Introducing Country Statistics: Track the Geographic Reach of Your OJS Journal

Prove your journal’s international diversity to indexing bodies — with one plugin.

When applying to Web of Science, Scopus, DOAJ, or other prestigious indexes, there is one question that almost every journal faces:
How geographically diverse is your author base? Indexing committees look for evidence that a journal attracts contributors from a wide range of countries.
It signals international relevance, editorial quality, and scholarly impact beyond regional boundaries.

Until now, answering that question in OJS meant manually combing through submission records, building spreadsheets, and hoping you did not miss anyone.
We built Country Statistics to eliminate that entire process.

What Does Country Statistics Do?

Country Statistics is a free, open-source analytics plugin for OJS 3.3 that automatically analyzes your published submissions and shows you exactly where your authors come from —
visualized through interactive charts, detailed tables, and exportable data.

Once installed, a new Country Statistics menu item appears in the OJS management sidebar. Click it, and you are greeted with a full analytics dashboard:

Admin Dashboard — summary cards, bar chart, donut chart, and data tables

The dashboard provides four key metrics at a glance:

• Published Articles — total number of published articles in the journal
• Unique Authors — deduplicated author count across all publications
• Countries — number of distinct countries represented
• Top Country Share — the percentage held by the leading contributor country

Below the summary cards, a horizontal bar chart displays the top 12 contributing countries, while a donut chart breaks down the proportional author distribution.
Both update in real time as you change filters.

Smart Author Deduplication

A common challenge in author-country analysis is counting: if the same researcher has published five articles, should they count as five authors or one?
Country Statistics handles this with a configurable deduplication engine.

You choose the identification strategy:

• ORCID — the gold standard for unique researcher identification
• Email — useful when ORCID data is sparse
• Full Name — a simple fallback for legacy data

When ORCID is selected, you can also define a fallback chain for authors who lack an ORCID — for example, try email first, then full name.
This ensures the most accurate count possible regardless of your journal’s metadata completeness.

Plugin Settings — deduplication strategy, display format, public page options

Two Tabs, Two Perspectives

The data tables are organized under two tabs:

Authors by Country — shows how many unique authors come from each country, with percentage share and a visual distribution bar. This is the metric most indexing bodies care about.

Articles by Country — shows how many published articles are associated with each country (an article with authors from three countries counts once for each). This gives you the publication volume perspective.

Both tables are fully searchable. Type a country name, and the table filters instantly. Need the data outside OJS?
Hit the CSV button to export everything — UTF-8 encoded and ready for your spreadsheet or index application form.

A Public Page for Transparency

Beyond the admin dashboard, Country Statistics offers an optional public-facing statistics page.
When enabled, this page displays the same charts and tables (without admin controls) to anyone visiting your journal’s website.

Public Page — charts and tables visible to site visitors

Why make this data public? Because transparency builds trust. Prospective authors can see that your journal has genuine international reach.
Indexing committees can verify your claims directly. Readers can appreciate the diversity behind the research they are consuming.

The public page title is fully customizable — call it “International Reach,” “Global Contributors,” “Geographic Distribution,” or whatever suits your journal’s tone.
You can add it to any navigation menu through OJS’s built-in Navigation Menu system with a dedicated menu item type.

Flexible Filtering for Admins

The admin dashboard goes further with real-time filters:

• Time Range — view all-time data, or limit to the last 12 or 24 months
• Unique Strategy — switch between ORCID, email, or name-based counting on the fly to compare results
• Minimum Threshold — hide countries with fewer than N authors or articles to reduce noise

These filters let you generate exactly the dataset you need for different reports or application forms.

Why We Built It This Way

We deliberately designed Country Statistics with zero external dependencies. There are no CDN-hosted chart libraries, no API calls to third-party services, no npm packages to maintain.
Every chart is rendered using pure SVG. Every interaction runs on vanilla JavaScript.

This means:

• Fast load times — nothing to fetch from external servers
• No privacy concerns — no data leaves your server
• No maintenance burden — no library updates to track or security patches to worry about
• Broad compatibility — works in any modern browser without polyfills

The plugin also ships with English and Turkish translations, and adding more languages is straightforward through standard .po locale files.

Installation in Under a Minute

1. Download the latest .tar.gz from the GitHub releases page
2. In OJS, go to Settings → Website → Plugins → Upload A New Plugin
3. Upload the file and enable it under Generic Plugins

That is it. No database migrations, no configuration files to edit, no server dependencies to install.
The plugin reads your existing submission metadata and starts working immediately.

If you use our Bulk Plugin Manager, Country Statistics is automatically detected and can be installed
or updated directly from the plugin management interface.

Who Is This For?

• Journal Managers preparing index applications (Web of Science, Scopus, DOAJ) who need geographic diversity data
• Editors-in-Chief evaluating their journal’s international reach and identifying underrepresented regions
• Editorial Boards building strategic outreach plans based on contributor geography
• University Press Teams reporting publishing metrics to institutional stakeholders

If your journal publishes research and you care about where your authors come from, this plugin gives you the answer in seconds.

Open Source and Free

Country Statistics is released under the GNU General Public License v3.0. It is completely free to use, modify, and distribute.
The source code is available on GitHub.

• GitHub: ojs-services/ojs-country-stats
• Compatibility: OJS 3.3.x
• License: GPL v3.0

Have questions, found a bug, or want to request a feature? Open an issue on
GitHub
or reach out at [email protected].

We build tools that make OJS better for everyone. Stay tuned for more.

— OJS Services Team