Agronomy

About Agronomy

Agronomy — Journal Profile

Agronomy is a peer-reviewed, fully open access scientific journal published by MDPI AG in Switzerland, covering research on agronomy and the related plant and soil sciences. Its single electronic ISSN is 2073-4395 — there is no print edition and no second ISSN — and that number, recorded on this JournalsWorld record and confirmed in the journal's record in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and in the OpenAlex source record resolved through the OpenAlex ISSN endpoint, is the anchor for everything in this profile. The journal was established in 2011, is published semimonthly in English, releases papers online immediately after acceptance, and exists, in its founding editor's original framing, to draw together researchers from diverse areas of agricultural research who share one aim: enhancing agricultural productivity globally.

One warning belongs at the very top of this profile, because it is the most consequential fact a reader, author or librarian can learn here. Agronomy is not Agronomy Journal. Agronomy Journal is the long-established journal of the American Society of Agronomy, published by Wiley, with print ISSN 0002-1962 and electronic ISSN 1435-0645, and it has its own separate, full profile on this site. The two titles share a field, a keyword and almost a name, and citations, metrics and submission invitations are routinely confused between them. A citation to one is not a citation to the other, an impact factor for one says nothing about the other, and a manuscript sent to one has not been sent to the other. Whenever anything about this title matters — a tenure file, a reference list, a library order, a submission — check the ISSN: 2073-4395 is the MDPI journal profiled here.

At a Glance

Identity and History

Agronomy began in 2011 as part of the first generation of MDPI's broad-scope open access journals. Its founding editor-in-chief was Prof. Dr. Peter Langridge, whose opening editorial — "Agronomy — A Multidisciplinary and Open Access Journal", published as the first article of volume 1 in January 2011 — set the template the journal still follows: a multidisciplinary home for agricultural research, published openly, in as much experimental and methodical detail as the work requires, with papers released immediately after acceptance rather than held for an issue. Langridge led the journal from 2011 to 2024 — while also serving, from 2011 onward, as section editor-in-chief for crop breeding and genetics — and in 2024 the editor-in-chief role passed to Prof. Dr. Leslie A. Weston of Charles Sturt University, who had previously led the journal's weed science and weed management section from 2020 to 2024. MDPI's own journal history page records both appointments with their date ranges, and also preserves the journal's growth pattern: a founding core in 2011, then a steady addition of subject sections, each with its own section editor-in-chief, from 2018 onward — soil and plant nutrition, horticultural and floricultural crops, grassland and pasture science, farming sustainability, agricultural engineering, innovative cropping systems, water use and irrigation, plant-crop biology and biochemistry, pest and disease management, and weed science among them.

That section history is the journal's institutional biography in miniature. A journal that began as one broad title became, over a decade, a federation of specialist sections under a single ISSN and a single editorial standard — which is why its archive is simultaneously very large and very uneven in subject weight, a point the metrics section below quantifies from OpenAlex topic data. The older template text previously on this JournalsWorld page described the journal adequately in outline but gave no sense of this structure, and quoted an impact factor figure that this profile does not repeat, because it could not be verified against a named source and year in the fetches made for this batch; the metrics given here are each attributed to the system that produced them.

Growth in volume is the other half of the story. OpenAlex records more than twenty thousand works under this source — a remarkable count for a journal founded in 2011 — reflecting both the semimonthly schedule and the continuous-publication model in which accepted papers appear at once. Authors evaluating the journal should understand what that scale implies: this is a high-throughput journal with a large reviewer pool and a professional production system, and also a journal where a manuscript competes for editorial attention with a very large inflow, so the clarity of the fit between a paper and one of its named sections matters more, not less, than it would at a small quarterly.

