Clarivate Journal Citation Reports 2023

Clarivate Plc has 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.

For nearly half a century, the information released in the annual Journal Citation Reports has been used by the global academic community to identify leading journals in their fields. The annual reports incorporate a variety of metrics, including the widely recognised 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.

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. The comany says 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; and
• 9,136 journals receive a Journal Impact Factor for the first time.

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; and
• 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.

Nandita Quaderi, Editor-in-Chief & Vice President of the Web of Science, Clarivate, explains the important changes to the 2023 Journal Citation Reports release here.