• March 2024: Minor update.
• October 2026: Rewritten with current sources. This version replaces separate articles on journal numbers in 2025, science journals, humanities journals and open access journals, and corrects the 2021 growth estimate.