Is Sensors (MDPI) Predatory? A Practical Verdict

Sensors was founded in 1996, making it one of MDPI's oldest and most established journals. It is indexed in SCIE (Q2 in Instruments and Instrumentation, Q2 in Chemistry Analytical, Q2 in Engineering Electrical and Electronic), Scopus (Q1-Q2), PubMed, and DOAJ. Its editorial board consists of approximately 300-500 real academics at real institutions.

Its Impact Factor is 3.5, CiteScore is 8.2, SJR is 0.764, h-index is 273. The APC is CHF 2,600 (approximately USD 2,900). Estimated acceptance rate is approximately 44%. MDPI's median submission-to-acceptance time is 37 days, with about one-third of papers having a turnaround of one month or less. For comparison, PLOS journals average around 200 days.

Clarivate delisted two MDPI journals (IJERPH and JRFM) in 2023 and suppressed some impact factors in 2024 for citation manipulation, but Sensors was not affected in either case. MDPI's overall retraction rate (2.01 per 10,000 publications) is actually lower than Springer Nature, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, and Elsevier. MDPI's self-citation rate of 14.85% across its portfolio is above average but not extreme.

SciRev (the crowdsourced peer review experience database) has dozens of reports for Sensors. The patterns are consistent and worth reading if you're considering submission.

Review turnaround clusters around 2-4 weeks. Most reports describe receiving 1-2 reviewer reports. This is where the concern gets concrete: multiple SciRev entries describe reviewer feedback that was 3-5 sentences long, a paragraph of general comments rather than the line-by-line technical engagement you'd expect from IEEE Sensors Journal or Measurement Science and Technology. Some authors report receiving a single reviewer report with a recommendation to accept and minor revisions, with the entire process taking under three weeks.

That doesn't mean every review at Sensors is shallow. Several SciRev reports describe thorough, multi-page reviews with specific technical questions. But the distribution is wider than at society journals. The best Sensors reviews match any journal in the field. The weakest ones read like someone skimmed the abstract and figures.

One pattern that appears repeatedly: authors who submitted to special issues report faster turnarounds and shorter reviewer comments than those who submitted to regular issues. This aligns with the concern that special issue guest editors sometimes prioritize filling the issue over maintaining consistent review depth.

This is the comparison most researchers are actually making when they ask "is Sensors predatory?" They're really asking: "Is Sensors good enough, or should I aim for IEEE Sensors Journal?"

IEEE Sensors Journal is the safer bet for career advancement in almost every context. It's a society journal backed by IEEE, it has Q1 standing, no reputational baggage, and committees never question it. The trade-off is real though: 3-6 months of review time versus 5 weeks, and a 25% acceptance rate versus 44%.

Sensors wins on speed, accessibility, and probability of acceptance. If you're a PhD student who needs a publication before a defense deadline, or a postdoc who needs to fill a gap in your CV before a job cycle, that speed difference matters. But if you have time and competitive work, IEEE Sensors Journal or Measurement Science and Technology (IOP) will serve you better in promotion and grant contexts.

The risk is the special issue model at scale.

In 2022, 88% of all MDPI articles appeared in special issues (since reduced to 55%). A Science investigation found that MDPI accounted for 87% of special issues where guest editors contributed more than a third of the papers. At one point, some MDPI journals were scheduled to publish more than 10 special issues per day. Guest editor self-publication rates dropped from 18.3% (2021) to 13.1% (2024), but 13% remains notably high.

At 7,000-10,000 articles per year, Sensors cannot maintain uniform editorial oversight across all papers. When a journal runs thousands of special issues simultaneously, the guest editors become the de facto gatekeepers, and their qualifications and incentives vary enormously. Papers in well-curated special issues can be excellent. Papers in poorly managed ones may not have received adequate scrutiny.

The 37-day median submission-to-acceptance is fast for sensor and instrumentation research that often requires evaluating hardware validation, signal processing methodology, and experimental calibration. Finland's JUFO downgrade to Level 0 means Finnish researchers earn minimal publication credit. The journal name tells you less than the paper's content, papers in Sensors range from genuinely excellent to mediocre, as is true of any journal publishing 7,000+ articles per year.

If you're a reviewer, reader, or hiring committee member evaluating a paper published in Sensors, don't dismiss it because of the publisher. Instead:

1. Check whether it was published in a regular issue or special issue
2. If a special issue, look up the guest editor, do they have real expertise in the topic, or is this a name you've never encountered in the field?
3. Read the acknowledgments for any mention of APC waivers or editorial invitations
4. Look at how many citations the paper has accumulated relative to the field average
5. Evaluate whether the methodology holds up on its own merits

Papers in Sensors range from genuinely excellent to mediocre. The same is true of papers in any journal that publishes 7,000+ articles per year. The publisher name is less informative than the paper's content and citation trajectory.

Sensors is not predatory. It has real indexing, real peer review, and a real editorial board built over nearly 30 years. The concerns about MDPI's special issue model, review speed, and guest editor practices are valid, but they describe a high-volume publishing model, not a fake one. Target regular issues when possible, vet guest editors if submitting to special issues, and know whether your institution or hiring committee views MDPI favorably or not.

MDPI publishes over 430 journals. Some are well-run. Some have had problems. Sensors, with its long track record, stable indexing, and consistent impact metrics, falls in the former category, even as the broader MDPI model draws ongoing scrutiny.

For the full picture on MDPI as a publisher, see our MDPI predatory assessment. To evaluate whether your manuscript fits Sensors or whether you should aim for IEEE Sensors Journal instead, try a manuscript readiness check.