PLoS Pathogens

Our screening does not flag PLoS Pathogens. That is not a guarantee of quality — it means the venue is not on Beall's archive (frozen since 2017) and does not match our name-pattern heuristic. It is listed in DOAJ, Scopus, Web of Science, PubMed, which is a positive signal.

Per our venue index, PLoS Pathogens appears in: DOAJ, Scopus, Web of Science, PubMed. Index membership changes over time — confirm on the index's own site before relying on it.

Papers in PLoS Pathogens are cited about 5.4 times each within two years of publication, and Scimago places it in Q1, with an h-index of 321. Those are the open equivalents: the Clarivate Journal Impact Factor is a proprietary metric we neither compute nor license, so we show the two-year citation rate and Scimago quartile instead — they answer the same question of how heavily the journal is cited. A citation rate is a property of a field as much as of a journal.

In the Scimago Journal Rank 2025 edition, PLoS Pathogens is Q1 in all 6 of its subject categories. By category: Parasitology: Q1, #3 of 83; Virology: Q1, #10 of 88; Microbiology: Q1, #22 of 192; Immunology: Q1, #38 of 246; Genetics: Q1, #41 of 370; Molecular Biology: Q1, #66 of 425. Quartiles split the journals in a subject category into four equal groups by SJR, so Q1 is the most-cited quarter and Q4 the least; PLoS Pathogens is cited about 5.4 times per paper over two years, with an h-index of 321.

The Web of Science quartile comes from Clarivate's Journal Citation Reports (JCR), a proprietary product we neither license nor compute — so we cannot state a JCR quartile for PLoS Pathogens. The open equivalent is its Scimago quartile, Q1, derived from Scopus citation data. Because JCR ranks against Web of Science and Scimago against Scopus, the two can differ, so check Clarivate's site directly if you need the JCR quartile specifically.

Our index records its access status as "gold". Where this is derived from publisher-level signals rather than works-level data it is a heuristic, so confirm on the journal's own site — particularly if an article processing charge matters to you.

Article processing charge (APC): $3,165 per accepted article (DOAJ). Fee waivers are available. The exact charge can vary by article type and any fee waiver, so confirm the current amount on the journal's own site.

Submission to acceptance for PLoS Pathogens takes about 168 days (median) — Estimated from our library (n=55 papers). Treat it as indicative rather than a guarantee: editorial times vary by article type, reviewer availability and season, and a self-reported figure is the journal's own. We do not hold a peer-review acceptance rate for PLoS Pathogens.