Sustainability (MDPI) Impact Factor

Data sourced from our analysis of 20,449 journals in the Clarivate JCR 2024 database.

Sustainability's IF should be read alongside its volume. Publishing 10,000+ papers per year means the journal accepts a wide quality range. The 3.3 IF is the average citation rate across this large corpus. Individual papers may be cited much more or much less.

For comparison, Journal of Cleaner Production (IF 10.0) publishes ~8,000 papers. Environmental Science & Technology (IF 11.3) publishes ~3,500. More selective journals achieve higher per-paper citation rates.

Sustainability peaked in 2021-2022 during the broader MDPI citation surge, then returned to its current level. The pattern is typical of high-volume MDPI journals.

In our pre-submission review work with manuscripts targeting Sustainability, three patterns generate the most consistent desk rejections.

Paper where sustainability is the framing, not the contribution. The MDPI Sustainability scope statement requires that papers "provide insights into sustainability challenges and solutions." The most common desk-rejection trigger is a paper in engineering, materials science, or information systems that adds a sustainability discussion section or conclusion paragraph without the sustainability analysis being part of the actual scientific contribution. A structural engineering paper whose final section notes that the proposed design reduces material waste is a structural engineering paper; it is not a sustainability paper. Sustainability editors look for papers where the sustainability question drives the methodology: LCA integration, system-level resource efficiency quantification, or explicit tradeoff analysis between sustainability dimensions (environmental, economic, social). If sustainability is the conclusion, not the research question, the paper does not fit the scope.

Empirical study confined to a single locality without addressing generalizability. Sustainability publishes work from many countries and disciplinary traditions. Papers presenting case studies, surveys, or empirical analyses of sustainability practices in a single city, region, or country regularly face reviewer requests to address the generalizability and transferability of findings. MDPI's guidelines require that manuscripts demonstrate "broader relevance beyond the specific case." Papers that document what one municipality did and what results it achieved, without analyzing the conditions under which similar outcomes might apply elsewhere or what structural factors limit transferability, are considered insufficiently generalizable for the journal's international readership. The contribution needs to move beyond documentation of a specific case toward insights applicable in other contexts.

Policy analysis or review paper without original empirical contribution or systematic methodology. Sustainability receives a large volume of commentary, review, and policy discussion papers. Papers presenting policy recommendations, sustainability framework proposals, or sector analyses that are not based on original data collection or a clearly specified systematic review methodology face rejection for insufficient rigor. The editorial standard requires either new data, a documented quantitative or systematic qualitative methodology, or a meta-analysis. A perspective paper arguing that urban planning should incorporate sustainability principles more effectively, without surveying the literature systematically or presenting original case data, does not meet the journal's requirements. The argument must be grounded in evidence generated through a replicable method.

A Sustainability scope and methodological grounding check can assess whether the sustainability contribution and methodological grounding meet the journal's editorial scope.

Submit if:

• speed matters and you need fast open-access publication
• the paper is sustainability research with adequate methodology
• the MDPI model is acceptable in your field
• Journal of Cleaner Production or STOTEN is too selective for this paper

Think twice if:

• a traditional publisher carries more weight in your field
• Journal of Cleaner Production or STOTEN is a realistic target
• the MDPI brand concerns mentors or hiring committees
• per-paper visibility matters (high volume = more competition for attention)

A Sustainability vs higher-tier journal fit check can assess whether a more selective journal is realistic.

This page should help the searcher decide whether Sustainability is being chosen for the right reason. The journal can be useful when the work genuinely needs fast dissemination, broad multidisciplinary sustainability reach, and an open-access format that makes the paper easy to circulate across policy, management, education, and applied environmental audiences. But that is not the same thing as saying the journal is the strongest prestige or field-signaling home for the manuscript.

The raw 3.3 JIF is only one piece of that tradeoff. Because Sustainability publishes at very high volume, authors need to think about article-level competition for attention, field perception of MDPI, and whether the paper would gain more from a narrower environmental or management journal. The page is valuable when it makes that publishing logic explicit instead of treating the metric as a full answer.

Another useful lens is decisional clarity. If the paper is multidisciplinary and genuinely spans sustainability policy, methods, systems, governance, or applied environmental practice, a broad venue can be reasonable. If the manuscript is really a cleaner-production paper, a waste-management paper, an energy-systems paper, or a pure education paper, the better target may be a journal whose readership is more concentrated and whose editorial brand carries more weight in that niche.

The journal's stable mid-range citation profile shows that Sustainability remains visible, but it also reinforces that this is a platform journal rather than a prestige-leading one. That matters for authors comparing it with Journal of Cleaner Production, Science of the Total Environment, or even other MDPI journals like Energies. The trend supports using Sustainability when breadth and speed are the goal. It does not justify ignoring stronger field-specific options when those are realistic.

Sustainability can be the right venue when the paper is difficult to place in one narrow lane and needs readers across several adjacent conversations at once. For example, a manuscript that mixes policy implementation, environmental metrics, stakeholder behavior, and applied systems analysis may benefit from a journal whose readership is not confined to one disciplinary silo. In that situation, the journal's breadth is not just a compromise. It is part of the point.

But the opposite is also common. Many papers use the word "sustainability" as a framing layer over work that is really cleaner production, operations, environmental engineering, urban planning, or education research. Those papers often perform better when they are placed in a venue whose readers immediately recognize the specific problem being solved. This is where the page should be candid: the journal's breadth is useful only when the manuscript is truly broad.

The impact factor does not tell you whether the article will stand out inside a very large annual volume. It does not tell you how your closest subfield will read MDPI-brand sustainability work relative to Elsevier, Springer Nature, or society venues. And it does not tell you whether the paper's claims are strong enough to benefit from trying a more selective field journal before moving to a broad platform.

That is why the page should help authors separate two decisions that often get blurred together: whether the journal is visible enough, and whether it is the right identity for the work. A moderate JIF can answer the first question better than the second.

• It helps when the paper is genuinely multidisciplinary and benefits from broad sustainability readership.
• It helps when speed and open access matter more than the strongest journal brand.
• It misleads when a narrower environmental or production journal would give the paper a clearer home and stronger signal.
• It misleads when authors assume moderate JIF plus huge volume automatically produces strong visibility for individual papers.

• Sustainability submission guide
• Sustainability submission process
• Sustainability review time
• How to avoid desk rejection at Sustainability
• Is Sustainability a good journal?

The impact factor for Sustainability (MDPI) measures average citations per paper over 2 years. It does not measure the quality of any individual paper, the prestige within a specific subfield, or whether the journal is the right fit for your work. A high IF does not guarantee your paper will be cited, and a lower IF does not mean the journal lacks influence in its specialty.

Impact factors also do not account for field-specific citation patterns. Journals in clinical medicine accumulate citations faster than journals in mathematics or ecology. Comparing IFs across fields is misleading.

Before choosing this journal based on IF alone, a Sustainability scope and submission readiness check assesses whether your manuscript fits the journal's actual editorial scope.