The recent downgrading of Journal of Cleaner Production in the ABDC ranking, from A to C, has triggered a familiar explanation: too many papers. The raw numbers certainly make that reaction understandable.
Annual output rose from a few hundred papers a decade ago to well over four thousand in recent years. For many observers, volume became the story.
But volume alone is a blunt diagnosis. Plenty of journals have grown without collapsing in reputation. The more interesting question is why scale stopped working as a virtue and started functioning as a negative signal.
Over the past years there has been a series of conversations in cyberspace ranging from Journal of Cleaner Production tolerating plagiarism to retraction controversies.
Acacemic scholars concur that the degradation is a correct decision.
But what caused this fall from Journal of Cleaner Production to Journal of Mass Production?
1. Dilution of editorial coherence
In its earlier years, Journal of Cleaner Production had a relatively clear intellectual identity. It sat at the intersection of production systems, environmental impact, and operational improvement. Readers knew roughly what kind of paper belonged there and, just as importantly, what did not.
As the journal expanded, that boundary loosened. Today, the journal hosts work spanning engineering, policy, behavioural science, supply chains, consumer research, ESG reporting, psychology, agriculture, and governance. Individually, many of these papers are defensible. Collectively, they create a problem: the journal no longer communicates a clear centre of gravity.
Ranking bodies and senior scholars tend to penalise journals that feel like repositories rather than curators. When readers cannot easily articulate what a journal is “about”, they struggle to associate it with intellectual leadership. Over time, breadth starts to look like drift, not inclusivity.
The trajectory also points to a failure of editorial leadership, not in intent but in stewardship. Editors are custodians of a journal’s identity, selectivity, and long-term reputation. Allowing output to expand to several thousand papers a year without visibly tightening scope, rejection thresholds, or review governance signalled a loss of strategic control. Rather than actively shaping the field, editorial leadership appeared reactive to submission volume and publisher incentives. In ranking-driven environments, this is read as weakened gatekeeping. When editors stop drawing hard lines, the journal’s brand erodes, and responsibility for that erosion ultimately sits at the top.
2. Uneven review standards at scale
Running a journal that publishes several thousand papers a year is not just a logistical challenge; it is a governance challenge. Editorial decisions are necessarily decentralised across hundreds of associate editors and thousands of reviewers. Even with strong guidelines, consistency becomes fragile.
Small variations matter. One editor may desk-reject aggressively. Another may be more developmental. One reviewer panel may insist on deep theory and robustness. Another may focus mainly on novelty or context. None of this is malicious. But at scale, these variations accumulate into a reputation for unevenness.
Once authors begin to believe that acceptance depends heavily on who handles the paper, perceptions of lowered standards emerge, regardless of actual average quality. Rankings tend to respond to these perceptions rather than auditing individual review files.
The graph shows a striking and sustained rise in the number of papers published, moving from just 231 articles in 2011 to a peak of over 5,300 papers in 2021, before stabilising at a very high level above 4,400 papers per year. This growth did not happen gradually; it accelerated sharply after 2015, coinciding with the journal’s aggressive expansion in scope, special issues, and submission intake. While this scale-up increased visibility and throughput, it also introduced a classic quantity-over-quality problem. At such volumes, maintaining consistent editorial scrutiny, reviewer depth, and theoretical contribution becomes extremely difficult. The signal of selectivity weakens, average contribution becomes more uneven, and the journal begins to resemble a high-capacity outlet rather than a curated intellectual venue. In reputation-based systems like journal rankings, this kind of mass production is not interpreted as productivity, but as dilution, where growth itself becomes a negative quality signal rather than a strength.
3. Citation quality versus citation quantity
High publication volume often brings high total citations. On the surface, this looks positive. But modern journal evaluation looks beyond raw counts.
A large share of papers receiving very low citations, or citations concentrated within a narrow sustainability citation loop, weakens perceived influence. In other words, who cites the journal, and why, starts to matter more than how often it is cited.
When influence is diffuse rather than sharp, a journal can look busy without looking central. This is particularly damaging in ranking systems that rely on peer perception surveys, where senior academics draw on mental shortcuts rather than metric tables.
4. Special issues as a reputational risk multiplier
Special issues were a major growth engine for the journal. They attracted submissions, expanded networks, and allowed topical agility. But they also introduced structural risk.
Guest editors vary widely in experience, selectivity, and ambition. Some special issues are tightly curated and genuinely field-shaping. Others become loose collections of loosely connected papers responding to a fashionable keyword.
Readers rarely differentiate between “regular” and “special issue” quality when forming impressions. A few weak or repetitive special issues can disproportionately damage a journal’s reputation, because they are encountered as blocks rather than isolated papers. At scale, this effect compounds quickly.
5. Field-level saturation and fatigue
Sustainability research has grown explosively. With that growth has come repetition: similar models, recycled constructs, minor contextual tweaks, and limited theoretical advancement. This is not unique to one journal, but journals that publish at scale absorb more of this saturation.
When a journal becomes the primary outlet for incremental sustainability work, it inherits the field’s fatigue. Reviewers and readers start to associate the title with “more of the same”, even when genuinely strong papers are present.
In mature fields, journals are judged less on volume and more on their ability to filter, prioritise, and say no. Failure to do so signals declining gatekeeping power, which ranking bodies tend to interpret as declining quality.
Pulling it together
None of these factors alone explains the downgrade. Together, they form a coherent story. This is not a moral failure or a sudden collapse. It is a structural outcome of rapid growth in a reputation-based system.
For Elsevier, the challenge is not to defend past growth, but to demonstrate renewed editorial control. For authors, the lesson is that journal labels lag reality. And for other journals watching closely, the message is clear: expansion without curation is not neutral. It is a strategic choice with long-term reputational costs.
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