Journals occasionally solicit manuscripts for special collections, in which all papers are focused on a particular topic within the journal’s scope. For the , there have been 51 special collections from 2005 through 2018, with a total of 981 papers out of the 8998 total papers in the journal over those years (11%). Taken together, the citations to these papers, as well as other metrics, are essentially the same as the non-special-collection papers. In late 2015 through early 2017, there was one grouping of special collections, Measurement Techniques in Solar and Space Physics (MTSSP) for particles, fields, optical, and ground-based instrumentation, with over 100 papers that were mostly Technical Reports: Methods papers (i.e., very few Research Article paper types). The MTSSP special collection papers have a significantly lower citation rate than the non-special-collection submissions published around the same time, but a higher download rate. Special collections papers omitting the MTSSP collections reveal a notably better citation rate and download rate than non-special-collection papers. In addition to higher citations, special collections also focus community attention on that particular research topic, providing a deadline for manuscript submissions and a single webpage at which many related papers are listed.