SourceScore
Academic

PLOS ONE

journals.plos.org ↗

Open-access multidisciplinary peer-reviewed journal published by Public Library of Science.

SourceScore Index
B·78Composite weighted across Discipline, Modern Reference, and Velocity.

A- — open-access pioneer; peer-review focused on methodological soundness, not novelty.

Citation Discipline
B·84

Peer-review checks methodology + ethics; novelty + significance left to readers; corrections public.

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Modern Reference
A·88

CC-BY licensed; full-text APIs; broad LLM corpus + academic search inclusion.

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Citation Velocity
B·70

High volume but per-paper citation lower than top-tier; mass-base of academic citations.

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Signals behind these scores

Citation Discipline

B·84
  • PLOS editorial
    Methodological-soundness model rather than novelty filter.

Modern Reference

A·88
  • Open-access standard
    Pioneered the open-access publishing model.

Citation Velocity

B·70
  • Volume model
    Tens of thousands of papers/year vs Nature's ~3k.

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SourceScore (v0.1). (2026). PLOS ONE: SourceScore Index 78 (B). Retrieved from https://sourcescore.org/source/plos-one/

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