International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health

About International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health

Key Facts at a Glance

• Journal: International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (IJERPH)
• ISSNs: electronic ISSN 1660-4601; print ISSN 1661-7827 (from the journal's print era; it is now published online only).
• Publisher: Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI), Basel, Switzerland.
• Coverage: 2004 to the present (founded 2004; SCImago coverage 2004–2026); published monthly online.
• Editor-in-Chief: Professor Paul R. Ward (Adelaide, Australia), in post since 2025. The founding editor-in-chief, Professor Paul B. Tchounwou, led the journal from 2004 to 2025 and remains Founding Editor.
• Access model: fully open access; article processing charge CHF 2,500 (MDPI).
• Headline metrics: no current Journal Impact Factor — Clarivate discontinued the journal's Web of Science coverage in February 2023 (see the indexing section, which every prospective author should read). Scopus CiteScore reported by MDPI as 9.8 for the latest round, top 5% in Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health. SCImago SJR 0.927 for 2025, Q1 in that category, H-index 256. OpenAlex counts 66,986 works and 1,837,609 citations.

Overview

The International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health — IJERPH, pronounced by its initials across the field — is one of the largest scholarly journals in the world by article volume, and one of the most debated. Published by MDPI of Basel, Switzerland, it is a transdisciplinary, peer-reviewed, fully open access journal covering global health, healthcare sciences, behavioural and mental health, infectious diseases, chronic diseases and disease prevention, exercise and health-related quality of life, and environmental health and environmental sciences. MDPI's own count on the journal home page stands at more than 66,700 articles published since 2004. Three learned societies are affiliated with the journal — the International Society Doctors for the Environment (ISDE), the Italian Society of Environmental Medicine (SIMA) and the Environmental Health Association of Québec (ASEQ-EHAQ) — and their members receive discounts on the article processing charge.

Any honest profile of this journal has to hold two things at once. It is a genuinely enormous, heavily used public health resource: its articles are indexed in PubMed and MEDLINE, it sits in the top 5% of its Scopus category by CiteScore according to its publisher, and its back catalogue is a working library for environmental and public health researchers on every continent. And it is a journal whose recent history includes a public rupture with Clarivate, which removed it from the Web of Science in 2023 for publishing content judged outside its scope — a decision MDPI appealed and continues to dispute. Both facts belong in this profile, with sources, because authors deciding where to submit need the second fact as much as the first.

History

IJERPH released its inaugural issue in 2004, founded and edited by Professor Paul B. Tchounwou, an environmental health scientist then building what became a two-decade tenure as editor-in-chief. MDPI's official journal history traces a steady early climb: publication was biannual at first, quarterly from 2006, and monthly from 2009. Indexing milestones came in sequence — PubMed in 2008 (applied retrospectively to volume 1), the Science Citation Index Expanded in 2009, a first impact factor of 1.605 reported in 2012, Scopus indexing in 2012 (again from volume 1), and the Social Sciences Citation Index in 2016. ISDE and SIMA became affiliated societies in 2017, the year the journal published its 5,000th paper. In 2019 the journal moved to a semimonthly schedule and passed its 10,000th paper; its impact factor, on MDPI's timeline, rose through 2.468 (2019), 2.849 (2020) and 3.390 (2021) to 4.614 in the 2022 reporting round.

Volume growth in those years was extraordinary. Contemporary reporting put the journal's output at more than 9,500 papers in 2020 and around 17,000 in 2022 — mega-journal scale, driven largely by its special issue programme — and OpenAlex's counts tell the same story, recording 17,453 works for 2022 alone. Then came the rupture. In its own news announcement of 22 March 2023, MDPI records that Clarivate discontinued coverage of IJERPH in the Web of Science as of 13 February 2023, finding that the journal failed the content relevance criterion because of publications deemed outside the journal's scope; MDPI states the decision was not about the quality of the publications, and that it formally appealed on 31 March 2023. The appeal did not restore coverage. In 2023 the journal refined its scope and specific aims, in 2024 it returned to a monthly schedule and marked its twentieth anniversary, and its section structure — which had grown to more than thirty sections — was consolidated: MDPI now presents the journal as published in seven topical sections. In 2025 Professor Paul R. Ward succeeded Tchounwou as editor-in-chief, with Tchounwou continuing as Founding Editor, and ASEQ-EHAQ joined the affiliated societies.

Scope and Subject Coverage

The journal's scope, in MDPI's current statement, is deliberately transdisciplinary: it aims to bring together scientific communities from the many disciplines that address health promotion, well-being and quality of life, and to broaden the perception of public health beyond its traditional boundaries to encompass the biological, social, environmental and behavioural determinants of health. Its concept of environmental research is explicitly not limited to the ecological perspective. The 2024 consolidation organised this breadth into a small set of sections — the 2024 round established Health Care Sciences; Behavioral and Mental Health; Infectious Diseases, Chronic Diseases, and Disease Prevention; Exercise and Health-Related Quality of Life; and Environmental Sciences, alongside the Environmental Health and Global Health sections whose editors are listed in MDPI's history — replacing the long tail of narrow sections built up during the expansion years.

