Cancer Discovery’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF)

Cancer Discovery's Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is the Clarivate-computed, journal-level citation ratio the AACR journal Cancer Discovery receives each year in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) -- citations in the JCR data year to the journal's citable items from the two preceding years, divided by that item count. Per journal-metrics tracker data reflecting the JCR release, Cancer Discovery's reported Impact Factor was approximately 29.5 for the 2025 JCR data year (Clarivate's June 2026 release), following a reported 33.3 for the 2024 data year and 29.7 for the 2023 data year -- Clarivate updates this figure every June, so treat any single number, including these, as time-stamped to a specific release rather than a fixed property of the journal. Per DORA (San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment) and CoARA guidance, this journal-level figure should not be used as a proxy for the quality of any individual article published in the journal or the merit of its authors.

ByCASRAI Editorial Board

· Last updated 23 Jul 2026

Worked examples

Is an instance

A researcher comparing Cancer Discovery's reported Impact Factor (roughly 29.5 for the 2025 JCR data year / 2026 release) against Cancer Research's (22.6, per the JCR 2024 data year) before deciding which AACR title better fits a manuscript, understanding each journal carries its own separately computed JIF.

Is an instance

A department administrator working through the ratio definition -- citations in the JCR year to the journal's citable items from the two preceding years, divided by that item count -- to explain to faculty how Cancer Discovery, like any JCR-indexed title, arrives at its published JIF.

Looks similar, but isn't

Not an instance

Treating Cancer Discovery's JIF as interchangeable with Cancer Research's or Cancer Cell's -- all three are separately indexed, separately computed journals (Cancer Research and Cancer Discovery both published by AACR; Cancer Cell published by Cell Press/Elsevier, unaffiliated with AACR), each receiving its own distinct JIF in the same JCR release.

Not an instance

Citing a single highly cited Cancer Discovery article as evidence the journal's whole JIF applies to that paper -- the metric is computed at the journal level only, never attributable to one article or author, which is exactly the conflation DORA's guidance cautions against.

Cancer Discovery’s 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). Cancer Discovery is a cancer-research journal published by the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), launched in 2011, and it receives its own separate JIF each JCR release — distinct from the JIF of AACR’s other flagship title, Cancer Research, and distinct from Cancer Cell, an unrelated oncology journal published by Cell Press/Elsevier with no AACR affiliation. All three are separately indexed in JCR and each carries its own independently computed Impact Factor — a high JIF for one says nothing about the others, and the near-identical names are a common source of confusion when comparing oncology journals.

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. Cancer Discovery is indexed in Clarivate’s Science Citation Index Expanded and receives a JIF on that basis, alongside a separately reported 5-year Impact Factor and a JCR quartile ranking within its assigned oncology categories.

Current figure, and why it should be treated as time-stamped

Journal-metrics tracker data reflecting Clarivate’s JCR releases put Cancer Discovery’s Impact Factor at approximately 29.5 for the 2025 JCR data year (the June 2026 release), following a reported 33.3 for the 2024 data year and 29.7 for the 2023 data year. These figures come from third-party JCR-tracking aggregators rather than a directly verified fetch of jcr.clarivate.com (subscription-gated) or AACR’s own journal-metrics page, and at least one search-engine summary encountered during research surfaced a substantially lower, unreconciled figure for the same 2024 data year — treat the numbers above as REPORTED-tier, not independently confirmed against Clarivate’s primary release, and check Cancer Discovery’s own journal-information page or jcr.clarivate.com for the current figure before citing a specific number in a formal context such as a grant application or tenure file. Clarivate releases updated JCR figures every June, and a journal’s JIF can move meaningfully year over year as its citation and publication volumes change.

Worked example

If Cancer Discovery published 400 citable items across 2023 and 2024, and those items collectively received about 11,800 citations during 2025, the resulting 2025 JIF would be approximately 11,800 / 400 = 29.5 — the same mechanical calculation Clarivate applies to every journal in JCR, from a single-issue society title to a large multidisciplinary journal. The arithmetic is identical regardless of field; what differs is the citation and publication volume feeding it, which is one reason JIFs are not comparable across fields with different citation norms.

Why this number alone is a poor stand-in for quality

Citation-tracking organizations including DORA and the CoARA coalition caution against using a journal-level metric like the JIF to evaluate an individual article, author, or grant applicant — a single highly cited paper in Cancer Discovery does not mean every article in that issue was equally cited, and the JIF says nothing about the quality or rigor of any specific piece of work. It is also field-relative (oncology citation norms differ from, say, mathematics) and sensitive to a journal’s mix of article types, so it should be read alongside other indicators — such as the SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) or CiteScore — rather than in isolation.

Related terms

See the general Journal Impact Factor entry for the full mechanics of the metric. Cancer Discovery is distinct from AACR’s other flagship title, Cancer Research — do not confuse either with Cancer Cell (Cell Press/Elsevier), a similarly named but unaffiliated oncology journal. For other biomedicine-adjacent JIF entries, see Journal of Clinical Investigation and Cell. On alternative journal-level metrics, see SCImago Journal Rank (SJR).

Use in your systems

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