About Fungal Diversity

Fungal Diversity

Overview and identity

Fungal Diversity is an international, peer-reviewed journal of mycology — the scientific study of fungi — published from Kunming, in Yunnan Province, China, where it is the official journal of the Kunming Institute of Botany of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. It has been published since 1998 and covers the biodiversity, systematics and molecular phylogeny of fungi, including lichens. The journal carries the print ISSN 1560-2745 and the electronic ISSN 1878-9129, and it reaches its international readership through Springer's publishing platform, where it is listed as a journal of the Mushroom Research Foundation.

Few specialist journals anywhere combine so distinctive a profile: a title devoted to the taxonomy and diversity of one kingdom of life, edited from a botanical institute in south-western China, and ranked by citation measures among the most influential journals in its field. Its editor is Zhuliang Yang of the Kunming Institute of Botany, a specialist in the systematics of macrofungi, and its history is closely bound up with the mycologist Kevin D. Hyde, whose work and institutions shaped the journal's development and international network.

Origins and the Mushroom Research Foundation

The journal began publication in 1998, in a period when the scientific description of fungal diversity was being transformed by molecular methods. Traditional fungal taxonomy rested on morphology — the shapes and structures visible under the microscope — but DNA sequencing made it possible to test those classifications against evolutionary relationships, revealing that many familiar groupings were unnatural and that the true number of fungal species was far larger than the described fraction. A journal named Fungal Diversity, founded at that moment, positioned itself exactly where the field's energy was moving: the discovery, description and phylogenetic classification of fungi worldwide.

The journal's publishing home is the Mushroom Research Foundation, with publication services provided through Springer and BioAcademic Press. The foundation is associated with Kevin D. Hyde, who directed it and whose research groups in Thailand and China built much of the journal's author community. Hyde's extraordinarily prolific presence in the journal — one bibliometric listing credits him with well over a hundred papers in its pages — is a defining feature of its character, discussed in the assessment of its citation debate below. The journal's top publishing affiliations have included Mae Fah Luang University in Thailand and institutions of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, reflecting that dual geography.

The Kunming Institute of Botany and the 2015 agreement

The journal's present Chinese identity was formalised on 29 October 2015, when the Kunming Institute of Botany (KIB), Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the Mushroom Research Foundation signed a memorandum of understanding. Under the agreement the journal was leased to KIB for five years and became the institute's official journal, carrying the KIB logo on its front page, with KIB's Yang Zhuliang joining as editor-in-chief. The institute's account of the signing noted how far the journal's standing had already risen, its impact factor having climbed from 3.8 to 6.221 by that date — figures that would later be far exceeded.

Kunming is a fitting home. Yunnan Province is one of the world's great centres of fungal diversity, famous for its wild edible mushrooms and for the richness of its forests and mountains, and KIB is one of China's leading botanical research institutes, holding major collections and conducting systematic research on the region's plants and fungi. Some accounts date the journal's association with KIB to around 2011, before the formal 2015 memorandum; what the documented agreement establishes is the point at which Fungal Diversity formally became the institute's official journal, anchoring an internationally mobile title in a Chinese Academy of Sciences institution.

Scope: biodiversity, systematics and phylogeny

The journal publishes papers spanning all facets of mycology, with its stated coverage centred on biodiversity, systematics and molecular phylogeny, including lichens — organisms formed by symbiosis between fungi and photosynthetic partners, traditionally studied by mycologists. Biodiversity work documents which fungi exist, where they occur and how they are distributed; systematics names, describes and classifies them; molecular phylogeny reconstructs their evolutionary relationships from DNA sequence data and continually revises the classifications the other two activities produce.

The scale of the underlying subject justifies the journal's existence. Fungi are estimated to number in the millions of species — Hyde has put the undescribed total at three million or more taxa awaiting discovery — while only a small fraction have been formally described by science. Every described species requires a name, a diagnosis, illustrations, comparisons with relatives and, increasingly, DNA evidence of its position in the fungal tree of life. Journals that publish such taxonomic work are the registry offices of biodiversity science, and Fungal Diversity became one of the most active of them.

The Fungal Diversity Notes series

The journal's best-known feature is its long-running series of Fungal Diversity Notes: large collaborative papers, each describing and illustrating scores of fungal taxa at once, with morphological descriptions coupled to molecular phylogenetic analysis. A landmark instalment, Fungal Diversity Notes 1151–1276, described 126 taxa distributed across two phyla, Ascomycota and Basidiomycota, six classes, 24 orders and 55 families, the great majority of them novel to science. The Kunming Institute of Botany presented the study as filling gaps in fungal knowledge by coupling classical morphology with modern molecular data, and dedicated it to the Italian fungal collector Erio Camporesi.

The series format itself is significant. Rather than scattering descriptions of new species one paper at a time across many journals, the notes concentrate the work of a large international network of taxonomists into single, heavily illustrated reference papers that other researchers can use to identify fungi and place new finds. Successive instalments have numbered their taxa continuously into the thousands. For biodiversity science, whose raw material is exactly this kind of verified, illustrated, phylogenetically placed description, the series made Fungal Diversity a central working tool — and a heavily cited one.