Publisher and Publishing Model

MDPI AG, based in Basel, Switzerland, is the publisher of record — DOAJ gives the publisher name as MDPI AG and the publisher country as Switzerland (CH), and OpenAlex names the Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute as the source's host organisation with Switzerland as its country. The journal is fully open access: every article is free to read immediately on publication, published under the Creative Commons Attribution licence (CC BY), and DOAJ records that authors retain copyright, that the journal operates a waiver policy for its charges, and that it charges no other fees beyond its article processing charge. Articles carry DOIs — the journal's DOI stream runs under the 10.3390/agronomy prefix, visible in the founding editorial's own identifier, 10.3390/agronomy1010001 — and DOAJ records plagiarism detection, CLOCKSS preservation and a deposit policy registered with the Open Policy Finder service. Submission, review and production are handled through MDPI's online platform, and the journal's pages on that platform — its aims page, instructions for authors, editorial board listings and article processing charge page — are the governing documents for anything an author needs to act on; directory profiles, including this one, are summaries, not substitutes.

Scope and Subjects

The journal's scope, in its own presentation, is agronomy in the full sense: crop physiology, breeding and genetics; the chemistry, biology and genetics applied to agricultural crops; soil science and plant nutrition; horticultural and floricultural crops; grassland and pasture science; weed science; pest and disease management; water use, irrigation and water management; farming sustainability and innovative cropping systems; agricultural engineering; and the organic farming territory named among its DOAJ keywords. DOAJ classifies it under the Library of Congress heading for Agriculture in general and lists its keywords as crop breeding and genetics, organic farming, horticultural and floricultural crops, water management and agronomy itself. It publishes original research articles, reviews, communications and short notes.

OpenAlex's topic map of the published archive — from source S2738977497, resolved through the ISSN endpoint and fetched directly for this profile — shows where submissions have actually concentrated: agricultural science and fertilization is the largest grouping, followed by soil carbon and nitrogen dynamics, smart agriculture and artificial intelligence, plant stress responses and tolerance, genetics and plant breeding, and soil management and crop yield. Read together, the stated scope and the archive map tell an author two useful things. First, the journal's centre of gravity is the crop–soil–management system: how crops grow, how soils feed and hold them, and how management choices change yield, quality and environmental cost. Second, computational and sensing approaches to that system — the smart agriculture cluster — are now a major stream in their own right, not a novelty corner. A paper that speaks to one of the named sections, states its agronomic question plainly, and reports its experimental detail in full is the paper this journal was built to publish; the founding editorial's insistence on complete methodical detail remains a stated condition of publication, and agronomy papers live or die on exactly that detail — site, soil, season, cultivar, design, replication and statistics.

Editorial Process and Peer Review

DOAJ records the review model as single anonymous peer review. The journal is organised under an editor-in-chief, section editors-in-chief for each subject section, and a large international editorial board listed on the publisher's platform; MDPI's journal history page shows section leadership changing on documented dates — for example, the pest and disease management section passing to a new section editor-in-chief in 2026 — which is a further reason to read the current board pages rather than any printed list. DOAJ records an average publication time of six weeks for the journal, reflecting the continuous model: papers are not queued for an issue, so the interval the directory measures is essentially the review, revision and production interval. Authors should expect the practical consequences of a fast, high-volume system: an early editorial screening for scope and completeness, reviewer invitations issued quickly, revision deadlines that are real, and production that begins as soon as acceptance is recorded. Manuscripts that arrive without the journal's required statements, with methods too thin to reproduce, or with figures and tables that cannot carry the claims made for them will struggle at the first of those stages, before scientific review begins.

A note on fit is warranted for authors coming from neighbouring fields. Work on livestock, food processing, agricultural economics or rural policy occasionally appears in the agricultural literature near this journal's borders, but its sections are built around crops, soils and their management; a manuscript whose centre is animal science, food technology or farm business rather than the crop–soil system should be checked carefully against the current aims page, and its authors should be ready to explain, in the cover letter, which named section it belongs to and why. Conversely, field, greenhouse and laboratory work on crops — breeding, physiology, protection, nutrition, water, weeds — is the journal's home ground, across climates and production systems worldwide.

