Cell Reports' Impact Factor (JIF)

Cell Reports’ Journal Impact Factor (JIF)

Cell Reports' Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is the Clarivate-computed, journal-level citation ratio Cell Reports receives each year in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) -- citations in the JCR data year to the journal's citable items from the two preceding years, divided by that item count. Cell Reports is a Cell Press (Elsevier) open-access, broad-scope life-sciences journal, and its JIF has placed it in JCR Quartile 1 for Cell Biology in recent releases; third-party JCR-tracking services report figures in roughly the high-6-to-8 range across the last several JCR releases, but they do not agree on an exact current figure, and Cell Press's own site was not independently reachable to confirm one at the time of writing. Treat any single number you see cited as time-stamped to a specific JCR release -- Clarivate updates JCR every June -- and check jcr.clarivate.com or the journal's own metrics page at cell.com/cell-reports for the current, authoritative figure before citing it in a formal context. Per DORA (San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment) and CoARA guidance, this journal-level figure should not be used as a proxy for the quality of any individual article published in the journal or the merit of its authors.

ByCASRAI Editorial Board

· Last updated 4 Sept 2026

What the number actually measures

The JIF is a ratio: citations received in a given year to citable items (articles and reviews) the journal published in the two preceding years, divided by the number of those citable items. Cell Reports, an open-access, broad-scope life-sciences journal published by Cell Press (an Elsevier imprint) since 2012, is indexed in Clarivate’s Science Citation Index Expanded and receives a JIF on that basis.

Cell Reports’ Impact Factor in 2026: what the named sources actually say

Cell Reports’ Journal Impact Factor is 7.7, for the 2025 JCR data year — the release Clarivate issued in June 2026. The source is Cell Reports’s own publisher metrics panel at cell.com/cell-reports/home, which attributes the figure on-page to “Journal Citation Reports 2025 (Clarivate Analytics, 2026)”. It appears there verbatim as “7.7 | Impact Factor”, retrieved 23 August 2026. That is the publisher restating Clarivate’s number for its own title — not a third-party JCR-tracking aggregator and not a Wikipedia infobox, either of which can lag behind or drift from the release Clarivate actually issued.

The same publisher page also shows a CiteScore of 12.3. That is Elsevier/Scopus’s metric, computed over a four-year window and a broader document set, and it is not a second opinion on the Impact Factor. Quoting the larger number as though it were the JIF is the single most common sourcing error on this metric.

Clarivate republishes the JCR every June, so this figure is current only for the 2025 data year. Re-check it at the publisher’s page or in JCR itself before putting it in a CV, tenure file, grant application or funder report — and say which data year you mean when you cite it.

What CASRAI could verify at source

ISSN: 2211-1247 — Crossref journal record, checked 23 August 2026.
Publisher: Elsevier (Cell Press) — Crossref journal record, checked 23 August 2026.
PubMed / MEDLINE: Currently indexed for MEDLINE; MEDLINE coverage v1n1, Jan. 26 2012- — NLM Catalog record, checked 23 August 2026.
DOAJ: Listed in DOAJ; record added 30 October 2015 — DOAJ API, checked 23 August 2026.
Journal Impact Factor: 7.7 for the 2025 JCR data year; CiteScore 12.3 (a different metric — see above) — Cell Reports’s own publisher metrics panel at cell.com/cell-reports/home, which attributes the figure on-page to “Journal Citation Reports 2025 (Clarivate Analytics, 2026)”, retrieved 23 August 2026.

Why this number alone is a poor stand-in for quality

Citation-tracking organizations including DORA, the CoARA coalition, and Clarivate itself caution against over-relying on a single journal-level metric to judge an individual article or researcher. A broad-scope life-sciences journal’s JIF is heavily shaped by a small number of highly cited papers and by field-level citation norms, so the same score means different things depending on what is being compared. DORA’s core recommendation is not to eliminate the JIF, but to stop using it as a proxy for the quality of a specific paper or the merit of an individual researcher’s work — a distinction that matters when Cell Reports’ JIF gets cited in tenure, promotion, or grant-review contexts as if it described any one article published there, rather than the journal’s two-year citation average as a whole.

Counter-example

Cell Reports’ CiteScore (a separate Elsevier/Scopus metric using a four-year citation window and a broader document set) is not the same figure as its JIF, and reporting one as if it were the other is a common sourcing error. Similarly, an individual highly cited article published in Cell Reports does not “have” the journal’s JIF — the metric is computed at the journal level, not the article level, which is precisely the conflation DORA’s guidance warns against.

Related terms

Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — the general metric this page illustrates with one journal’s current figure.
Nature Communications’ Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — another single-journal illustrative instance.
Scientific Reports’ Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — another single-journal illustrative instance.
Nature’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — another single-journal illustrative instance.
Science Advances’ Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — another single-journal illustrative instance.
CiteScore — Elsevier/Scopus’s competing journal-level metric, different window and denominator.
DORA (San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment) — the reform commitment behind the over-reliance caveat above.

Use in your systems

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