Environmental Science and Pollution Research’s…

Environmental Science and Pollution Research’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF)

<p>The Journal Impact Factor (JIF) of <em>Environmental Science and Pollution Research</em> (ESPR) is the Clarivate-calculated, Journal Citation Reports (JCR) metric for this Springer (Springer Nature) journal, covering environmental chemistry, ecotoxicology, and pollution-monitoring research. Per third-party JCR-tracking aggregators (Research.com, BioxBio, Resurchify) rather than a direct jcr.clarivate.com subscription check this session, ESPR's JIF rose through the early 2020s -- from roughly 2.6 in 2012 to about 5.8 for the 2022 JCR data year -- before falling to an aggregator-reported figure of approximately 5.59 for the 2024 JCR data year (2025 release), a decline these sources describe as consistent with a broader multi-year retrenchment across the journal's citation counts. As with any single aggregator-sourced figure, treat the exact decimal as indicative rather than authoritative until cross-checked against Clarivate's own JCR platform, and note that a journal's JIF is only ever one input into assessing where to submit or how to read a single paper's citation context -- not a substitute for reading the paper itself.</p>

ByCASRAI Editorial Board

· Last updated 23 Jul 2026

Worked examples

Is an instance

A pollution-monitoring researcher deciding between ESPR and a competing environmental-chemistry journal checks the current JCR entry for each rather than relying on a remembered figure, since JIF is recalculated and re-released annually and can move meaningfully year to year -- as ESPR's own trajectory shows.

Is an instance

A hiring or tenure committee reviewing a candidate's ESPR publication cites the journal's JIF only as one contextual data point alongside the specific paper's own citation count, in line with DORA's recommendation against using a journal-level metric as a proxy for a single article's quality.

Looks similar, but isn't

Not an instance

Treating ESPR's JIF as a fixed, permanent number is incorrect -- JCR recalculates and republishes it annually, and, as shown above, this journal's own reported figure has moved in both directions across recent release years.

Not an instance

Using ESPR's JIF alone to judge an individual article published in the journal is a misapplication of the metric -- JIF is a journal-level average of citations to recent articles, not a per-article score; DORA and CoARA both explicitly recommend against this substitution.

Environmental Science and Pollution Research (ESPR), ISSN 0944-1344 (print) / 1614-7499 (electronic), is a Springer (Springer Nature) journal publishing peer-reviewed research on environmental chemistry, ecotoxicology, pollution monitoring, and related environmental-science subfields. Like any journal indexed in Clarivate’s Journal Citation Reports (JCR), it receives an annual Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — a ratio of citations in a given year to citable items the journal published in the two preceding years.

What the reported figures show

Third-party JCR-tracking sites that aggregate and republish Clarivate’s JCR data (Research.com, BioxBio, Resurchify) report ESPR’s JIF climbing over the 2010s and early 2020s — from around 2.6 in the 2012 JCR release to approximately 5.8 for the 2022 data year — before declining to a reported figure near 5.59 for the 2024 data year (2025 JCR release). These figures were not independently re-verified against a live jcr.clarivate.com subscription in this session and should be treated as reported/aggregator-tier rather than primary-source-confirmed; the exact decimal can also vary slightly between aggregators depending on when each last refreshed its cache. Readers who need a citation-defensible figure for a specific use (funding application, promotion file, journal-comparison decision) should pull the current number directly from Clarivate’s JCR platform or the publisher’s own journal metrics page rather than relying on an aggregator snapshot.

Why the number moves

A journal’s JIF is recalculated every year from a fresh two-year citation window, so it is expected to fluctuate with publication volume, field citation norms, and the specific cohort of articles the ratio is drawn from in any given release — a rise or fall in one release year is not, by itself, evidence of a change in editorial quality. Editors and publishers increasingly point to this normal year-to-year variability, and to the well-documented broader problems with using JIF as an assessment shortcut (see below), when discussing any single year’s movement.

Using ESPR’s JIF responsibly

Whatever the current number, the same field-wide cautions that apply to any journal’s JIF apply here. The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) and the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) both recommend against using a journal-level metric like JIF as a proxy for the quality of an individual article or the researcher who wrote it — a highly cited article in a lower-JIF journal, or a rarely cited article in a high-JIF one, are both common and expected outcomes of how citation distributions actually work within any journal. For a full explanation of the JIF calculation and its documented limitations across fields, see the general Journal Impact Factor entry. Researchers comparing ESPR against alternative outlets, or wanting a metric less sensitive to a two-year citation window, may also want to look at CiteScore, Elsevier/Scopus’s four-year-window equivalent, alongside JIF rather than in place of it.

Use in your systems

JATS XML <role> element

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Schema.org DefinedTerm (JSON-LD)

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