Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A researcher citing IEEE Access as 'Journal Impact Factor 4.2 (2025 JCR)', naming the data year and source rather than a bare number.
- Is an instance
An author comparing IEEE Access only with journals in the same JCR category and data year, not across unrelated fields.
Editorial commentary
Quick answer: IEEE Access lists an impact factor of 4.2 from the 2025 Journal Citation Reports (JCR), alongside a CiteScore of 9.3 from 2025 Scopus data. Both figures are taken from the journal’s bibliometrics page, checked on 29 October 2026. They are two different metrics from two different vendors, so never quote one as if it were the other.
What is the IEEE Access impact factor?
The Journal Impact Factor is a journal-level ratio that Clarivate publishes each year in Journal Citation Reports. IEEE Access states 4.2 for the 2025 JCR on its own bibliometrics page; its About page repeats the same 4.2 without a data year. Because Clarivate issues a new value every June, the number belongs to a data year, not to the journal permanently. Cite it as “IEEE Access, Journal Impact Factor 4.2 (2025 JCR)”.
How is it calculated?
Citations received in the JCR data year to the items the journal published in the two preceding years, divided by the number of citable items (articles and reviews) from those two years. IEEE Access is a multidisciplinary journal whose scope covers all IEEE fields of interest, so the figure is a single average across very different fields with very different citation habits. It describes the journal as a whole and says nothing about any one paper in it.
Impact factor versus CiteScore
The 9.3 CiteScore on the same page comes from Scopus (Elsevier), uses a different citation window and a different set of document types, and is a separate number from the Clarivate impact factor. See CiteScore for how it is built. A 4.2 and a 9.3 for the same journal are not a contradiction.
IEEE Access quartile
A JCR quartile is assigned per Web of Science category and per data year, so one journal can sit in different quartiles in different categories. The journal’s bibliometrics page does not give a quartile. To find it, open the journal’s entry in JCR and read the rank within each listed category for the year you need; the impact factor look-up guide walks through the steps.
Is IEEE Access a good journal?
Whether a venue suits a paper depends on the field, the funder’s and institution’s assessment rules, and the paper itself, so a single number cannot answer it. What the journal’s bibliometrics page does state is where it is tracked: Web of Science (Science Citation Index Expanded and Current Contents/Engineering, Computing and Technology), JCR Science Edition, Scopus, DOAJ, Ei Compendex, IET Inspec, EBSCOhost and Google Scholar. The About page describes a binary peer review model, in which a paper is accepted or rejected with feedback, and a scope that includes multidisciplinary and applied work, negative results and surveys of emerging fields.
IEEE Access review time
The About page gives “Submission to Publication: 4 to 6 Weeks”. That is the span from submission to publication, not the time to a first decision, and sites that quote it as a review time are conflating the two.
IEEE Access APC
The journal’s article processing charge page lists US$2,160 per article, plus applicable local taxes, with no page limit and no over-length charge (checked 29 October 2026). It lists discounts that cannot be combined: 5% when the corresponding author is an IEEE member, 20% when that member also belongs to an IEEE Society (student and graduate student members are excluded), and a waiver for authors who are all in World Bank low-income countries. APCs change over time; older pages quote lower amounts, so confirm the figure on the IEEE Access APC page. For the general concept see article processing charges in open access.
Using the number responsibly
The impact factor is an average over a whole journal, and a mega-journal averages over an especially wide spread of topics. Use it only to compare journals in the same JCR category and the same data year, always state both, and do not use it to judge an individual article or author. The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) sets out this position.
Sources
- IEEE Access, About (https://ieeeaccess.ieee.org/about/), checked 29 October 2026.
- IEEE Access, Bibliometrics (https://ieeeaccess.ieee.org/about/bibliometrics/), checked 29 October 2026.
- IEEE Access, Article Processing Charges (https://ieeeaccess.ieee.org/about/article-processing-charges/), checked 29 October 2026.
Clarivate refreshes JCR every June, so check the current value before citing.
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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