When Does a Journal Stop Being a New Journal?

In my editorials, you may have often read my references to Parasitologia being a new journal—we only started in 2021—but at some point, we need to move on from this “honeymoon” description. Where are we now in 2025? To answer this, we need to reflect on some of the stages in the publication process.

Firstly, it takes time to build up trust in a new journal—the trust of authors, reviewers and, of course, our readers. While there is still much progress to be made, I think we are, in general, doing well now in developing a diverse, global community of authors. We are also covering a wide variety of representative parasitological topics and attracting interest, as measured by readership and citations. Finally, we are building up a community of great reviewers who provide appropriate and insightful evaluations, which is highly important for a quality review process. Another side of building a journal is the practical aspect of integrating it with indexing systems and organisations involved in the publication process. This can take time as journals need to be mature enough to satisfy rigorous inclusion criteria—we are partway through this process but not fully there yet. Importantly, in these processes, it takes time to develop a history of data which can be applied to citation rates and other metrics. Last year, we achieved the milestone of becoming indexed in Web of Science and Scopus and received our first CiteScore of 1.7. I am very pleased to announce that, this year, we have received our second CiteScore, which has significantly increased to 2.4. Just before we went to press with this editorial, we received the very exciting news that we have received our first Impact Factor. I am delighted to report that the Impact Factor for Parasitologia is 1.5 and the 5-Year Impact Factor is also 1.5, putting us into Q3 in the rankings of parasitology journals. This is a remarkable accomplishment, which is down to the efforts of the many reviewers of our papers, our Editorial Board and our team at MDPI who work hard to ensure our papers are published in a timely manner. It is also, of course, a tribute to the authors who have joined us in our journey by publishing with us.

As we transition away from being a new journal, we need to build upon these metrics, continue to aim for the publication of quality science and ensure that our open-access approach makes parasitology globally accessible. Our next goal will be to improve our visibility by aiming for indexing in other important databases, including PubMed, after which, we should well and truly join the ranks of established parasitology journals. I would like to thank you all as we emerge from the larval stages of our lifecycle as a journal.