Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A clinical researcher checking Cell Reports Medicine's current 2-year JIF on jcr.clarivate.com before selecting a target journal for a translational-medicine manuscript, rather than relying on a single third-party aggregator that may reflect an older JCR release.
- Is an instance
An editor explaining to authors that Cell Reports Medicine's JIF is calculated the same way as every other JCR-indexed title -- total citations in the JCR data year to the journal's prior-two-years' citable items, divided by that item count -- regardless of the journal's clinical/translational focus.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
Treating Cell Reports Medicine's JIF as interchangeable with Cell Reports' JIF because both titles carry the Cell Press "Cell Reports" name -- they are separate JCR-indexed journals with separate editorial boards, separate scopes (Cell Reports Medicine is translational/clinical; Cell Reports is broad life-sciences), and separate, independently computed Impact Factor figures.
- Not an instance
Citing Cell Reports Medicine's CiteScore (a separate Elsevier/Scopus metric with a four-year citation window and a broader document set) as if it were the journal's Clarivate JIF -- the two metrics use different windows, denominators, and source organizations, and routinely diverge in value.
Editorial commentary
Cell Reports Medicine’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). Like every JCR-indexed title, Cell Reports Medicine receives its own separate JIF — distinct from its broader-scope sister journal Cell Reports — 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 Medicine, an open-access journal published by Cell Press since its 2020 launch, focuses specifically on translational and clinical biomedical research intended to inform human health and medicine — a narrower, more clinically oriented scope than Cell Reports, which covers life sciences broadly. Both are indexed separately in Clarivate’s Science Citation Index Expanded and each receives its own JIF on that basis.
Cell Reports Medicine vs. Cell Reports: not the same journal
The shared “Cell Reports” branding is a common source of confusion. Cell Reports Medicine and Cell Reports are separate Cell Press titles with separate editorial boards, separate scopes, separate ISSNs, and separate, independently computed Impact Factor figures in JCR — a high JIF for one does not imply anything about the other’s current figure. Anyone citing a JIF in a CV, grant application, or tenure file should confirm which of the two titles the number actually belongs to.
A note on the current figure
Multiple third-party JCR-tracking aggregators report a figure of approximately 14.0 for Cell Reports Medicine for the 2025 JCR data year (Clarivate’s June 2026 release), placing the journal in JCR Quartile 1. CASRAI was not able to independently verify this figure against jcr.clarivate.com (subscription-gated) or reach Cell Press’s own metrics page directly at the time of writing, so treat it as a cross-corroborated but secondary-source figure rather than a primary-verified one. Rather than treat any single aggregator number as authoritative, check jcr.clarivate.com or cell.com/cell-reports-medicine directly for the current, release-dated figure before citing it formally.
Worked example
If Cell Reports Medicine published 400 citable items across two preceding years, and those items collectively received 5,600 citations in the JCR data year, the resulting JIF would be 5,600 / 400 = 14.0 — the same mechanical calculation Clarivate applies to every journal in JCR, from a small specialty title to a large multidisciplinary journal. 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 translational-medicine journal’s JIF is heavily shaped by a small number of highly cited papers and by field-level citation norms in clinical research specifically, 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.
Counter-example
Treating an individual highly cited Cell Reports Medicine article as “having” the journal’s JIF is a conflation DORA’s guidance specifically warns against — the metric is computed at the journal level across two years of citable items, not attributable to one article or author.
Related terms
- Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — the general metric this page illustrates with one journal’s current figure.
- Cell Reports’ Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — the distinct, broader-scope Cell Press sister journal, with its own separate JIF.
- Cell’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — the flagship Cell Press journal, another separate title and separate JIF.
- DORA (San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment) — guidance against using journal-level metrics as a proxy for individual article or researcher quality.
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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