Metrics — Attributed Figures

The figures in this section come from the OpenAlex source record for this journal (source S2738977497), resolved through the OpenAlex ISSN endpoint for 2073-4395 and fetched in full for this profile, and they are quoted as at checking time because aggregator records are recalculated as works and citations accrue. OpenAlex recorded 20,515 works for the journal, cited 347,217 times in total, with an h-index of 170, an i10-index of 9,455 and a two-year mean citedness of about 5.33, and it marks the source as open access, as listed in DOAJ, and as a core source. One figure in that record must be handled with care: the source's first-publication year is given as 1987, which is an artefact of merged source data and is plainly wrong for a journal whose founding editorial is dated January 2011 and whose DOAJ record gives 2011 as the start of its open access publishing; this profile follows the documentary record — 2011 — and flags the aggregator date as unreliable rather than repeating it as history. That is the correct general posture toward all of these numbers: they are a fetched snapshot of one system's counting, valuable for scale and trajectory, and not interchangeable with the Journal Impact Factor, which is a Clarivate product with its own window and method. Authors who need a Journal Citation Reports figure for this journal should take it from Clarivate's current record or the publisher's current journal page, with its year attached, rather than from any directory — the figure previously shown in this record's template text is not repeated here precisely because it arrived without a source and year that could be re-verified for this batch.

What the verified figures do establish is scale and reach. Twenty thousand works in fifteen years, a citation total in the hundreds of thousands, and an h-index at the level OpenAlex records place Agronomy among the largest and most-cited titles in its field by volume — a different claim from a claim about per-article acceptance rates, and authors should hold the two apart when they decide where a career-significant paper belongs. For many working agronomists the operative facts are simpler: the journal is indexed and discoverable where agricultural researchers actually search, its papers are free to read everywhere including by extension services and practitioners without library subscriptions, and its sections map closely onto the structure of the discipline itself.

Indexing, Archiving and Discoverability

The journal's listing in the Directory of Open Access Journals was verified directly from the DOAJ search API for ISSN 2073-4395 for this profile; the record returns the title, publisher, licence, review model, archiving and charge details summarised above, in a single consistent entry. Secondary summaries of the journal's indexing — the journal's own indexing page is the authoritative version, and DOAJ links to it — report coverage in the Science Citation Index Expanded, in Scopus, and in ProQuest databases, alongside the DOAJ listing itself. OpenAlex indexes the title as a core source. Preservation is recorded by DOAJ as CLOCKSS, with the Swiss National Library also named, so the archive is held independently of the publisher's platform. Authors with a funder or institution that names a specific index should confirm the title's presence in that index at submission time; indexes revise their lists, and no profile can certify a future list.

Fees and Open Access Charges

All articles in Agronomy are published in full open access, and an article processing charge applies to papers accepted after peer review. DOAJ records the charge as a maximum of CHF 2,600 (Swiss francs), with the publisher's charge page as the governing document, and OpenAlex's price list for the source records the same CHF 2,600 figure — its dollar equivalent is shown there at checking time, but authors will be invoiced in the currency arrangements the publisher's current charge page describes, and should budget from that page rather than from any conversion in a directory. DOAJ records that the journal has a waiver policy and that there are no other charges beyond the APC — no submission fee, no page or colour charges of the kind print-era journals levied. Discount routes connected with institutional open access agreements exist within the publisher's programmes; whether a given author's institution participates is a fact to check on the publisher's site at submission, since participation lists change. The important planning point is timing: the charge falls due on acceptance, so authors without grant cover for open access fees should establish their position — waiver, institutional agreement, or personal payment — before they submit, not after review.

