Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
The BMC Bioinformatics journal page shows a Journal Impact Factor of 4.4 (2025) and a 5-year Journal Impact Factor of 4.0 (2025).
- Is an instance
An earlier snapshot of the same page showed 3.3 (2024) and 3.5 (2024, 5-year), which is why every cited value needs its data year.
Editorial commentary
Quick answer: The BMC Bioinformatics Journal Impact Factor is 4.4 for 2025, with a 5-year Journal Impact Factor of 4.0 for 2025. Both figures are shown on the journal’s Springer Nature page (link.springer.com/journal/12859), checked on 29 October 2026. The figure is year-specific, so always cite the data year with it.
What is the current impact factor of BMC Bioinformatics?
BMC Bioinformatics is an open access journal (eISSN 1471-2105) published by BioMed Central, part of Springer Nature. Its journal page lists a Journal Impact Factor of 4.4 (2025) and a 5-year Journal Impact Factor of 4.0 (2025). The same page lists a median of 5 days from submission to first decision and 10.6 million downloads for 2025. Clarivate’s Journal Citation Reports is the original source of the impact factor values; the publisher page restates them for its own title.
BMC does not publish a single impact factor for the publisher as a whole. Each journal receives its own figure, as covered in whether BMC journals are peer reviewed.
How is the impact factor calculated?
Clarivate describes the numerator as the number of current year citations, and the denominator as the source items published in that journal during the previous two years. In plain terms, the 2025 figure compares citations received in 2025 with the recent citable items the journal published in the two years before. See Journal Impact Factor and Journal Citation Reports for the general definitions.
What is the difference between the 2-year and 5-year figures?
The 5-year Journal Impact Factor combines a longer run of consecutive years, as Clarivate describes it. For BMC Bioinformatics the 2025 values are 4.4 (standard) and 4.0 (5-year). Quoting both lets a reader see whether the journal’s citation rate depends on a short recent window. CiteScore is a different metric from a different indexer and should not be mixed with either figure.
Why do websites list different values?
The impact factor is recalculated every year, so any page that quotes a number without a data year may be showing an older release. The journal page has displayed other values for earlier years, including 3.3 (2024) with a 5-year value of 3.5 (2024). When two sites disagree, check which data year each one states, then confirm against the journal page or the Journal Citation Reports.
How should the impact factor be used?
Clarivate states that the impact factor should not be used without careful attention to the many phenomena that influence citation rates, and that it should be used with informed peer review. Citation counts of individual articles are quite varied, so a journal-level figure does not describe any single paper. Clarivate also notes that reviews, letters and title changes can distort the value, and that comparisons belong within a subject category. For responsible use in evaluation, see the Hindawi journal impact factor guide and why journals are delisted from Web of Science, which affects whether a journal receives a figure at all.
Sources
- BMC Bioinformatics journal page, Springer Nature: https://link.springer.com/journal/12859 (checked 29 October 2026).
- Clarivate, impact factor essay: https://clarivate.com/academia-government/essays/impact-factor/ (checked 29 October 2026).
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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