These data are associated with the study entitled "A critical analysis of plant science literature reveals ongoing inequities" by Rose A. Marks, Erik J. Amézquita, Sarah Percival, Alejandra Rougon-Cardoso, Claudia Chibici-Revneanu, Shandry M. Tebele, Jill M. Farrant, Daniel H. Chitwood, and Robert VanBuren published in PNAS, 2023. The data deposited here include 296,447 plant science papers published between 2000 to 2021 that were sourced from a representative set of 127 plant science journals based in 26 different nations across 5 continents, covering 21 different subspecialties. Both society and for-profit journals are included, with open access, hybrid, and subscription publishing models. 

We assembled a comprehensive database of plant science papers from 127 journals spanning a range of impact factors, nationalities, and sub-specialties (see Supplementary Table S1). We cross-referenced plant science journals listed in the Journal Citation Reports Database (https://jcr.clarivate.com) with a list of plant science journals compiled by the American Society of Plant Biology (https://plantae.org/plant-biology-journal-database/). We then filtered journals on the following criteria: (1) the journal must have an impact factor, (2) it must be plant-specific, and (3) it must include research articles. Metadata associated with research papers from the resulting 127 journals were included in the current study.

Metadata for all research articles published in this comprehensive set of plant science journals during the years 2000-2021 were downloaded from the Web of Science (WoS) using the batch download tool. For each paper, the downloaded metadata included the Author Full Names, Article Title, Author Keywords, Keywords Plus, Abstract, Addresses--all authors, Address--corresponding author, DOI, Email Addresses, Researcher IDs, ORCIDs, Funding Orgs, Funding Text, Cited Reference Count, Times Cited–All Databases, ISSN, eISSN, Open Access Designations, Quartile, Publication Year, Volume, Issue, IDS Number, UT (Unique WoS ID), and Pubmed ID. The resulting database was filtered to remove duplicate records, papers without a corresponding author, all book chapters, reviews, proceeding papers, and retracted papers. A total of 296,447 records were retained across all 127 journals. 

Other metadata were incorporated by referencing JCR and journal webpages, including the Journal Impact factor (2020), Publisher, Publisher City, Publisher Address, Journal location, Open Access options available, and Open access fees (USD). We consolidated open access designations into two categories for simplicity. Papers were scored as open access only if they were published gold open access. All other open access designations (e.g., green, bronze, etc.) were not considered open access. For more information about open access designations please see (https://clarivate.com/blog/a-researchers-complete-guide-to-open-access-papers/).

Continental divisions and country assignments were based on a sensible combination of subregions as designated by the United Nations Statistics Division (https://unstats.un.org/unsd/methodology/m49/). Income divisions were based on per capita Gross National Income (GNI) as reported by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs in June 2019 (World Economic Situation and Prospects). Data on national development indicators (e.g., Gross Domestic Product (GDP), per capita income, and research and development expenditure were taken from the World Bank 2019 database (https://databank.worldbank.org/source/world-development-indicators and https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/GB.XPD.RSDV.GD.ZS).