How to Submit

Submission is through MDPI's online system, reached from the journal's home on the publisher's platform. Read the current instructions for authors first — DOAJ links to them directly as the journal's governing author document — and prepare the manuscript to the publisher's template, with the ethics, data and conflict statements the instructions require. Agronomy-specific preparation matters more than formatting polish: give the experimental design completely, including site coordinates or a clear site description, soil characterisation, seasons and weather context where relevant, cultivars and materials with their provenance, treatments and replication, and the statistical methods in enough detail for another group to repeat the work — the founding editorial's demand for full experimental detail is still the journal's stated standard, and reviewers in this field ask for exactly those items. Name the section your paper belongs to, and write the cover note around the agronomic question and its practical or scientific consequence, not around the techniques alone. Reviews and communications follow the same platform route with their own article-type expectations. After acceptance, publication is immediate in the continuous model, so the accepted manuscript should be treated as effectively final: check names, affiliations, funding lines, data statements and figures at proof stage as if the paper were already public, because within days it will be.

Similar and Related Journals

The comparison that matters most is the one this profile opened with: Agronomy Journal (American Society of Agronomy / Wiley, ISSN 0002-1962 / 1435-0645) is a different, much older society journal with its own profile on this site, and authors choosing between the two are choosing between a society journal with a long print lineage and a born-open-access journal with a section structure and a processing charge — both legitimate, neither a substitute for the other. Within the same publisher's agricultural family, Agriculture (ISSN 2077-0472) covers the agricultural sciences more broadly, including livestock and rural systems, and Plants and Soil Systems serve plant science and soil science in greater specialisation. Beyond that family, working agronomists also weigh the field's society and commercial standards — titles such as Field Crops Research, European Journal of Agronomy, Crop Science and Plant and Soil — whose scopes overlap this journal's sections in different proportions. The practical advice is constant across all of these choices: match the paper to the readership that needs it, confirm the index coverage your institution requires, and count the full cost and licence terms of the open access route before submitting.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the ISSN of Agronomy?

Electronic ISSN 2073-4395. It is an online-only journal and has no print ISSN; the DOAJ and OpenAlex records for the title both carry this single identifier.

Is Agronomy the same journal as Agronomy Journal?

No. Agronomy is the MDPI open access journal founded in 2011 (ISSN 2073-4395). Agronomy Journal is the American Society of Agronomy's journal, published by Wiley (ISSN 0002-1962 / 1435-0645), with a history reaching back to the early twentieth century. They are different journals with different publishers, editors, histories and charges.

Who publishes Agronomy, and who edits it?

MDPI AG in Switzerland publishes it. MDPI's journal history page records Prof. Dr. Peter Langridge as founding editor-in-chief (2011–2024) and Prof. Dr. Leslie A. Weston as editor-in-chief from 2024.

What does it cost to publish in Agronomy?

An article processing charge of CHF 2,600 applies to accepted papers, per the DOAJ record for the journal and the price list in its OpenAlex source record. DOAJ records a waiver policy and no other charges; check the publisher's current charge page for currency, discount and agreement details.

What are Agronomy's metrics?

From the OpenAlex source record S2738977497 fetched for this profile: 20,515 works, 347,217 citations, h-index 170, i10-index 9,455 and two-year mean citedness of about 5.33, as at checking time. These are aggregator figures, not a Journal Impact Factor; take the current JCR figure from Clarivate or the publisher with its year.

Is Agronomy listed in DOAJ?

Yes — verified directly from the DOAJ search API for ISSN 2073-4395 during the research for this profile. The DOAJ record also confirms its CC BY licence, author copyright retention, single anonymous peer review and CLOCKSS preservation.

Sources and verification note: this profile is anchored to the JournalsWorld record for post 2679 (title Agronomy, slug agronomy, ISSN 2073-4395) and was checked against the DOAJ search API record for that ISSN, the OpenAlex source record resolved through the ISSN endpoint and fetched as source S2738977497, MDPI's journal history page for the title, the journal's founding editorial of January 2011, and the full JournalsWorld profile of Agronomy Journal (post 2457), whose own record confirms that 2073-4395 appears in its text only as a disambiguation reference to this different journal. Figures are attributed at checking time in October 2026; the OpenAlex first-publication year of 1987 for this source is an aggregator artefact and is not used as history here.