Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A researcher checking Cell Reports' current 2-year JIF on jcr.clarivate.com before deciding where to submit a manuscript, rather than relying on a single third-party aggregator site that may reflect an older JCR release.
- Is an instance
An editor working through the mechanical calculation -- total citations in the JCR data year to the journal's prior-two-years' citable items, divided by that item count -- to explain to authors how Cell Reports' published JIF is derived, the same formula Clarivate applies to every JCR-indexed title.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
Citing Cell Reports' CiteScore (a separate Elsevier/Scopus metric with a four-year citation window and broader document set) as if it were the journal's Clarivate JIF -- they are different metrics from different organizations, with different windows and denominators, and commonly diverge in value.
- Not an instance
Describing a single highly cited Cell Reports article as "having" the journal's JIF -- the metric is computed at the journal level only, not attributable to one article or author, which is exactly the conflation DORA's guidance cautions against.
Editorial commentary
Cell 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, Cell Reports receives its own separate JIF — distinct from its sister Cell Press journals such as Cell Reports Medicine — 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. Cell Reports, an open-access, broad-scope life-sciences journal published by Cell Press (an Elsevier imprint) since 2012, is indexed in Clarivate’s Science Citation Index Expanded and receives a JIF on that basis.
A note on the current figure
Third-party JCR-tracking services report figures for Cell Reports in roughly the high-6-to-8 range across recent JCR releases, with the journal placing in JCR Quartile 1 for Cell Biology, but these trackers do not agree on a single current number — likely reflecting different JCR release years being cited. Cell Press’s own metrics page was not independently reachable to confirm one figure at the time of writing. Rather than repeat an unverified number here, check jcr.clarivate.com (subscription-gated) or cell.com/cell-reports directly for the current, release-dated figure before citing it in a formal context such as a CV, grant application, or tenure file.
Worked example
If Cell Reports published 1,500 citable items across two preceding years, and those items collectively received 11,250 citations in the JCR data year, the resulting JIF would be 11,250 / 1,500 = 7.5 — the same mechanical calculation Clarivate applies to every journal in JCR, from a single-issue society title to a large multidisciplinary journal like this one. The arithmetic is identical regardless of field or journal size; what differs is the citation and publication volume feeding it.
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. A broad-scope life-sciences journal’s JIF is heavily shaped by a small number of highly cited papers and by field-level citation norms, so the same score means different things depending on what is being compared. DORA’s core recommendation is not to eliminate the JIF, but to stop using it as a proxy for the quality of a specific paper or the merit of an individual researcher’s work — a distinction that matters when Cell Reports’ JIF gets cited in tenure, promotion, or grant-review contexts as if it described any one article published there, rather than the journal’s two-year citation average as a whole.
Counter-example
Cell 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 article published in Cell Reports does not “have” the journal’s JIF — the metric is computed at the journal level, not the article level, which is precisely the conflation DORA’s guidance warns against.
Related terms
- Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — the general metric this page illustrates with one journal’s current figure.
- Nature Communications’ Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — another single-journal illustrative instance.
- Scientific Reports’ Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — another single-journal illustrative instance.
- Nature’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — another single-journal illustrative instance.
- Science Advances’ Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — another single-journal illustrative instance.
- CiteScore — Elsevier/Scopus’s competing journal-level metric, different window and denominator.
- DORA (San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment) — the reform commitment behind the over-reliance caveat above.
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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