Impact, rankings and citation record

By citation measures, Fungal Diversity stands at the top of mycology publishing. Springer's journal page reports a Journal Impact Factor of 24.8 for 2024, with a five-year impact factor of 28.3; the corresponding figure for 2022 was 20.3. Its h-index is recorded at 136, and its SCImago journal rank places it in the top tier across categories including ecology, evolution, plant science and mycology. The Kunming Institute of Botany has described it as the world's highest-impact-factor journal for fungal taxonomy — a status almost unheard of for a journal whose core business is describing new species.

The mechanics behind those numbers are visible in its contents. Long taxonomic papers in the Fungal Diversity Notes series each introduce dozens of new genera and species, and every subsequent identification or revision of those taxa cites the describing paper; a single notes instalment on taxa 111–252 accumulated hundreds of citations. Comprehensive outline and classification papers, which the whole field uses as reference points, amplify the effect. The result is a citation profile more typical of a leading review journal in a large biomedical field than of a taxonomy title, which is precisely why the journal attracts both admiration and scrutiny.

The editorial authorship and self-citation debate

A balanced profile must record the published criticism the journal has attracted. Bibliometric commentary examining its 2015 to 2020 contents found that, of 133 research articles published between January 2015 and April 2020, 62.4 per cent had at least one member of the journal's editorial board among their authors, and 51.1 per cent carried Kevin D. Hyde as an author; among its ten most prolific authors in that period, only two were not editorial board members. The same analysis reported very high journal self-citation, averaging over seventeen citations per article to other Fungal Diversity papers, and argued that such patterns inflate the impact factor.

Context matters in weighing that critique. Fungal taxonomy is a small, concentrated field, and its most productive research groups — Hyde's among them — naturally publish where their collaborators and their taxonomic series are based; a journal built around a named notes series will cite its own earlier instalments as a matter of scientific necessity, since new taxa must be compared with those previously described in the series. Readers should therefore hold both facts together: the journal's metrics are exceptional and genuinely reflect a central position in fungal systematics, and its concentration of editorial-board authorship and self-citation has been documented and debated in print. Neither fact cancels the other.

Indexing and publishing arrangements

The journal is abstracted and indexed across the standard international systems listed by its publisher, including Scopus, BIOSIS and agricultural and biological databases such as AGRICOLA, which together make its contents discoverable to researchers in mycology, botany, ecology and plant pathology worldwide. Publication through Springer's platform places it in the library licences and discovery services through which most institutional readers now reach journals, while the copyright line on its Springer page names the Mushroom Research Foundation — a reminder of the unusual structure behind the title, in which a research foundation owns the journal, a Chinese Academy institute sponsors it, and a global commercial publisher produces and distributes it.

That three-part arrangement explains the journal's trajectory better than any single metric. The foundation supplied the editorial network and the taxonomic series; Kunming supplied institutional anchorage, an editor-in-chief and the authority of the Chinese Academy of Sciences; Springer supplied reach. Journals in taxonomy often struggle for visibility because their contents serve a small readership, but Fungal Diversity's structure gave it, from three directions at once, the community, the institution and the distribution that visibility requires.

Readership and scientific role

The journal's readers are mycologists and the scientists who depend on their work: plant pathologists identifying crop pathogens, ecologists inventorying soil and forest fungi, bioprospectors screening fungi for useful compounds, and conservation biologists documenting biodiversity before habitats change. For all of them, names and classifications are infrastructure: an ecological study or a quarantine decision is only as reliable as the identification behind it, and identifications rest on the descriptions and phylogenies that journals such as this one publish.

Its role in Chinese science is equally concrete. Anchored at Kunming, the journal connects China's exceptionally rich fungal flora — and the Chinese taxonomists who study it — to the international system of fungal classification, while bringing the work of that international system to publication under a Chinese institute's name. In a discipline where the map of life is still mostly blank, that two-way connection is real scientific work, not ceremony.

Assessment and continuing relevance

Assessed whole, Fungal Diversity is one of the most consequential taxonomy journals of its generation: published since 1998, official journal of the Kunming Institute of Botany since the 2015 agreement, edited by Zhuliang Yang, shaped throughout by Kevin D. Hyde and the Mushroom Research Foundation, and carrying a 2024 impact factor of 24.8 that no comparable mycology title matches. Its Fungal Diversity Notes have added thousands of documented taxa to the scientific record, each with the morphological and molecular evidence modern systematics requires.

The debate over its editorial concentration and self-citation belongs in its record, and has been included here, because a journal this central will inevitably be argued about. But the underlying need it serves is beyond argument: with millions of fungal species still undescribed, science needs venues that can publish rigorous fungal taxonomy at scale. From Kunming, Fungal Diversity remains the largest of those venues, and its continuing instalments are still extending the numbered catalogue of fungal life.