Cureus’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF)

Searches for Cureus’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF) are common, but the honest current answer differs from most other named-journal impact-factor lookups: Cureus does not have one right now. Like the general Journal Impact Factor entry this page illustrates, the JIF is a citation ratio Clarivate calculates annually from a journal’s Web of Science-indexed citation data and publishes in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) — but that calculation depends on continuous Web of Science indexing, and Cureus lost that status in 2025.

Current status: no active Impact Factor

Clarivate placed Cureus (ISSN 2168-8184) ‘on hold’ in its Web of Science indexing in September 2024, and formally removed the journal from the Web of Science Master Journal List in October 2025. Clarivate has not published a detailed public rationale, but the removal followed a period of substantial retraction activity at the journal and reported article-quality concerns. Because Web of Science indexing is the source of the citation data a JIF is built from, delisting means Cureus does not receive a 2025 Impact Factor and will not receive one for subsequent years unless it is re-indexed. This is a live, checkable fact, not a stable one — confirm current status directly against Clarivate’s Master Journal List (mjl.clarivate.com) rather than an older cached description, including this one.

What Cureus’s Impact Factor was before delisting

Before removal, Cureus did receive JCR figures for several annual cycles. Third-party JCR-tracking aggregator sites report Cureus’s most recent 2-year JIF inconsistently — figures cited include approximately 1.2, attributed to the 2022 JCR release, and approximately 1.3, attributed to a 2024 release — with different aggregator pages disagreeing about which figure is the journal’s actual ‘last’ one. Neither figure could be independently confirmed against a single primary Clarivate source at the time of writing, since a delisted journal’s JCR entry is not maintained the way a currently-indexed journal’s is. Treat any specific Cureus JIF number found online as historical background at best, not as a current, citable figure.

Editorial model and scope

Cureus is an open-access general medical journal, originally launched as PeerEMed in 2009 and relaunched under the Cureus name in December 2012; Springer Nature acquired it in December 2022. Its defining editorial characteristics, independent of its Web of Science status, are a high-volume, broad-scope publishing model — it accepts submissions across the full range of clinical medicine and related fields rather than specializing in one subdiscipline — and a peer-review workflow built around speed: pre-publication peer review followed by an optional post-publication commentary and rating layer. Cureus also runs its own in-house metric, the Scholarly Impact Quotient (SIQ), a reader-driven, post-publication score generated on the journal’s own platform. SIQ is frequently confused with a Journal Impact Factor because both are described casually as an article or journal’s ‘impact score,’ but the two are unrelated: SIQ is Cureus-specific and crowdsourced from readers after publication, while JIF is a citation-count ratio Clarivate computes centrally across all Web of Science-indexed journals using the same formula. This breadth-and-speed model is a legitimate, disclosed editorial choice, distinct from — not inherently better or worse than — the narrower-scope, longer-review-cycle model of many specialty journals; the two serve different purposes and should be evaluated on their own disclosed terms rather than assumed to be directly comparable on impact-factor grounds alone, especially now that Cureus has no active JIF to compare.

Why this matters for how the figure gets cited

Per DORA (San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment) and CoARA’s responsible-assessment guidance, journal-level metrics generally should not substitute for evaluating the actual content of a specific paper or the contributions of a specific researcher. Cureus’s delisting sharpens that caution in a specific, practical way: citing a stale or aggregator-sourced ‘Cureus impact factor’ in a CV, grant application, or tenure file risks stating a figure Clarivate no longer maintains or endorses as current. Anyone evaluating a Cureus publication for its citation record should check the live Master Journal List status first, note SIQ and JIF as separate metrics if either is cited, and rely on a live JCR/Master Journal List lookup rather than a remembered or previously seen number.

Related terms

• Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — the general metric this page illustrates with one currently-delisted journal’s status.
• Journal Citation Reports (JCR) — the Clarivate publication a JIF is drawn from, and that Cureus no longer appears in.
• New England Journal of Medicine’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — a contrasting single-journal instance that remains actively Web of Science-indexed.
• CiteScore — Elsevier/Scopus’s separately computed journal-level metric, which uses different eligibility criteria than JCR.
• DORA (San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment) — the reform commitment behind the over-reliance caution above.
• Is Cureus Peer Reviewed? — CASRAI’s companion guide on Cureus’s editorial and review process.
• How to Look Up a Journal’s Impact Factor — the practical lookup guide this term supports, including Cureus’s delisting as a named example.