Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A researcher checking Communications Biology's current reported JIF before deciding whether the journal's scope and audience fit a manuscript, and confirming which specific Nature Portfolio title (Communications Biology vs. Nature Communications) a given figure actually belongs to before citing it.
- Is an instance
An author working through the mechanical calculation -- total JCR-data-year citations to the journal's prior-two-years' citable items, divided by that item count -- to explain to a hiring or grant committee how the reported figure is derived, the same formula Clarivate applies uniformly across JCR-indexed titles.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
Citing a Nature Communications impact factor figure while referring to Communications Biology by name (or vice versa) because the names sound alike -- they are separately indexed journals with independently computed JIFs that differ substantially in value.
- Not an instance
Citing Communications Biology's CiteScore (a separate Elsevier/Scopus metric with a four-year citation window) as if it were the journal's Clarivate JIF, or describing one highly cited Communications Biology article as "having" the journal's impact factor -- the metric is computed at the journal level only.
Editorial commentary
Communications Biology’s most recently reported Journal Impact Factor is 5.8, for the 2025 JCR data year (the Journal Citation Reports 2026 release, issued June 2026), sourced to Nature Portfolio’s own Journal Metrics page for the title (nature.com/commsbio/journal-impact), where it appears verbatim as “Journal Impact Factor: 5.8 (2025)”, retrieved 23 August 2026. Third-party JCR trackers additionally place the journal in Quartile 1 for Biology and report 5.1 for the 2024 JCR data year; the publisher’s own page states neither a quartile nor the prior-year figure, so treat those two as tracker-reported rather than publisher-confirmed. Communications Biology (ISSN 2399-3642) is a Nature Portfolio journal and is a different title from Nature Communications; the two carry separately computed impact factors and are not interchangeable.
What the number actually measures
The Journal Impact Factor 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. Communications Biology launched in 2018 as part of Springer Nature’s Nature Portfolio “Communications” family and is indexed in Clarivate’s Science Citation Index Expanded, which is what makes it JCR-eligible. Because the journal is only a few years old, its JIF has been recalculated over a still-short citation history, and year-to-year movement in the figure reflects that relative youth as much as it reflects any change in the work being published.
Communications Biology’s Impact Factor in 2026: what the named sources actually say
Communications Biology’s Journal Impact Factor is 5.8, for the 2025 JCR data year — the release Clarivate issued in June 2026. The source is Nature Portfolio’s own Journal Metrics page for Communications Biology (nature.com/commsbio/journal-impact). It appears there verbatim as “Journal Impact Factor: 5.8 (2025)”, 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.
Sources disagree, so here are both. A second live Nature Portfolio page for the same journal, nature.com/commsbio/journal-information, still states a 2-year impact factor of 5.2 from the 2023 Journal Citation Reports — two JCR releases behind. Use the 5.8 (2025) figure. An earlier version of this page carried 5.8 as a third-party tracker figure that CASRAI could not confirm; it is now confirmed against the publisher.
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: 2399-3642 — Crossref journal record, checked 23 August 2026.
- Publisher: Springer Nature — Crossref journal record, checked 23 August 2026.
- PubMed / MEDLINE: Currently indexed for MEDLINE; MEDLINE coverage v2, 2019- — NLM Catalog record, checked 23 August 2026.
- DOAJ: Listed in DOAJ; record added 1 May 2018 — DOAJ API, checked 23 August 2026.
- Indexing the publisher itself lists: DOAJ, Medline, PubMed Central, Scopus, Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE), Current Contents/Life Sciences, BIOSIS, Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) and Zoological Record — the publisher’s own journal page, 23 August 2026.
- Journal Impact Factor: 5.8 for the 2025 JCR data year; 5-year Impact Factor 6.3 — Nature Portfolio’s own Journal Metrics page for Communications Biology (nature.com/commsbio/journal-impact), retrieved 23 August 2026.
Communications Biology’s Journal Impact Factor by JCR data year
Clarivate issues a new Journal Impact Factor for every indexed title each June, so the figure is a property of a data year rather than of the journal. The series below runs most recent first, with the source named against every row and the date CASRAI read it. Clarivate’s Journal Citation Reports is paywalled and CASRAI has not read it directly; rows attributed to a tracker are third-party readings of Clarivate’s release, not Clarivate’s own publication.
