Energies

About Energies

Energies — Journal Profile

Energies is a peer-reviewed, fully open access journal covering scientific research, technology development, engineering, policy and management studies across the whole field of energy. It is published online on a semimonthly schedule by MDPI AG of Basel, Switzerland, under the single electronic ISSN 1996-1073. The JournalsWorld record for this post (ID 2021, slug “energies”) carries exactly that ISSN, a Swiss country attribution and a publication history beginning in 2008, and those anchors match the publisher’s own journal pages and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) record checked for this profile. Because the one-word title is generic, identity matters here: this profile is about the MDPI journal identified by ISSN 1996-1073, launched in 2008, and not about any other periodical, magazine or conference series that uses the word “energy” or “energies” in its name.

MDPI describes the journal’s remit in deliberately broad terms: research on energy supply, conversion, dispatch and final use, together with work on the physical and chemical processes behind those technologies, and the engineering policy and management questions that surround them. In practice that breadth is organised into 41 topical sections, so an author is not submitting to an undifferentiated mega-journal so much as to a section community — for example a section on solar energy, on energy storage, on fuels, on energy economics, or on energy systems modelling — each with its own editors and reviewer pool. Understanding that structure is the single most useful thing a prospective author can do before submitting, because fit is judged first at section level.

Quick Facts

History and Development

Energies began publishing in 2008, in the first wave of MDPI’s expansion beyond its original chemistry titles into engineering and the environmental sciences. The timing is part of its story. The late 2000s saw research funding for renewable generation, energy efficiency and energy security grow sharply in Europe, North America and East Asia, and a fast, online-only, open access venue that accepted work from across the whole energy system — rather than only from one technology community — matched the way interdisciplinary energy projects were actually being funded and staffed. The journal grew with that funding landscape. What began as a general energy journal became, over the following decade and a half, one of the largest outlets in the field by article volume, organised into dozens of sections and hundreds of guest-edited special issues and topical collections.

That growth model deserves an honest explanation, because it shapes how the journal should be used. MDPI journals publish accepted articles continuously and rely heavily on special issues proposed and guest-edited by active researchers. For authors this produces speed and a very good chance of finding a collection whose theme matches their paper closely. For readers and evaluators it means quality and selectivity vary somewhat between sections and collections, so the reputation of an individual Energies paper rests more on its own citations, its section, and the standing of its editors than on the journal brand alone. This profile therefore reports the journal’s metrics with their sources attached, and advises readers in the sections below on how to interpret them rather than treating any single number as a verdict.

A second stage in the journal’s development was formal recognition by the major citation databases. Energies is indexed in Scopus and in the Science Citation Index Expanded, which is what allows it to carry a Journal Impact Factor at all, and it is listed in Ei Compendex and Inspec, the engineering databases that matter most to its technology readership. Its listing in RePEc is a smaller but telling detail: RePEc serves the economics community, and its presence reflects how much of the journal’s content is energy economics, policy and management research rather than laboratory science. Few energy journals genuinely span both worlds; Energies is one of the ones that tries to, and its section structure is the mechanism it uses.

Scope and Subject Coverage

The publisher’s own scope statement covers “scientific research, technology development, engineering policy and management studies related to the general field of energy,” from technologies of supply, conversion, dispatch and final use to the physical and chemical processes behind them. Translated into the questions authors actually ask, the journal’s coverage includes the following broad areas, which correspond closely to its topical sections.

• Energy generation technologies — solar photovoltaics and solar thermal, wind, hydro, geothermal, bioenergy and biomass, marine energy, and conventional and advanced thermal generation, including component-level and system-level studies.
• Energy conversion and storage — batteries and other electrochemical storage, hydrogen production, storage and use, fuel cells, power-to-X routes, thermal storage, and conversion processes in chemistry and chemical engineering.
• Power systems and grids — power system operation and planning, smart grids, microgrids, dispatch and forecasting, power electronics, electric vehicles and charging, and integration of variable renewables.
• Energy in buildings and industry — heating, cooling and ventilation, building energy performance, industrial process energy, waste-heat recovery, and demand-side management.
• Energy economics, policy and management — energy markets, pricing and regulation, energy policy analysis, energy security, business and management studies of the energy sector, and the social dimensions of energy transitions.
• Energy and the environment — life-cycle assessment, emissions and climate mitigation, carbon capture and use, resource efficiency, and environmental impacts of energy technologies.
• Fuels and combustion — fossil and alternative fuels, combustion science, engines and turbines, and emissions control.
• Methods work — modelling, simulation, optimisation, control, machine learning and data-driven methods, where the application is clearly an energy problem.

Two scope judgements follow from this. First, a purely theoretical paper with only a distant energy application is a weak fit: the journal expects the energy problem to be the subject of the paper, not a motivating sentence in its introduction. Second, the journal states that there is no restriction on paper length and that full experimental detail must be provided so results can be reproduced. Authors used to tight page limits elsewhere should take that seriously — Energies papers are often long, data-rich and heavily referenced, and reviewers for the journal do ask for the methodological detail that a shorter format would have forced out.

