JAMA Network Impact Factor: No Single Figure

JAMA Network Impact Factor: Why There’s No Single Figure

JAMA Network's Impact Factor is not a single figure: JAMA Network is the American Medical Association's family of 13 peer-reviewed journals (including flagship JAMA and the open-access JAMA Network Open), and Clarivate assigns a Journal Citation Reports (JCR) Journal Impact Factor separately to each individual title, not to the family as a whole. Neither the AMA nor Clarivate publishes a blended or family-wide figure; any source quoting one number for 'JAMA Network' has either mislabelled a single member journal's figure or invented the number. A searcher wanting a specific figure must specify which of the 13 journals -- JAMA, JAMA Network Open, JAMA Cardiology, JAMA Dermatology, JAMA Health Forum, JAMA Internal Medicine, JAMA Neurology, JAMA Oncology, JAMA Ophthalmology, JAMA Otolaryngology-Head & Neck Surgery, JAMA Pediatrics, JAMA Psychiatry, or JAMA Surgery -- they mean, then look that title up directly at jamanetwork.com or in the JCR (jcr.clarivate.com).

ByCASRAI Editorial Board

· Last updated 7 Aug 2026

Ask about JAMA Network Impact Factor: Why There’s No Single Figure

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Worked examples

Is an instance

A researcher wants to know if their forthcoming paper's target journal, JAMA Psychiatry, has a strong Impact Factor. Because JAMA Psychiatry is one of the 13 JAMA Network titles with its own separately computed JCR entry, they look up 'JAMA Psychiatry' specifically -- either on the journal's own page at jamanetwork.com or in Clarivate's Journal Citation Reports -- rather than searching for a 'JAMA Network' figure that does not exist.

Is an instance

A CV or grant-report line reads 'published in a JAMA Network journal, Impact Factor 65.4' without naming which journal. This is not verifiable as written: the 65.4-range figure reported by third-party JCR trackers for the 2025 data year (2026 JCR release) applies to flagship JAMA specifically, not to 'JAMA Network' generally -- the correct citation names the actual journal (e.g. JAMA Network Open, JAMA Internal Medicine) and its own figure.

Looks similar, but isn't

Not an instance

A source stating 'JAMA Network's Impact Factor is 12.4' (or any single number) as though it applies to the whole family is incorrect by construction -- Clarivate computes and publishes a JIF per ISSN-registered journal, never a combined figure across a publisher's journal list, so no such single number exists to quote.

There is no single “JAMA Network Impact Factor.” JAMA Network is a publisher family, not a journal — it is the American Medical Association’s (AMA) group of 13 peer-reviewed medical journals, and Clarivate assigns a Journal Impact Factor (JIF) separately to each individual title in its annual Journal Citation Reports (JCR). A search for “JAMA Network impact factor” has no single correct answer; the correct answer depends entirely on which of the 13 journals you mean.

What JAMA Network actually is

JAMA Network is the collective name for the family of journals published by the American Medical Association. It includes the flagship title JAMA (The Journal of the American Medical Association), the open-access general-medicine journal JAMA Network Open, and a set of specialty journals covering fields such as cardiology, dermatology, internal medicine, neurology, oncology, ophthalmology, otolaryngology, pediatrics, psychiatry, surgery, and health policy. Each journal has its own editorial board, its own scope, its own ISSN, and — critically for this page — its own Impact Factor. The family name is a publisher/branding umbrella, the same relationship a publisher like Elsevier or Springer Nature has to the individual journals it publishes; nobody would ask for “the Elsevier Impact Factor” as a single number, and the same logic applies here.

Why there is no family-wide figure

Clarivate computes the JIF at the level of an individual, ISSN-registered serial publication: citations recorded in the JCR data year to that journal’s citable items from the two preceding years, divided by the number of citable items that journal published in those two years. Clarivate does not aggregate that calculation across a publisher’s whole journal list, and neither the AMA nor Clarivate publishes a blended or averaged figure for “JAMA Network” as a unit. Any source that quotes one number for the entire family is either quoting a single member journal’s figure and mislabelling it as the family’s, or has invented the number outright. This is the same confusion CASRAI has documented for other multi-journal publisher families — see the correction for what happened to Hindawi’s Impact Factor for a comparable case where a publisher-level figure doesn’t exist and per-title lookup is the only accurate answer.