Both rows below are publisher-stated. The 2025 figure is from Nature Portfolio’s own Journal Metrics page for the title (nature.com/commsbio/journal-impact), which states “Journal Impact Factor: 5.8 (2025)” and “5-year Journal Impact Factor: 6.3 (2025)”. The 2023 figure is from a second, older Nature Portfolio page for the same journal (nature.com/commsbio/journal-information), which states that the journal “has a 2-year impact factor: 5.2 (2023 Journal Citation Reports®)”. Cross-checks are from wos-journal.info/journalid/4862 (a third-party Web of Science tracker, confirmed on the page itself to carry eISSN 2399-3642) and the Wikipedia article. All were read on 23 August 2026.
| JCR data year | Clarivate release | Journal Impact Factor | Attributed to, read 23 August 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | June 2026 | 5.8 | nature.com/commsbio/journal-impact (publisher); wos-journal.info; Wikipedia citing 2025 JCR |
| 2023 | June 2024 | 5.2 | nature.com/commsbio/journal-information (publisher, on a page two releases out of date) |
Category and quartile
Clarivate assigns Communications Biology to the Web of Science category Biology (Science Citation Index Expanded). For the current release, wos-journal.info gives its percentage rank within that category as 91.5% (read 23 August 2026). On wos-journal.info’s own stated scale — Q1 is better than 75% of the journals in the category, Q2 better than 50%, Q3 better than 25%, Q4 the rest — 91.5% places it in Q1. CASRAI has not read the quartile in Clarivate’s Journal Citation Reports itself, so treat it as a tracker-derived reading of the category position, not as a quartile quoted from JCR. Wikipedia additionally states that the journal ranks 9th out of 106 journals in the category “Biology”, citing the 2025 Journal Citation Reports (Clarivate, 2026); CASRAI has not read that rank in JCR itself. The 5-year Impact Factor, a separate figure that widens the citation window from two years to five, is 6.3 for the 2025 data year, stated by the publisher and matched by wos-journal.info.
Why this table is short, and why the 2024 row is absent. Communications Biology launched in 2018, so it has a short JCR history, and it is not covered by BioxBio, the year-by-year tracker used for the older titles in this dictionary. CASRAI could find no named, dated source for a 2024-data-year figure on 23 August 2026: the publisher states none, and the roughly 5.1 that circulates for that year is third-party tracker material CASRAI could not attribute. That row is therefore left out rather than filled in. Note also that the two publisher pages named above disagree with each other — nature.com/commsbio/journal-information was still showing the 2023 figure of 5.2 as though it were current. Use 5.8 (2025).
Re-check any row above against the source named beside it before quoting it in a CV, tenure file, grant application or funder report, and say which JCR data year you mean. A rising or falling series says nothing about any individual paper published in a given year — the JIF is a journal-level average, for the reasons set out elsewhere on this page.
Communications Biology is not Nature Communications
This is the single most common error made with this figure. Nature Portfolio publishes both Nature Communications and a separate family of open-access “Communications” journals launched from 2018 onward — Communications Biology, Communications Physics, Communications Chemistry, Communications Earth & Environment, and others. Communications Biology is a distinct journal with its own editorial board, its own scope, its own article processing charge, and its own independently calculated JIF, which is substantially lower than Nature Communications’. Quoting Nature Communications’ figure on a Communications Biology paper — or the reverse — is a factual misstatement that a careful reviewer will catch. Neither journal is Nature itself, which is a third, separately indexed title with its own Impact Factor.
The open-access model and what publishing here costs
Communications Biology is fully gold open access: there is no subscription route, and accepted authors are required to publish open access by paying an article processing charge. The journal’s own Open Access Fees and Funding page states an APC of £3,250 / $4,390 / €3,650, subject to VAT or local taxes where applicable, with the price set by the date of acceptance rather than the date of submission; that figure was read from the search-engine index of the journal’s page on 7 August 2026, because the page itself is account-gated to direct retrieval, so confirm it on nature.com before budgeting against it. Springer Nature operates institutional and transformative agreements that may cover the charge for eligible corresponding authors, and offers waivers and discounts for authors based in the lowest-income countries. Check your institution’s read-and-publish agreement before assuming you will pay list price.
Scope, selectivity, and whether it is the right venue
Communications Biology publishes across the biological sciences, broadly defined — it is not a predatory venue and it is not a soundness-only megajournal in the mould of PLOS ONE. It sits deliberately between the two: it applies a significance threshold, but a lower one than Nature Communications, and it accepts transfers from more selective Nature Portfolio titles. That positioning is the practical thing to evaluate. If your work is methodologically solid and of clear interest to specialists in your subfield but was declined upstream for insufficient breadth of interest, this is the kind of venue the transfer system is designed for. If your budget cannot absorb a four-figure APC and no agreement or waiver applies, the JIF is not the deciding variable — the cost is. CASRAI has not published an acceptance-rate figure for this journal because no primary source for one could be verified; treat aggregator-quoted acceptance rates for it as estimates.
