Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A researcher checking Scientific Reports' current 2-year JIF (4.9, confirmed directly on nature.com/srep) before deciding where to submit a manuscript, understanding this figure sits alongside CiteScore and quartile ranking rather than replacing them.
- Is an instance
A librarian explaining to faculty that Scientific Reports, as a high-volume soundness-only mega-journal, averages its JIF across a far larger and more heterogeneous set of articles than a narrowly curated specialist journal.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
Citing Scientific Reports' CiteScore (a separate Elsevier/Scopus metric, four-year window) as if it were the journal's Clarivate JIF.
- Not an instance
Describing a single highly cited Scientific Reports article as "having" the journal's JIF -- the metric is computed at the journal level only.
Editorial commentary
Scientific Reports’ Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is a specific, illustrative instance of the general Journal Impact Factor metric published annually by Clarivate in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR). Like every JCR-indexed title, Scientific Reports receives its own separate JIF — it is not the same figure as its sister title Nature Communications or any other journal in the Nature Portfolio — and that figure changes with each annual JCR release.
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. Scientific Reports is an open-access, multidisciplinary journal published by Springer Nature (Nature Portfolio) since 2011. It is a “mega-journal” that evaluates submissions on technical and scientific soundness rather than perceived novelty or importance — similar in editorial model to PLOS ONE — and publishes a substantially larger volume of articles per year than most JCR-indexed titles, including other Nature Portfolio journals.
Scientific Reports’ Impact Factor in 2026: what the named sources actually say
Scientific Reports’ Journal Impact Factor is 4.9, for the 2025 JCR data year — the release Clarivate issued in June 2026. The source is Nature Portfolio’s own About page for Scientific Reports (nature.com/srep/about). It appears there verbatim as “Journal Impact Factor: 4.9 (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.
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: 2045-2322 — Crossref journal record, checked 23 August 2026.
- Publisher: Springer Nature — Crossref journal record, checked 23 August 2026.
- PubMed / MEDLINE: Currently indexed for MEDLINE; NLM records PubMed coverage from v1, 2011- and PubMed Central deposit — NLM Catalog record, checked 23 August 2026.
- DOAJ: Listed in DOAJ; record added 4 November 2011 — DOAJ API, checked 23 August 2026.
- Indexing the publisher itself lists: Web of Science, PubMed, PubMed Central, Scopus, Dimensions, Google Scholar, DOAJ and SAO/NASA ADS — the publisher’s own journal page, 23 August 2026.
- Journal Impact Factor: 4.9 for the 2025 JCR data year; 5-year Impact Factor 4.8 — Nature Portfolio’s own About page for Scientific Reports (nature.com/srep/about), retrieved 23 August 2026.
Scientific Reports’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. Figures for the 2021 data year and earlier are shown to three decimal places because that is how Clarivate published them at the time; from the 2022 data year Clarivate rounds the JIF to one decimal place.
The publisher figure is Nature Portfolio’s own metrics page for the journal (nature.com/srep/journal-impact), which states “Journal Impact Factor: 4.9 (2025)” and “5-year Journal Impact Factor: 4.8 (2025)” and attributes them to the “2025 Journal Citation Reports® Science Edition (Clarivate Analytics, 2026)”. The longer series is from BioxBio (bioxbio.com/journal/SCI-REP-UK), a third-party JCR tracker. Cross-checks are from wos-journal.info/journalid/13280 (a third-party Web of Science tracker, confirmed on the page itself to carry ISSN 2045-2322) and the Wikipedia infobox. All four were read on 23 August 2026.
| JCR data year | Clarivate release | Journal Impact Factor | Attributed to, read 23 August 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | June 2026 | 4.9 | nature.com/srep/journal-impact; BioxBio; wos-journal.info; Wikipedia (all four agree) |
| 2024 | June 2025 | 3.9 | BioxBio |
| 2023 | June 2024 | 3.8 | BioxBio |
| 2021 | June 2022 | 4.996 | BioxBio |
| 2020 | June 2021 | 4.379 | BioxBio |
| 2019 | June 2020 | 3.998 | BioxBio |
| 2018 | June 2019 | 4.011 | BioxBio |
| 2017 | June 2018 | 4.122 | BioxBio |
| 2016 | June 2017 | 4.259 | BioxBio |
| 2015 | June 2016 | 5.228 | BioxBio |
| 2014 | June 2015 | 5.578 | BioxBio |
| 2013 | June 2014 | 5.078 | BioxBio |
| 2012 | June 2013 | 2.927 | BioxBio |
Category and quartile
Clarivate assigns Scientific Reports to the Web of Science category Multidisciplinary Sciences (Science Citation Index Expanded). For the current release, wos-journal.info gives its percentage rank within that category as 85% (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 — 85% 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. The 5-year Impact Factor, a separate figure that widens the citation window from two years to five, is 4.8 for the 2025 data year, stated by the publisher and matched by wos-journal.info.
