News: Academic Publishing Weekly

2025's Highly Cited Researchers list, celebrating University Press Week, and the best AI tool hacks in the biz

Posted on November 14, 2025 in News

Clarivate Releases Highly Cited Researchers List

Clarivate published its Highly Cited Researchers List for 2025 this week. As in past years, the list identifies top performing papers, by citation, across the sciences and social sciences. This year, 6,868 researchers were designated with 7,131 Highly Cited Researcher awards (some researchers were awarded more than once) across 21 fields of study. Just over half of the individuals were recognized for papers that cut across several fields. The U.S topped the list with the most designations, accounting for 37 percent of the global total. Mainland China came in second with a 20 percent share, but the Chinese Academy of Sciences came in first with the most awards for an institution. Harvard University, Stanford University, Tsinghua University, and MIT rounded out the top five. According to Clarivate, 60 countries and regions are represented in the list, but only 10 of them account for 86 percent of the awards.

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Checking in on University Press Week

Now in its 14th year, AUPresses’ celebratory University Press Week is wrapping up today. AUPresses has a comprehensive news roundup of the event. This year’s theme is TeamUP (see what they did there?), which focuses on the collective strengths of university press publishers. Accordingly, Publishers Weekly checks in with several to see how publishing missions are faring in today’s extraordinarily contentious research and higher education environments. Notably, maybe even surprisingly, a number of university press directors said the administration’s attacks on research “are not their main concerns.” Rather, presses are keeping their eyes on the prize. “It’s only really by staying true to our values that we will all maintain our footing over the longer term,” says Erich van Rijn, executive director of the University of California Press, in the report. But that doesn’t mean they’re putting on the blinders. According to the article, Peter Berkery, AUPresses Executive Director, fears that federal cuts to research and higher education will have a “trickle-down effect” on university press budgets.

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Separating the Best from the Rest—AI Tools Edition

This week the chefs at The Scholarly Kitchen shared their favorite AI hacks—and which AI tools may be lacking. The chefs highlighted general tools like Grammarly (a quick “polishing hack”), ChatGPT (most useful for bouncing ideas or drafting projects), and Microsoft Copilot (helpful for its summarization features and formulas in Excel). Also spotlighting tools like CACTUS’s Paperpal and Google Analytics 4, the chefs dig into why they use certain products, with some seeing AI as a helpful aid to stay on track with work and personal tasks and others applauding it for its time-saving functions. But, of course, there was a fair share of bashing on AI tools, too, with some preferring not to use them all. (If anyone’s wondering, APW is not written by AI. No AI tool could recreate this magic!)

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What Are the Most Popular Nontraditional Research Outputs?

Digital Science’s Altmetric turned its quantifying eye toward repositories, releasing its list of the top 25 nontraditional research outputs (NTROs) of 2024. According to Altmetric the intention here is to foreground the growing role repositories are playing in measuring research impact. The emphasis is on resources that fall “outside the familiar formats of journal papers, book chapters, and conference proceedings,” says the company. “They include everything from policy evaluations and data visualizations to performances and digital exhibits.” NTROs are typically stored on platforms such as Figshare and Zenodo (CERN). Altmetric notes that with the growth of OA, institutional repositories are “no longer simply archives, they have become amplifiers.” Altmetric’s list measures repositories indexed by DataCite, filtering out journal articles. With a commanding Altmetric score of 2,345, Stanford’s custom repository platform topped the list for its report on “Identifying and Eliminating CSAM in Generative ML Training Data and Models.” A climate change report archived on Zenodo came in second with an Altmetric score of 710.

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Celebrating Open Access Growth and Awards

Springer Nature reported on its first nine months of 2025, sharing an optimistic outlook on open access growth. The publisher revealed that it signed 18 transformative agreements in the nine-month timespan, “bringing the total of transformative agreements in place to 84.” In addition, the publisher’s research segment grew by 7 percent to €1,112.6 million, “with particular strength in full open access (FOA).” Springer Nature also included overall revenue updates and within the book, print, and digital segments, along with an update on its AI tool Nature Research Assistant. Next, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) celebrated the winners of the 2025 ACLS Open Access Book Prize and Arcadia Open Access Publishing Award. Books from California, Washington, and Stanford university presses were honored in the four categories of Environmental Humanities, History, Literary Studies, and Multimodal.

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Data Is King: Reevaluating Impact Metrics and the Key to Publisher Success

Publishers Weekly covered a workshop lead by Y.S. Chi, chairman of Elsevier and director of RELX, from last week’s Sharjah Publishers Conference. Chi underscored the power of data, encouraging publishers of all sizes to invest in their data infrastructure, especially in today’s AI environment. Covering Elsevier’s strategical decisions in past years, Chi advised publishing leaders to recruit those from outside the publishing industry for strong leadership and innovation, in addition to balancing short- and long-term investments. Also on the topic of data, Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe and Heather Parkin for The Scholarly Kitchen investigated whether publishers are actually practicing what they preach when it comes to reevaluating impact metrics. Focusing on the placement and visibility of impact metrics on 12 major publisher platforms, Hinchliffe and Parkin found that the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) reigned supreme, as “the JIF still maintains a prominent place in how publishers present the impact of the content they publish.” However, they found considerable variation in the number of impact metrics publishers reported and their visibility, with metrics unique to certain publishers further complicating the investigation.

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