Reports reveal insights into the world’s leading journals – more than 9,000 quality journals from more than 3,000 publishers receive a Journal Impact Factor for the first time

London, U.K. June 28, 2023. Clarivate Plc (NYSE:CLVT), a global leader in connecting people and organizations to intelligence they can trust to transform their world, today released the 2023 update to its annual Journal Citation Reports™ (JCR™). This annual release identifies more than 21,500 high-quality academic journals from across 250+ scientific and research disciplines. Only journals that have met the rigorous quality standards for inclusion in the Web of Science™ index are selected, to ensure that users can confidently rely on the information and data provided to foster and support collective community goals to adhere to research integrity norms.

For nearly half a century, the information released in the annual Journal Citation Reports has been trusted by the global academic community as a reliable resource for identifying leading journals in their fields. It provides clarity of key citation impact trends, powered by a range of indicators, descriptive data and compelling visualizations, enabling meaningful comparisons and insights.

The annual reports incorporate a variety of metrics, including the widely recognized Journal Impact Factor™ (JIF™) and the Journal Citation Indicator. Clarivate advocates that journal editors and the wider scholarly community make use of the broad contextual information provided alongside the Journal Impact Factor to present a comprehensive view of a journal’s influence.

This year for the first time, all Web of Science Core Collection™ journals that passed the rigorous Web of Science quality criteria and were accepted before January 1, 2023, were eligible to receive a Journal Impact Factor. By expanding the JIF to the Arts and Humanities Citation Index™ (AHCI) and the multidisciplinary Emerging Sources Citation Index™ (ESCI), more than 9,000 journals from more than 3,000 publishers now have a JIF for the first time. This indicator helps the scholarly community more easily identify trustworthy, high-quality journals that have been selected by the Web of Science editorial team. Selection is only granted to journals that have met the 24 rigorous quality criteria applied on evaluation. Just 15% of journals evaluated by an in-house editorial team pass this high-quality bar.

Furthermore, the JCR 2023 release presents the JIF with one decimal place, rather than three. This move to one decimal place introduces more ties, which will encourage users to consider additional indicators and descriptive data when comparing journals. The Journal Citation Indicator – a normalized journal-level metric – is emphasized for easy interpretation and cross-disciplinary comparison.

Dr. Nandita Quaderi, Editor-in-Chief & Vice President of the Web of Science, Clarivate, said: “As part of our ongoing commitment to providing transformative intelligence and trusted content, all quality journals in the Web of Science Core Collection are now eligible for a Journal Impact Factor. The JIF was introduced in 1975 as a measure of scholarly impact and was restricted to journals in the sciences and social sciences. As fraudulent behavior has intensified in scholarly publishing, there is an increasing need for markers of trustworthiness. In this year’s JCR release we expand the JIF from only the most impactful science and social science journals to journals across all disciplines that have passed our rigorous quality evaluation. This means the JIF is now a reliable indicator of trustworthiness, as well as a measure of scholarly impact, at the journal level.”

Emmanuel Thiveaud, Senior Vice President for Research & Analytics, Academia & Government at Clarivate added: “Research integrity is crucial for ensuring the credibility, reliability and trustworthiness of the scientific and scholarly record. It is of paramount importance to us at Clarivate that our data in the Web of Science citation index and the JCR metrics derived from it are accurate and reliable for the purposes of research discovery and assessment. This year we have taken significant additional steps to foster research integrity in the Web of Science as we seek to uphold the highest ethical standards and proactively contribute to the maintenance of public trust in scientific and scholarly research.”

Key highlights from the 2022 data include:

• More than 21,500 high-quality journals from 254 research categories and 112 countries are identified and receive a JIF. This includes:
  • 13,668 science journals
  • 7,123 social science journals
  • 3,248 arts & humanities journals
• More than 5,600 journals publish all their content as open access
• 9,136 journals receive a Journal Impact Factor for the first time

The JCR is based on 2022 data compiled from the Web of Science Core Collection, the leading collection of quality journals, books and conference proceedings in the world’s largest publisher-neutral global citation database. Publications are evaluated by a global team of in-house editors at Clarivate using rigorous selection criteria. The data from selected content are then carefully curated to ensure accuracy in the JCR metrics, together with a wide body of descriptive data. These insights enable researchers, publishers, editors, librarians and funders to explore the key drivers of a journal’s value for diverse audiences.

Clarivate is proud of its commitment to deliver unbiased, publisher-neutral information, which does not promote or endorse any specific publishers. This enables confident decision-making for a wide group of stakeholders including publishers, academic institutions, funders and researchers.

Each journal profile in the JCR provides a rich array of journal intelligence metrics, allowing users to filter and rank journals by category. These metrics include:

• The Journal Citation Indicator, which represents the average category-normalized citation impact for papers published in the prior three-year period
• The Immediacy Index, which measures how frequently the journal’s content is cited within the same year as publication
• Cited half-life, which is the median age, in years, of items in the journal that were cited during the JCR year
• The Journal Impact Factor, which scales the citations received to recent content by a measure of the size of the journal’s scholarly output
• In addition, the Journal Citation Reports include descriptive data such as availability of open access content, top contributing institutions and regions

To explore all available data, metrics and analysis visit the Journal Citation Reports. For further insights into this year’s release, please refer to our series of blogs. The changes to the 2023 release apply from this year forward; no changes will be made to data from previous years.

About Clarivate

Clarivate is a leading global information services provider. We connect people and organizations to intelligence they can trust to transform their perspective, their work and our world. Our subscription and technology-based solutions are coupled with deep domain expertise and cover the areas of Academia & Government, Life Sciences & Healthcare and Intellectual Property. For more information, please visit clarivate.com

Media contact:

Rachel Scheer, External Communications Director, Academia & Government
newsroom@clarivate.com