Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A CV entry reading 'IJMS, Impact Factor 5.6 (2025 JCR release), Q1 Biochemistry & Molecular Biology' — figure tagged to its release year and category rank.
- Is an instance
A research office comparing IJMS's 2-year JIF (~5.6) against its 5-year JIF (~6.3) to judge citation-trend stability before recommending it as a submission venue.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
Citing 'IJMS Impact Factor 4.9' with no release year attached — 4.9 was an earlier JCR-release figure, not the current one, and high-volume journals like IJMS can move more between releases than lower-volume titles.
Editorial commentary
The figure most people arrive here for is 5.6. That is the two-year Journal Impact Factor for the International Journal of Molecular Sciences for the 2025 JCR data year, published in Clarivate’s Journal Citation Reports release of 17 June 2026. The journal’s five-year Impact Factor for the same release is 6.3, and it sits in Quartile 1 (Q1) of the Biochemistry & Molecular Biology category, ranked around 72 of 319 titles. Every one of those numbers belongs to that one release and will be restated when JCR updates again in June 2027.
If someone told you 4.9, they were reading the previous release
The commonest error on this specific journal is a figure that is not wrong so much as out of date. 4.9 was the IJMS Impact Factor in the preceding cycle – 2024 citation data, issued June 2025 – and it is still cached across a very large number of metric-tracker pages that have not been refreshed since. Both numbers are real; only one is current.
The ambiguity is made worse by how the question is usually typed. “IJMS impact factor 2025” can mean either the 2025 data year or the 2025 release, and those are different figures a full year apart. Clarivate’s own convention is to label a release by its data year, so under that convention the “2025 Impact Factor” is 5.6 (released June 2026) and the “2024 Impact Factor” is 4.9 (released June 2025). Whenever you write the number down – in a CV, a submission rationale, a departmental report – write the data year next to it. A bare “IF 5.6” is unfalsifiable a year later.
The abbreviation: Int. J. Mol. Sci.
The journal’s ISO 4 abbreviated title is Int. J. Mol. Sci. – the form used by Clarivate, by the ISSN register, and in reference lists that abbreviate journal names. PubMed and Vancouver-style references drop the full stops and render it Int J Mol Sci. The journal is online-only, with e-ISSN 1422-0067.
This matters more than it sounds when you are trying to find the metric: JCR, Scopus and most library discovery layers index the journal under the abbreviated form, so searching the full title in a database that stores the abbreviation is a common reason people conclude, incorrectly, that a journal is not indexed.
Publisher, scope and what publishing there costs
IJMS is published by MDPI and is fully gold open access – there is no subscription route, so every accepted paper carries an article processing charge, listed by MDPI at USD 2,490 as of August 2026. MDPI revises APCs periodically, so confirm the current rate on the journal page before budgeting a grant line against it.
Scope covers molecular biology, biochemistry, molecular biophysics, molecular medicine and chemistry addressed at the molecular level. It is a mega-journal, publishing well over ten thousand articles a year, and that scale is directly relevant to reading its Impact Factor: with a denominator that large, the JIF is a broad average across an extremely heterogeneous body of work. It describes the journal’s aggregate two-year citation behaviour and tells you very little about how any individual paper in it was received. MDPI also publishes its own turnaround statistics on the journal page – reported for the first half of 2026 as a median of roughly 17.5 days from submission to first decision and 2.9 days from acceptance to publication. Those are the publisher’s self-reported operational figures, not Clarivate metrics, and should be cited as such.
How to check the current number yourself
There are only two sources worth treating as authoritative: jcr.clarivate.com, which is the metric’s actual home but is subscription-gated and normally reached through an institutional library login, and the publisher’s own journal page, which MDPI keeps current and which is free to read. Aggregator and journal-metrics sites are useful for spotting that a number has changed, but they lag the June release by weeks to months and frequently disagree with one another over the decimal – which is exactly how a superseded 4.9 stays in circulation. Our step-by-step walkthrough of the lookup is in how to check a journal’s impact factor in JCR, and the ranking system is explained in journal impact factor and quartile rankings.
What the quartile actually tells you
Q1 means the journal falls in the top 25% of titles in its assigned JCR category by Impact Factor – here, Biochemistry & Molecular Biology. It is a within-category rank, so it is only meaningful against the category named alongside it. A Q1 placement in a large, densely cited category such as this one is a different achievement from Q1 in a small category with a handful of titles, and quartiles from Clarivate’s JCR categories are not interchangeable with the quartiles reported by SCImago Journal Rank, which uses a different subject taxonomy and a different underlying database.
Why the number alone settles very little
The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) and the CoARA coalition both advise against using a journal-level average as a proxy for the quality of a single article or the merit of its authors – and IJMS, given its publication volume, is close to a worked demonstration of why. If you are assessing a candidate’s IJMS paper, the paper’s own citation record, its methods, and its independent replication history are all better evidence than the journal’s two-year average. If you are choosing where to submit, the JIF is one input alongside scope fit, turnaround time, cost and audience. And if you are comparing IJMS against a journal quoted with a CiteScore, stop: that is an Elsevier/Scopus metric on a four-year window with a different denominator, and the two are not comparable figures – see CiteScore vs Journal Impact Factor.
Related terms
- Journal Impact Factor (JIF) – the general metric this page illustrates with one journal’s figure.
- Journal Citation Reports (JCR) – the Clarivate product the figure is released in each June.
- MDPI – the journal’s publisher.
- Is MDPI peer reviewed or predatory? – the question most readers checking an MDPI journal’s metric are really asking.
- Article processing charge (APC) – the cost model behind gold open access.
- Journal Citation Indicator (JCI) – Clarivate’s field-normalised companion metric.
- Scientific Reports’ Journal Impact Factor – another high-volume open-access mega-journal for comparison.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does IJMS stand for, and how is it abbreviated in citations?
IJMS is the common short form of the journal’s full title, International Journal of Molecular Sciences. Its ISO 4 abbreviation – the form used by Clarivate, the ISSN register and abbreviated reference lists – is Int. J. Mol. Sci., and PubMed/Vancouver-style references drop the full stops to render it Int J Mol Sci.
What is the International Journal of Molecular Sciences’ current Impact Factor?
5.6, the two-year Journal Impact Factor for the 2025 JCR data year, published in Clarivate’s Journal Citation Reports release of 17 June 2026. The five-year Impact Factor from the same release is 6.3.
Why do some sites still show IJMS’s Impact Factor as 4.9?
4.9 was the Impact Factor from the previous JCR cycle – 2024 citation data, released June 2025 – and it remains cached on metric-tracker pages that haven’t been refreshed since the June 2026 update. Both figures are genuine; only 5.6 is current.
Is the International Journal of Molecular Sciences indexed in Journal Citation Reports?
Yes. Clarivate’s Journal Citation Reports covers IJMS and reports both its two-year and five-year Impact Factor, along with its category ranking in Biochemistry & Molecular Biology.
What does IJMS’s Q1 ranking mean?
Q1 means the journal falls in the top 25% of titles in its assigned JCR category by Impact Factor. For IJMS that category is Biochemistry & Molecular Biology, where it ranks around 72 of 319 titles – a within-category rank that isn’t directly comparable to quartiles in other categories or from other databases.
Is IJMS’s Impact Factor the same as its CiteScore?
No. CiteScore is an Elsevier/Scopus metric calculated over a four-year citation window with a different denominator than Clarivate’s Impact Factor, so the two figures aren’t directly comparable. See CiteScore vs Journal Impact Factor for the full comparison.
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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