Why this number alone is a poor stand-in for quality
DORA, the CoARA coalition, and Clarivate itself all caution against over-relying on a single journal-level metric to judge an individual article or researcher. DORA’s core recommendation is not to abolish the JIF, but to stop using it as a proxy for the quality of a specific paper or the merit of an individual’s work. That caution has particular force for a broad-scope journal like Communications Biology, whose single averaged figure blends citation norms from genomics, neuroscience, ecology, microbiology, and structural biology — fields whose baseline citation rates differ by multiples. A 5.8 does not mean the same thing to an ecologist and to a cell biologist, and a specific Communications Biology paper does not “have” a 5.8.
Counter-example
Communications Biology’s CiteScore — Elsevier/Scopus’s competing metric, computed over a four-year window and a broader document set — is a different number from its Clarivate JIF, and reporting one as if it were the other is a common sourcing error. Similarly, the journal’s Nature Portfolio branding is not itself evidence about its JIF: portfolio membership and citation performance are independent facts, and the “Nature” in the imprint does not transfer Nature‘s figure to this title. And as above, quoting Nature Communications’ number here is simply wrong, not a conservative approximation.
Related terms
- Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — the general metric this page illustrates with one journal’s reported figure.
- Nature Communications’ Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — the title most often confused with this one.
- Nature’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — the flagship title, separately indexed again.
- Scientific Reports’ Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — Springer Nature’s soundness-based megajournal, a different model.
- PLOS ONE’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — the megajournal comparison point.
- Science Advances’ Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — AAAS’s open-access multidisciplinary title.
- CiteScore — Elsevier/Scopus’s competing journal-level metric, different window and denominator.
- Article processing charge (APC) — the fee model this journal uses.
- Gold open access — the publishing route Communications Biology operates under.
- h-index — an author-level metric, not a journal-level one.
- DORA (San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment) — the reform commitment behind the over-reliance caveat above.
- DORA vs CoARA — comparing the two major research-assessment reform frameworks.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Communications Biology’s current impact factor?
Communications Biology’s Journal Impact Factor is 5.8 for the 2025 JCR data year (the Journal Citation Reports 2026 release, issued June 2026). The source is the publisher’s own Journal Metrics page, nature.com/commsbio/journal-impact, which states “Journal Impact Factor: 5.8 (2025)”; CASRAI retrieved it there on 23 August 2026. Note that a second live Nature Portfolio page, nature.com/commsbio/journal-information, still shows 5.2 from the 2023 JCR — two releases stale. Use 5.8 (2025).
Has Communications Biology’s impact factor gone up or down recently?
It rose year over year. The current figure, 5.8 for the 2025 JCR data year (2026 release), is confirmed on the publisher’s own metrics page. The preceding figure of roughly 5.1 for the 2024 JCR data year is reported by third-party JCR trackers only and is not stated by the publisher, so treat the direction of travel as sound but the earlier number as unconfirmed. Because the journal launched in 2018, its JIF is still being calculated over a comparatively short citation history, so year-to-year movement partly reflects that youth.
Is Communications Biology the same journal as Nature Communications?
No. Despite the similar name, Communications Biology is a distinct Nature Portfolio title with its own editorial board, scope, article processing charge, and independently calculated impact factor, which is substantially lower than Nature Communications’. Quoting one journal’s figure for the other is a common citation error.
Is Communications Biology open access, and what does it cost to publish there?
Yes, it is fully gold open access with no subscription route, and accepted authors must pay an article processing charge. The journal’s own fees page states an APC of £3,250 / $4,390 / €3,650 (subject to VAT or local taxes), set by date of acceptance rather than submission; institutional read-and-publish agreements or waivers may cover the cost for eligible authors, so check your institution’s agreement before assuming list price.
What is Communications Biology’s acceptance rate?
CASRAI has not published an acceptance-rate figure for this journal because no primary source for one could be verified. Aggregator-quoted acceptance rates for it should be treated as estimates, not confirmed figures.
Does a high impact factor mean a specific Communications Biology paper is high quality?
No. DORA and the CoARA coalition both caution against using a journal-level metric like the JIF as a proxy for the quality of an individual article or researcher. This caution applies with particular force to a broad-scope journal like Communications Biology, whose single averaged figure blends citation norms across fields such as genomics, neuroscience, ecology, microbiology, and structural biology, which have very different baseline citation rates.
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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