Cell Death and Disease Impact Factor: Value,…

Cell Death and Disease Impact Factor: Value, Trend and Method

The Cell Death and Disease impact factor is the Journal Impact Factor of the journal Cell Death & Disease (Springer Nature): citations in a JCR year to articles and reviews published in the previous two years, divided by the number of those items. The journal reports 12.1 for 2025.

ByCASRAI Editorial Board

· Last updated 8 Nov 2026

Current impact factor (journal-reported, 2025)

The journal-information page lists: Journal Impact Factor 12.1 (2025); 5-year Journal Impact Factor 11.4 (2025); Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) 2.052 (2025); SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) 3.291 (2025). These are different metrics from different indexers and are not interchangeable: the Impact Factor figures belong to Clarivate’s Journal Citation Reports, while SNIP and SJR are Scopus-based. Aggregator sites may show a slightly different value for the same year; the journal’s own page and Clarivate are the references.

Five-year history and Clarivate rank

Table 2 of the journal’s 15-year anniversary article (PMC12722284, “data from Clarivate”, read 7 November 2026) gives the following. Rank is position out of the journals in the category, as printed in the article.

JCR year	Impact Factor	Rank	Rank as share of category
2020	8.5	37/195	19.0%
2021	9.7	36/195	18.5%
2022	9.0	31/191	16.2%
2023	8.1	33/205	16.1%
2024	9.6	29/204	14.2%

The Impact Factor moved between 8.1 and 9.7 over these five years, and the 2025 value the journal reports is 12.1. Year-to-year movement of this kind is normal, and is one reason a single number is a weak basis for judgement. The last column is simple division (rank divided by category size), calculated by CASRAI, not a figure published by Clarivate.

How the Impact Factor is calculated

Citations received in the JCR year to items the journal published in the two previous years, divided by the number of citable items (articles and reviews) from those two years. The 5-year version uses a five-year publication window, which tends to suit fields where citations accrue slowly. Details: Journal Impact Factor.

Is Cell Death and Disease a Q1 journal?

Quartiles are assigned within a subject category by rank: a journal in the top 25% of its category is Q1. By the arithmetic above, every rank in the table sits within the first quarter of the category size printed beside it. The Q1 label itself, and the category it refers to, is Clarivate’s to assign in JCR; the quartile on SCImago is a separate calculation and can differ. State which system and which year you mean.

Is 7.7 (or any) impact factor good?

There is no universal threshold. An Impact Factor is meaningful only against other journals in the same category and year, because citation rates differ widely between fields. Compare rank within category, as in the table above, rather than raw values across fields.

Why do some journals’ impact factors look low (the PNAS question)?

Usually because of field and journal size rather than quality: a journal that publishes a very large, broad set of articles averages citations over all of them, and fields differ in how quickly work is cited. The average is also skewed by a small number of highly cited papers. The method, not an assumption about prestige, explains the number.

Is Cell Death and Disease reputable? Indexing and decision times

CASRAI gives no verdict; it reports what the journal states. The journal-information page lists indexing in Biological Abstracts, BIOSIS Previews, DOAJ, Google Scholar, ISI Web of Science, PubMed/MEDLINE, Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) and Scopus. It reports a median of 7 days from submission to first editorial decision and 192 days from submission to acceptance. The 15-year article states that the journal has published more than 11,000 articles, about 95% of them original papers.

Acceptance rate

The journal’s metrics panel reports time-to-decision figures rather than an acceptance rate, so there is no journal-stated acceptance rate to quote. Publication charges are described in the open access section of the journal’s site at nature.com/cddis.

Cautions on using the number

The Impact Factor describes a journal, not an article or an author. The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) recommends against using journal-based metrics as a surrogate for the quality of individual research articles. Pair any figure with its data year, source and category, and see the CiteScore and h-index entries for what other metrics measure.

Use in your systems

JATS XML <role> element

xml

<role vocab="credit"
      vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
      vocab-term="Cell Death and Disease Impact Factor: Value, Trend and Method"
      vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/cell-death-and-disease-impact-factor" />

Schema.org DefinedTerm (JSON-LD)

json

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "DefinedTerm",
  "@id": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/cell-death-and-disease-impact-factor",
  "name": "Cell Death and Disease Impact Factor: Value, Trend and Method",
  "identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/cell-death-and-disease-impact-factor",
  "description": "The Cell Death and Disease impact factor is the Journal Impact Factor of the journal Cell Death & Disease (Springer Nature): citations in a JCR year to articles and reviews published in the previous two years, divided by the number of those items. The journal reports 12.1 for 2025.",
  "inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/publishing#set",
  "url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/cell-death-and-disease-impact-factor",
  "license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "publisher": {
    "@id": "https://casrai.org/#organization"
  },
  "author": {
    "@id": "https://casrai.org/#editorial-team"
  },
  "datePublished": "2026-11-08T01:48:20",
  "dateModified": "2026-11-08T01:48:20",
  "inLanguage": "en-GB",
  "isAccessibleForFree": true
}