Article Types and Special Issues

The journal publishes regular research articles, review articles and communications, together with editorials and corrections in the normal way. Reviews are a substantial part of its identity: in a field moving as quickly as energy technology, well-structured reviews of a technology, a method or a policy area attract heavy readership, and the journal actively commissions and guest-edits review-led collections. Feature papers — substantial original articles submitted by invitation or on the recommendation of the scientific editors — and Editor’s Choice selections, chosen by the journal’s scientific editors from recent papers, are the journal’s own mechanisms for signalling work it considers especially strong, and both are useful reading lists for newcomers mapping a sub-field.

Special issues and MDPI “Topics” (cross-journal collections) account for a large share of submissions. The practical guidance is straightforward. A special issue with active guest editors in your exact niche usually means faster, better-matched reviewing and a ready-made audience of related papers published alongside yours. It also means you should check the guest editors’ own standing, the collection’s deadline discipline, and whether the papers already published in the collection are of the standard you want your work associated with. Submitting to the journal’s regular sections remains possible at any time and is the better route for work that does not map cleanly onto an open collection.

Peer Review and Editorial Process

DOAJ records the review model as single anonymous peer review, and MDPI describes the same single-anonymised process in its instructions: reviewers know the authors’ identities, authors do not know the reviewers’. Manuscripts pass an initial editorial pre-check for scope, basic quality and research-integrity screening — DOAJ records that the journal operates plagiarism detection — before being sent to reviewers, and section editors and guest editors manage review within their areas, under the oversight of the journal’s editorial office and editorial board, whose membership the publisher lists publicly on the journal’s editors page.

Speed is the journal’s most advertised editorial characteristic, and its published figures should be quoted as what they are: the publisher states that a first decision is provided approximately 16.7 days after submission, and that acceptance to publication takes about 3.5 days, giving these as median values for papers published in the journal in the first half of 2026. Those are publisher-reported medians for published papers, not guarantees for any individual manuscript, and they do not include the time authors take over revisions, which is where most real timelines are decided. Even allowing for that, the process is fast by the standards of energy journals, and authors choosing Energies for time-sensitive work — a conference-linked paper, a project deliverable, a thesis by publication — are usually doing so rationally. The corresponding duty is on the author: because turnaround is quick, a poorly prepared submission is also rejected or sent back quickly, and the publisher explicitly warns that papers should be well prepared, with good English and clear figures, before submission.

Open Access, Licensing and Charges

Energies is a fully open access journal. Every article is free to read on publication, is published under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence, and — as DOAJ records — authors retain copyright. That combination is the most permissive standard arrangement in scholarly publishing: readers may reuse text, figures and tables, including for commercial purposes, provided the original work is cited. For authors funded by agencies with open access mandates, CC BY publication in a Scopus- and SCIE-indexed journal normally satisfies the licence and indexing conditions of those mandates, although authors should always check the specific terms of their own grant.

The cost of that model falls on the author side. The article processing charge is CHF 2,600 for papers accepted after peer review, payable in several major currencies, with local tax added where applicable — the figure is stated on the publisher’s APC page and matches the maximum APC in the journal’s DOAJ record, which also records that there are no other submission or page charges. Discounts exist through MDPI’s Institutional Open Access Program, for members of the journal’s affiliated societies, and in the form of vouchers given to reviewers whose reports are timely and of high quality. The publisher also warns authors that only invoices issued directly by MDPI are valid and that no third party is authorised to collect its charges — a warning worth repeating in a profile, because imitation invoices targeting open access authors are a real and recurring fraud.

Metrics and How to Read Them

The headline metric published by MDPI is a Journal Impact Factor of 3.9 for 2025, with a five-year Impact Factor of 3.5 for the same year. The publisher also presents the journal as holding a Q1 ranking by CiteScore in the Control and Optimization category; CiteScore is a Scopus-based measure, and category quartiles of this kind are always category-specific — a journal of this breadth sits in several Scopus categories at once and will not hold the same quartile in each. The MDPI journal-cluster material published for its energy titles gives a CiteScore of 8.3 for Energies alongside its 2008 launch year and the same CHF 2,600 charge; that figure is presented here as a publisher-published value, and readers who need a CiteScore for a formal evaluation should confirm the current value directly in Scopus, since CiteScore is recalculated annually.

The bibliometric picture from OpenAlex, fetched directly for this profile from the OpenAlex source record for ISSN 1996-1073 (source S198098182), is of a very large journal: 65,160 works and 1,171,594 citations recorded, an OpenAlex h-index of 232, an i10-index of 32,066, and a two-year mean citedness of about 5.35. The JournalsWorld stored record for this post lists an h-index of 201, a figure of the kind produced from Scopus data of the SCImago type. The two h-index values do not contradict each other; they count different citation universes over different windows, and the gap between them is a good illustration of why an h-index should never be quoted without naming the database that produced it. What both sources agree on is the substantive point: this is a high-volume journal whose papers are cited at scale, and whose average citation performance is respectable for applied energy research without being that of a small, highly selective review title.

