Editorial 2026
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Molecular Ecology (MEC) remains one of the most prominent and influential journals in ecology and evolution.In 2024, the journal published 341 citable items, placing it third among 53 journals in Clarivate's Evolutionary Biology category.Citation patterns show a similar trend: MEC received 37,985 citations, ranking fourth in the field.Google Scholar metrics also reflect the journal's influence, with an h5-index of 71-again positioning MEC fourth among evolution-focused journals.Despite these strengths, MEC, like other evolutionary biology journals (Figure 1), continues to experience a decline in impact factor, which fell to 3.9 in 2024.Although the journal still holds the eighth-highest impact factor in this category, this drop has been discouraging, particularly given recent efforts to increase the number of reviews and special issues published in the journal.The downward trend partly reflects changes in impact factor calculations as well as intensifying competition for highimpact submissions.This decline has motivated some of the proposed changes in the editorial board structure at MEC, which are described below.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.021 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.504 | 0.418 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".