Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
Citing the JIF transparently as a journal-level metric in a library subscription-renewal review.
- Is an instance
Publishing a journal's full citation distribution alongside its JIF, per Larivière et al.'s proposal, so readers can see how skewed the underlying data is.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
Setting a minimum JIF as a requirement for promotion, tenure, or hiring decisions.
- Not an instance
Comparing a humanities researcher's publication venues to a biomedical researcher's using JIF, ignoring field-level citation-rate differences.
Editorial commentary
The Journal Impact Factor was introduced by Eugene Garfield in the 1950s-1960s as a librarian’s tool for comparing journals in collection-development decisions, and has been published annually since 1975 in what is now Clarivate’s Journal Citation Reports (JCR). The two-year JIF is calculated by dividing the count of citations received in year Y to items published in years Y-1 and Y-2 by the number of citable items published in those same two years. For exactly what counts as a citable item, the front-matter loophole, and what Clarivate does about self-citation, see how the Journal Impact Factor is calculated, step by step.
Who is eligible, and what else JCR reports
Eligibility has changed materially in recent years: through the 2022 JCR release, only journals indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) or Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) received a JIF. Starting with the 2023 JCR release, Clarivate extended JIF eligibility to all Web of Science Core Collection journals meeting its quality criteria, including Arts & Humanities Citation Index (AHCI) and Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) titles — over 9,000 journals received a JIF for the first time that year. A JCR release also reports several metrics alongside JIF: the JIF 5-Year, the field-normalised Journal Citation Indicator (JCI, introduced 2021, category average = 1.0), the Eigenfactor Score and Article Influence Score, the Immediacy Index, and quartile rank (Q1-Q4) within a journal’s subject category. Since the 2024 methodology change, arts and humanities categories are ranked by JCI rather than JIF, since citation-based metrics behave poorly in those fields. See CiteScore for Elsevier’s competing journal-level metric, which uses a different citation window and denominator.
Why its misuse is the paradigm case for responsible metrics
The metric is mathematically inappropriate as a measure of the quality of an individual article or researcher, because citation distributions within a journal are highly skewed: a small number of papers typically attract most of a journal’s citations. Both DORA and the Leiden Manifesto cite JIF misuse in hiring and promotion decisions as the paradigmatic example of irresponsible metric use.
References
- Clarivate Journal Citation Reports. Clarivate, “2023 JCR” and “2024 JCR ranking changes” announcements. Larivière V et al. ‘A simple proposal for the publication of journal citation distributions’, bioRxiv, 2016. DORA recommendations.
Also known as
JIF · Impact Factor · ISI Impact Factor
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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