The 2022 data year is missing on purpose. BioxBio’s row for the 2022 data year is blank, and no other source CASRAI could read on 23 August 2026 states a figure for it, so no 2022 row is given rather than an invented or interpolated one.
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.
How Scientific Reports compares across the Nature Portfolio
Scientific Reports is one of dozens of separately indexed titles under the Nature Portfolio umbrella (Springer Nature), and each receives its own independently computed JIF — a low or high figure at one title says nothing about a sibling journal’s score. A same-JCR-data-year snapshot for a few well-known Nature Portfolio titles:
| Journal | 2-year JIF (2025 JCR data year) | JCR quartile / category |
|---|---|---|
| Nature (flagship) | Not quoted here by CASRAI house style — the figure changes every June; check JCR or Nature’s own metrics page directly | Q1, Multidisciplinary Sciences (consistently one of the highest-ranked titles in the category) |
| Nature Communications | approximately 18.1 (reported, not independently confirmed on this page) | Q1, Multidisciplinary Sciences |
| Scientific Reports (this page) | 4.9 | Q1, Multidisciplinary Sciences (85% category rank) |
| Communications Biology | approximately 5.8 (reported, not independently confirmed on this page) | Q1 |
| Nature Medicine | approximately 79.6 (reported, not independently confirmed on this page) | Q1, General & Internal Medicine |
The wide spread above — from single digits to nearly 80 — illustrates why comparing a JIF across categories is misleading even within one publisher’s own portfolio: General & Internal Medicine and Multidisciplinary Sciences have very different citation norms and category sizes, so a “higher number” does not mean “more rigorously reviewed” or “more important.” Scientific Reports’ own 4.9 sits toward the lower end of that spread precisely because it is a high-volume, soundness-only mega-journal averaging across a far larger and more heterogeneous set of articles than a narrowly curated specialist title — not because it is reviewed less rigorously. Compare a journal’s JIF only against other journals in its own JCR category, and see the Impact Factor look-up guide for how to check any title’s current figure directly.
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. This caution applies with particular force to a soundness-only mega-journal: because acceptance is not based on a subjective importance threshold, the resulting JIF reflects an average across a much wider spread of citation outcomes than a narrowly curated journal would show.
Counter-example
Scientific 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 Scientific Reports article does not “have” the journal’s JIF — the metric is computed at the journal level, not the article level.
Related terms
- Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — the general metric this page illustrates with one journal’s current figure.
- Nature Communications’ Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — a second Nature Portfolio title’s JIF.
- Nature’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — the flagship journal’s own separately computed figure.
- Communications Biology’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — a same-portfolio open-access sibling.
- Nature Medicine’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — a same-portfolio clinical title, for scale.
- CiteScore — Elsevier/Scopus’s competing journal-level metric.
- DORA (San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment)
- DORA vs CoARA
Last verified: 16 August 2026. Clarivate refreshes Journal Citation Reports figures every June; treat any specific number on this page as time-stamped to the release named next to it, not a permanent property of the journal, and re-check the source named above after the next June release.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Scientific Reports’ current Journal Impact Factor?
Nature Portfolio’s own journal page (nature.com/srep) states a 2-year impact factor of 4.9 (2025 JCR data year, released 2026), confirmed directly by CASRAI on 16 August 2026 — this is the current, publisher-confirmed figure.
How is Scientific Reports’ Journal Impact Factor calculated?
The JIF is a ratio: citations received in a given year to the citable items (articles and reviews) the journal published in the two preceding years, divided by the number of those citable items.
Has Scientific Reports’ Impact Factor changed from the previous JCR release?
Yes. The publisher-confirmed figure is 4.9 for the 2025 JCR data year, up from approximately 3.9 reported for the 2024 data year release.
Is Scientific Reports’ Impact Factor the same as its CiteScore?
No. CiteScore is a separate Elsevier/Scopus metric using a four-year citation window and a broader document set, while the JIF is Clarivate’s two-year metric.
Does Scientific Reports’ Journal Impact Factor reflect the quality of an individual article published there?
No. The JIF is computed at the journal level, not the article level, and DORA and the CoARA coalition caution against using it as a proxy for the quality of a specific paper or researcher.
How does Scientific Reports’ Impact Factor compare to other Nature Portfolio journals?
Each Nature Portfolio title has its own separately computed JIF, and they vary enormously by field: Scientific Reports is 4.9 (2025 data year, Multidisciplinary Sciences), while Nature Communications runs far higher (reported around 18.1) and a same-portfolio clinical title like Nature Medicine is reported around 79.6 (General & Internal Medicine). Compare journals only within the same JCR category, not across the portfolio by raw number.
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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