OpenAlex's topic map of the journal's million-plus citing and cited literature shows where its centre of mass lies: physical activity and health; COVID-19 and mental health; air quality and health impacts; obesity, physical activity and diet; substance abuse treatment and outcomes; and smoking behaviour and cessation. SCImago classifies the journal under Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health (Medicine) and under Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis and Pollution (Environmental Science). In practical terms the journal will consider almost any study whose question touches environment, behaviour or population health — which is precisely the breadth that made the content relevance question of 2023 so consequential, and why its post-2023 scope statements deserve a careful read before submission.

Metrics and Standing

Begin with the absent metric, because it is the one authors most often assume. IJERPH has no current Journal Impact Factor and has had none since Clarivate's 2023 decision: a title outside the Web of Science Core Collection receives no impact factor, whatever its citation volume. Authors whose institutions, funders or national assessment systems require an impact factor title should treat that as settled and choose accordingly.

The metrics the journal does hold are strong. MDPI's journal history reports the Scopus CiteScore rising from 5.4 in the 2023 round to 7.3 in 2024, 8.5 in 2025 and 9.8 in the latest round, where it stands in the top 5% of the Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health category, and MDPI's home page summarises the current standing as CiteScore Q1 in that category. SCImago's independent series agrees on the direction: an SJR of 0.927 for 2025, up from 0.919 in 2024 and 0.808 in 2023, with a 2025 quartile of Q1 in Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health and Q2 in both Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis and Pollution. SCImago's H-index for the journal is 256 — the figure the Journals World record previously carried. OpenAlex, counting the widest document set, records 66,986 works and 1,837,609 citations (source S15239247), an H-index of 320, an i10-index of 43,221 and a two-year mean citedness of 3.91.

The output curve after 2022 is the other essential number set. OpenAlex records 17,453 works in 2022, then 6,464 in 2023, 1,708 in 2024 and 1,896 in 2025 — a deliberate contraction to roughly a tenth of peak volume, reflecting the scope refinement, the monthly schedule and a tighter editorial line under the current structure. Whether OpenAlex's recent-year counts slightly understate the true totals because of indexing lag, the strategic picture is unambiguous and is confirmed by MDPI's own announcements: the journal of 2026 is a much smaller, more tightly scoped title than the journal of 2022, publishing at a pace its publisher reports as a median of about 24 days from submission to first decision and 3.8 days from acceptance to publication for papers published in the first half of 2026.

Indexing and the 2023 Delisting

MDPI's current indexing statement for the journal lists Scopus, PubMed, MEDLINE, PMC, Embase, GEOBASE and CAPlus/SciFinder among its databases. That is a strong biomedical discoverability set, and it is current: this profile verified the list on the live journal home page in November 2026. The Directory of Open Access Journals, however, returned no listing for this journal when searched by its ISSN in this review — an absence worth noting for authors whose funders check DOAJ membership, and one readers should re-verify at the time they rely on it, since directory listings change.

The 2023 events, stated precisely and from the publisher's own record: Clarivate discontinued IJERPH's coverage in the Science Citation Index Expanded and the Social Sciences Citation Index as of February 2023, on the content relevance criterion, citing publications deemed outside the journal's scope; MDPI was informed on 15 March 2023 and appealed on 31 March 2023. More than fifty journals were removed in the same Clarivate round, most of them from another publisher entirely. Three practical consequences follow for authors. First, papers in IJERPH no longer accumulate Web of Science citations or contribute to an impact factor record. Second, some institutions and national systems issued guidance after 2023 about how publications in titles removed from the Core Collection are treated in assessment; the rules differ by country and employer, and only the author's own institution can answer for its policy. Third, none of this affects the journal's Scopus, PubMed or MEDLINE presence, which continue and which drive most clinical and public health discovery. This profile reports the episode in full because a directory that concealed it would fail its readers; it also reports that the journal's response was structural — scope refinement, section consolidation, volume contraction and an editor-in-chief succession — rather than merely rhetorical.

Editorial Leadership

Professor Paul R. Ward became editor-in-chief in 2025. Ward, an Australian public health scholar listed by MDPI with Adelaide University, has set out his programme in the journal itself, including guidance introducing a mandatory Highlights section for all articles submitted from December 2025 — a small but telling sign of an editor standardising article presentation across a huge author base. He works through the section editors-in-chief of the consolidated structure: among those MDPI lists in post from 2024 are Dr Zahid Ahmad Butt (Infectious Diseases, Chronic Diseases, and Disease Prevention), Professor Lingxin Chen (Environmental Sciences), Professor Jimmy T. Efird (Global Health), Professor Karl Goodkin (Behavioral and Mental Health), Dr Nicola Magnavita (Health Care Sciences) and Professor German Vicente-Rodríguez (Exercise and Health-Related Quality of Life), with Professor William A. Toscano holding the Environmental Health section since 2017. Professor Paul B. Tchounwou, who founded the journal in 2004 and edited it for twenty-one years, continues as Founding Editor-in-Chief.

