Megajournals a relatively new type of journal which publish online-only papers, and focus solely on scientific rigour and not the novelty or potential interest of the research. Two megajournals (PLOS One and Nature Scientific Reports) now dominate scientific publishing. This project will investigate whether and how these journals have changed scientific publishing, by building on methods we recently developed for related studies.

Students will need a strong background in Python programming, and preferably a demonstrated (e.g. via a GitHub account) familiarity with text and XML parsing using libraries like BeautifulSoup.