Journal impact factors for 2018 were recently announced by Clarivate Analytics in the June 2019 edition of Journal Citation Reports (JCR). In this editorial, I compared the impact factor of Systematic and Applied Acarology (SAA) with those of other main acarological journals as I did in Zhang (2017). Following Zhang (2018a), I also highlighted the top 10 SAA papers from 2016/2017 with the highest numbers of citations in 2018 (according to Journal Citation Reports June 2019 edition). In addition, I remarked on the increasing impact of developing countries and emerging markets in systematic and applied acarology, both in the number of publications and citations, and also includedannouncements of meetings on applied acarology.

SAA became the largest journal in acarology in 2016 (Zhang 2017) and continued to increase in 2017 (Zhang 2018b). In 2018, SAA reached a new height by publishing 185 items in 2,448 pages—14.9% increase over that in 2017 (161 items) in the number of published items and 7.7% over that in 2017 (2,272 pages) in the number of pages.

TABLE 1.

2018 impact factors (difference from that of last year), journal ranking and current article counts in four main acarological journals indexed in Journal Citation Reports (June 2019 edition).

Despite the continued increase of SAA in size in 2018, its impact factor also continued to increase, reaching 1.732 in 2018 (Table 1). This impact factor is the average citations in 2018 of papers (articles and reviews) published in 2016 and 2017; the top 10 papers (Table 2) account for 16.9% of the total citations (497) and have an average citation of 8.4. It is also interesting to note that (1) the first authors of all papers are from developing countries or emerging markets, and (2) eight of these papers concern predation of Tetranychus urticae by phytoseiid mites (Table 2).

Further analyses of top ten countries ranked by the number of publications in Systematic & Applied Acarology from 2016 to 2018 show dominance of developing countries or emerging markets, which accounted for 70 to 80 % of the top 10 and made of top 4 in all three years (Table 3). Among the developed countries, USA was no 5 in 2016, but dropped to no 6 in 2017 and 2018. These show the importance and increasing impact of developing countries and emerging markets in systematic and applied acarology.

TABLE 2.

Top 10 papers from 2016/2017 with the highest numbers of citations in Systematic and Applied Acarology in 2018 (according to Journal Citation Reports June 2019 edition).

TABLE 3.

Top 10 countries ranked by the number of publications in Systematic & Applied Acarology from 2016 to 2018. Data from Web of Science Core Collection (accessed on 25 June 2019).

Several meetings on applied acarology are forthcoming in the near future. The 7th meeting of the IOBC-WPRS Working Group "Integrated Control of Plant-Feeding Mites" will be held in Vienna during 16–19 September 2019. This IOBC meeting is organized by the Division of Plant Protection, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Austria. The 2rd meeting of the IOBC-APRS “Predatory Mites as Biological Agents Working Group” will be held during 16–19 October 2019 in Chongqing, China. This meeting is organized by IOBC-APRS, The Institute of Plant Protection, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, and College of Plant Protection, Southwest University. The IXth Congress of the European Association of Acarologists will be held during 13 to 17 July 2020 in Bari, Italy. The title of the congress is “Acarology 1.0 to 2.0: Progress in Changing Times” and the program will include key lectures delivered by top scientists aiming at showing the most recent developments of contemporary acarology (more info  https://euraac2020.com/).