This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American
Scientific American‘s parent company, Macmillan Science & Education strives to be both a place where curious minds gather together to achieve great things for our customers–and where we can, working together as a company, be more than the sum of our parts. Scientific American serves science enthusiasts, scientists, business leaders, policy leaders, educators and students the world over.
I thought I might share how we think about that. So below are 15 things that you might not have known about Scientific American, its audiences, and the way we work with our corporate family to serve you all through our award-winning science coverage, books, textbooks, events and more. Members of our corporate family include the journal Nature, the Nature News team, and other Nature-branded journals; Macmillan Education (publisher of Scientific American-branded textbooks for non-majors on biology, psychology, and environmental science and a partner on the annual STEM Executive Summit); and Farrar, Straus & Giroux (publisher of our joint popular-science imprint series).
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Without further ado:
1.It’s not quite as old as Macmillan (1843), but Scientific American is the longest continuously published magazine in the United States, founded in 1845 by inventor and landscape painter Rufus Porter. It turns 170 in August 2015!
2.An early home for innovation, it included lists of patents as a weekly broadsheet for many years, and Scientific American founded the 1st branch of the U.S. patent agency, in 1850, helping to foster more than 100,000 inventions by 1900. We have 150,000+ articles about science and innovation in our digital archives.
3.Translated into 14 languages in international editions around the globe, today Scientific American has 3.5 million+ readers in print and tablet worldwide, has exceeded 7.24 million unique visitors a month online (40% outside the U.S.), and has a social reach exceeding 4 million. In October 2014, we launched Scientific American en Espanol on our site.
4.How big is that audience reach? Larger total U.S. audience than BusinessWeek, The Economist, The Atlantic or Wired. (Comparison audience-size figures from MRI Fall 2014.)
5.Scientific American Mind, which celebrated its 10th anniversary in 2014, is translated into six languages. It has a print circulation of 170,000 and a 550,000+ social reach. (And here are its archives.)
6.But Scientific American is not just for science enthusiasts in the general public. We broadcast the joy of discovery to all customers for Macmillan Science & Education. Let me tell you about some of them.
7. Researchers make up 5% of our audience, which is more than 139,000 scientist subscribers in the U.S. alone.
8.We help build the reputations of those scientists and celebrate their work both in our coverage by our award-winning journalists and in featuring those researchers as authors for our feature articles: 150+ Nobel laureates have written, collectively, 250+ articles for the magazine–often long before receiving their Nobel honors. (More in our press room.)
9.Scientific American‘s impact factor is 1.328, even though it does not publish original scientific journal articles (2013 figure).
10.In the multidisciplinary-sciences category for journals, Scientific American ranks 15 of 56.
11.Business leaders make up 45% of its audience (20% C-suite). It is in the top 20 magazines for business leaders. That is ahead of Money, Esquire, The New Yorker, Entrepreneur, Fortune and Forbes. (Source: MRI.) For professional learning, for instance, we offer courses in collaboration with NYU Poly.
12.It is #17 in professional/managerial for all 196 measured consumer titles. (Source: MRI.)
13.Policy leaders make up 21% of its audience, and it has more Beltway opinion leaders than Forbes, Wired, Harvard Business Review, BusinessWeek, Vanity Fair, Fortune, Barron’s and the LA Times. (Source: MRI.) Many such experts contribute essays to the Forum department online and in print.
14.It is #2 for influentials for all 196 measured consumer titles. (Source: Erdos & Morgan.)
15.Educators make up 14% of its audience, and it is #18 for education professionals for all 196 measured consumer titles. As a result, it is often used in classrooms. (Source: MRI.) To serve educators, parents and students, we have a number of Education initiatives.
