When I was on the train yesterday I thought I’d pass the time by looking up some numbers to answer a question someone asked me after my seminar in Valencia. I thought the results were Quite Interesting so I thought I would share them here. Just for fun I worked out the average number of citations so far for all papers published in 2023 in the “leading” astrophysics journals:
| Journal | Mean citations per paper | Median citations per paper |
| ApJ | 6.2 | 3 |
| MNRAS | 6.9 | 4 |
| A&A | 7.7 | 4 |
| OJAp | 8.4 | 5 |
I suspect these numbers don’t turn out the way most people would have imagined! I don’t think you should infer too much from these figures because the window for citations is very narrow, but they do demonstrate that there’s no evidence that papers in the Open Journal of Astrophysics attract any less attention than those in more mainstream journals.
In the Dark 