Publishing Model and Charges

Everything IJERPH publishes is open access and free to read. MDPI's charge page for the journal sets the article processing charge at CHF 2,500 for papers accepted after peer review, payable in Swiss francs or in euros, US dollars, British pounds, Japanese yen or Canadian dollars, with local taxes added where applicable; invoices come only from MDPI itself. Discounts apply for authors at institutions in MDPI's Institutional Open Access Program and for members of the affiliated societies (ISDE, SIMA and ASEQ-EHAQ). There is no subscription route and no print edition in the journal's current model — the print ISSN in its record is a survival from its early years, when it appeared in print as well as online.

Author Guidance

Submission is through MDPI's online system, and the journal's reported medians — about 24 days to a first decision and under four days from acceptance to publication, for papers published in the first half of 2026 — describe one of the fastest full pipelines in scholarly publishing. Speed at that level means the initial editorial screening carries great weight: manuscripts should arrive well prepared, in good English with clear figures, as MDPI's charge page itself warns, because weaknesses that peer review might once have caught slowly can instead produce a quick rejection. From December 2025, articles must include the mandatory Highlights section the editor-in-chief has introduced. Authors should state their section fit explicitly — the consolidated seven-section structure is the journal's organising device, and a paper addressed to a named section's readership starts ahead of a paper addressed to public health in general.

The strategic guidance matters more than the mechanics. Choose this journal with your eyes open about its index profile: if your evaluation environment counts Scopus, PubMed and CiteScore standing, IJERPH offers a Q1 CiteScore category position, a top-5% category rank on its publisher's reporting, very large readership and rapid handling. If your environment requires a Web of Science impact factor title, this journal cannot currently meet that requirement, and no amount of citation volume changes it. Check your funder's open access conditions against the CHF 2,500 charge and any institutional agreement you may hold. Consider the special issue route carefully: special issues remain part of the journal's model and are led by guest editors, and a well-matched collection can bring focused readership; equally, the 2023 history means authors should satisfy themselves that the collection they join sits squarely inside the journal's refined scope. Finally, write for the journal as it now is — monthly, consolidated, scope-conscious — rather than for the mega-journal of 2022 that its own publisher has retired.

The Reset: Scope Refinement and the Ward Era

The journal's own account of its turning point is on the record. In a September 2023 editorial titled "A New Vision for IJERPH — A Transdisciplinary Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health", the founding editor told readers that the editorial board had met to review the journal's status, identify its strengths and weaknesses, and plan around three goals: refining the journal's scope and aims, improving scientific quality, and enhancing its reputation. He closed with a commitment to work to bring the journal back to Clarivate within two years. That return has not happened as of this profile's verification in November 2026, and authors should plan on the basis of the indexing position as it stands, not as it was hoped to become. But the structural promises were kept: the scope statement was refined in 2023, the thirty-plus section sprawl was consolidated in 2024, the schedule normalised to monthly, annual volume fell to roughly a tenth of its peak, and the editorship itself passed in 2025 from the founder to Professor Ward, whose early interventions — standardised article highlights, a consolidated section leadership — are those of an editor running a smaller, more deliberately curated journal.

What counts as in scope now follows from that reset. The journal's centre is the determinants of population health and the interventions that act on them: environmental exposures and their health effects; health behaviour and health promotion; infectious and chronic disease prevention at population level; healthcare sciences and delivery; exercise and health-related quality of life; and the mental health dimensions of all of these. Papers whose connection to health outcomes is remote — the category of content whose presence triggered the 2023 content relevance finding — face a materially higher bar than they did in the expansion years, and authors with a borderline case serve themselves best by arguing the health pathway explicitly, in the abstract, rather than leaving editors to infer it. Conversely, work squarely inside the consolidated sections meets a journal that is actively rebuilding its reputation on exactly that material, with a new editor, a two-decade archive, top-decile Scopus category standing and one of the largest readerships in public health. The mega-journal era made IJERPH famous and cost it its impact factor; the journal that has emerged from that era is the one this profile describes, and it is the one authors in 2026 are actually submitting to.

Sources and Verification

This profile was researched and verified on 4 November 2026 from: the journal's stored Journals World record (top matter: ISSNs 1660-4601 and 1661-7827); MDPI's live journal home page for IJERPH (scope statement, affiliated societies, indexing list, article count, turnaround medians, section structure); MDPI's official journal history page (founding, schedule and indexing milestones, impact factor and CiteScore timelines, section changes, editor-in-chief succession); MDPI's article processing charge page for the journal (CHF 2,500); MDPI's news announcement of 22 March 2023 on the discontinuation of Web of Science coverage and its appeal; SCImago's record (source 144989) for SJR, quartiles, categories, H-index and coverage; OpenAlex source S15239247 for work, citation and yearly output counts; and the DOAJ search API, which returned no listing for this journal's ISSN at the time of checking. Figures are attributed to their counting source wherever systems differ, and the impact factor figures quoted for 2012–2022 follow MDPI's own history timeline.