The 13 JAMA Network journals

As of 2026, the JAMA Network family comprises:

JAMA (JAMA — The Journal of the American Medical Association)
JAMA Network Open
JAMA Cardiology
JAMA Dermatology
JAMA Health Forum
JAMA Internal Medicine
JAMA Neurology
JAMA Oncology
JAMA Ophthalmology
JAMA Otolaryngology-Head & Neck Surgery
JAMA Pediatrics
JAMA Psychiatry
JAMA Surgery

Every title on this list is indexed separately in Web of Science and receives its own JIF entry in the JCR, its own quartile ranking within its subject category, and its own five-year JIF.

Figures CASRAI can verify, and figures it cannot

Impact Factors change every year with each new JCR release, and third-party trackers frequently disagree with each other or lag the official Clarivate release, so CASRAI does not publish a full per-journal table here from secondary sources. Two figures are worth flagging with their caveats:

JAMA — multiple third-party JCR-tracking services report a 2025 data-year figure (2026 JCR release) in the mid-60s, down substantially from the low triple digits reported for the 2022-2023 data years. That large swing is consistent with a well-documented, publisher-wide pattern: JIFs across major medical journals spiked when 2020-2021 COVID-19 papers drove an unusual citation surge, then fell as those citations aged out of the two-year JIF window. This is reported, not CASRAI-verified directly against jcr.clarivate.com, and should be confirmed there before formal citation.
JAMA Network Open — see CASRAI’s dedicated page, JAMA Network Open’s Journal Impact Factor, which tracks this specific journal’s figure release-by-release with the same sourcing caveat.

For every other title in the family — JAMA Cardiology, JAMA Internal Medicine, JAMA Pediatrics, JAMA Psychiatry, JAMA Oncology, JAMA Neurology, JAMA Surgery, JAMA Dermatology, JAMA Ophthalmology, JAMA Otolaryngology-Head & Neck Surgery, and JAMA Health Forum — CASRAI has not independently verified a current figure and will not publish an estimate. Use the lookup method below instead of a secondary-source number, particularly since a new JCR release (typically issued each June) can move any of these figures materially.

How to look up a specific JAMA Network journal’s Impact Factor

Go to the journal’s own page, not the family homepage. Each JAMA Network title publishes its current JIF on its “About” or “Journal Information” page at jamanetwork.com — for example, jamanetworkopen.com or the equivalent page for JAMA Psychiatry, JAMA Oncology, and so on.
Check the JCR directly if you have institutional access. Journal Citation Reports (jcr.clarivate.com) is the primary source Clarivate itself publishes from; searching the exact journal title there returns the authoritative current JIF, five-year JIF, and JCR quartile.
Note the JCR release year, not just the number. A figure is only meaningful paired with which data year and release it comes from — “2025 JIF (2026 JCR release)” is a complete citation; “JAMA’s Impact Factor is X” with no year attached is not verifiable and should not be treated as current.
Do not average or sum figures across journals. There is no valid way to combine 13 separately computed JIFs into one “JAMA Network” number; any such combined figure is not a Clarivate output.

JAMA Network vs. JAMA Network Open

These are two different things and are frequently confused. JAMA Network is the publisher family of 13 journals described above. JAMA Network Open is one specific journal within that family — an open-access, general-medicine title launched in 2018 — with its own Impact Factor, distinct from flagship JAMA’s and from every other specialty title’s. If you were looking specifically for JAMA Network Open’s current figure, see JAMA Network Open’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF). If you were looking for the flagship journal, search specifically for “JAMA impact factor,” not “JAMA Network impact factor” — the family name alone will not return a single correct figure because, as above, none exists.

Related terms

See also CASRAI’s entries on the predatory journal concept and the Hindawi Impact Factor correction for other cases where a publisher-level figure is commonly assumed to exist but does not.

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