Used properly, these numbers answer a narrow question — whether the journal is a visible, indexed, regularly cited venue in its field — and they answer it clearly in the affirmative. They do not answer the questions that actually decide individual careers: whether a particular paper will be read by the right specialists, whether an institution’s evaluation rules credit this journal at a particular level, or whether a given national assessment exercise treats MDPI titles in a particular way. Those rules differ by country and institution and change over time; they are not published by the journal, so they are not stated in this profile, and checking them locally is the author’s responsibility.

Who Publishes Here, and Who Reads It

The journal’s authorship is international and engineering-led, with strong representation from European and East Asian energy research groups — a pattern consistent with its Swiss publisher, its European affiliated societies, and the geography of public energy research funding. Its readership is the same community plus the policy and industry analysts who follow energy technology through open sources, which is precisely the audience that subscription barriers would otherwise exclude. OpenAlex topic data for the source record underlines the engineering centre of gravity: its largest topic clusters concern integrated energy systems optimisation and smart grid energy management, both squarely electrical and systems engineering subjects.

For a reader rather than an author, the practical way to use Energies is by section and collection rather than by browsing whole issues: a semimonthly journal of this size publishes far more than any individual can scan, but its sections, special issue pages and search filters divide that volume into communities of a manageable size, and its review articles are a genuinely efficient entry point into an unfamiliar energy sub-field.

Advantages and Limitations — an Honest Assessment

The strengths are structural. Genuine breadth across the energy system; full open access under CC BY with author copyright retention; indexing in the databases engineering evaluators actually check; fast, predictable editorial handling; a moderate charge by the standards of large commercial open access titles; and a section system that gives interdisciplinary work a home it often lacks at technology-specific journals — a paper that is half power systems and half economics has an obvious section here, and an obvious difficulty at most alternatives.

The limitations are the mirror image of the same structure. Volume is very high, so the journal’s brand carries less selectivity signal than a small journal’s would, and individual papers must earn their standing. Quality control depends on section and guest editors, so diligence about the specific collection you are joining matters more than usual. The charge, while mid-range, is a real barrier for unfunded authors, and the discount routes are worth exploring before rather than after acceptance. Finally, the speed of the process leaves little slack: incomplete methods, thin data presentation or careless referencing will be visible to reviewers immediately, and the journal’s expectation of full reproducible detail is enforced in review.

Submitting a Manuscript

Submissions are made through MDPI’s online submission system, after registering on the publisher’s website. Before submitting: confirm the section or collection that fits your paper and read several recent papers from it; prepare the manuscript to the journal’s instructions for authors, including its reference style and data expectations; check your funder’s open access conditions and your institution’s position on the charge and any institutional discount; and decide in advance how you will handle the data-availability and conflict-of-interest statements the publisher requires. Authors whose first language is not English can use the publisher’s paid language and figure editing services, but are not required to. Reviewers, in turn, are recruited from the same community, and timely, high-quality reviewing is rewarded with a discount voucher toward a future MDPI publication — a small but real part of how a journal operating at this speed maintains its reviewer pool.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Energies a legitimate, peer-reviewed journal? Yes. It is a peer-reviewed journal published by MDPI since 2008, indexed in Scopus and the Science Citation Index Expanded, listed in DOAJ with a CC BY licence and author copyright retention, and identifiable by ISSN 1996-1073. Readers verifying any journal should check those independent listings rather than relying on the journal’s own claims, and this profile has been written from those listings wherever possible.

Is Energies open access? Yes, fully. All articles are free to read under a CC BY licence, funded by an article processing charge of CHF 2,600 charged after acceptance.

What is the journal’s Impact Factor? MDPI publishes a 2025 Journal Impact Factor of 3.9 and a five-year figure of 3.5. Treat these as year-stamped values that will be superseded at the next Journal Citation Reports release.

How fast is publication? The publisher reports median times of about 16.7 days to first decision and about 3.5 days from acceptance to publication for papers published in the first half of 2026. Individual manuscripts, especially those needing major revision, will take longer.

Does the journal publish policy and economics work, or only engineering? Both. Its scope statement explicitly includes engineering policy and management studies, it is listed in RePEc, and energy economics and policy form part of its section structure.

Can I publish a long paper or extensive supplementary data? The journal states there is no restriction on paper length and expects full experimental detail for reproducibility, which makes it suitable for data-rich work that would strain a page-limited journal.

Sources and Verification

This profile is anchored on the JournalsWorld record for post 2021 (title “Energies”, slug “energies”, ISSN 1996-1073, Switzerland, coverage from 2008, stored h-index 201) and verified against the publisher’s journal and article processing charge pages at mdpi.com, the DOAJ search API record for ISSN 1996-1073 (one result; CC BY; author retains copyright; single anonymous review; maximum APC CHF 2,600; English language), and a direct fetch of the OpenAlex source record S198098182 (65,160 works; 1,171,594 citations; h-index 232). One discrepancy is noted for transparency: the OpenAlex record carries an early first-publication year that precedes the journal’s documented 2008 launch, so the launch year in this profile follows the publisher and the JournalsWorld record, not OpenAlex. Where a figure is published by the publisher rather than by an independent database — the Impact Factor presentation, decision-time medians and CiteScore quartile claim — the text says so. Fields for which no official source was found are simply omitted rather than estimated.