Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A biochemistry researcher checking JBC's current JCR entry against a competing society journal's JIF before deciding where to submit a manuscript, using each journal's own current JCR record rather than an older cached aggregator number.
- Is an instance
An author working through the mechanical calculation -- total JCR-data-year citations to JBC's prior-two-years' citable items, divided by that item count -- to explain to a hiring or promotion committee how the reported figure is derived, the same formula Clarivate applies uniformly across JCR-indexed titles.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
Citing JBC's CiteScore (a separate Elsevier/Scopus metric with a four-year citation window and broader document set) as if it were JBC's Clarivate JIF -- the two are computed differently and are not interchangeable.
- Not an instance
Describing one highly cited JBC paper as "having" the journal's impact factor -- the metric is computed at the journal level across all citable items, not for any single article, which is precisely the conflation DORA's guidance warns against.
Editorial commentary
The Journal of Biological Chemistry’s (JBC) Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is a specific, illustrative instance of the general Journal Impact Factor metric published annually by Clarivate in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR). JBC is one of the oldest continuously published biochemistry journals, founded in 1905 and now published by the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB); it moved to a fully open-access publishing model in 2021.
What the number actually measures
The JIF is a ratio: citations received in a given year to a journal’s citable items (articles and reviews) published in the two preceding years, divided by the number of those citable items. JBC (ISSN 0021-9258) is indexed in Clarivate’s Science Citation Index Expanded and receives its own JIF on that basis, computed the same mechanical way as every other JCR-indexed title.
A note on the current figure
Third-party JCR-tracking aggregators report JBC’s 2-year JIF at roughly 4.1 for the 2025 JCR data year (released June 2026), up from roughly 3.76 for the 2024 data year, with a reported 5-year JIF near 4.3 and a JCR Quartile 2 placement in biochemistry and molecular biology. These aggregator figures do not always agree with one another across tracking sites, which is typical when different releases or caching lags are being reflected, and ASBMB’s own jbc.org metrics page was not independently reachable to confirm one authoritative figure at the time of writing. Treat any single number you see cited as time-stamped to a specific JCR release — Clarivate updates JCR every June — and check jcr.clarivate.com or jbc.org directly for the current, release-dated figure before citing it in a formal context such as a CV, grant application, or tenure file.
Worked example
If JBC published 2,000 citable items across two preceding years, and those items collectively received 8,200 citations in the JCR data year, the resulting JIF would be 8,200 / 2,000 = 4.1 — the same arithmetic Clarivate applies to every JCR-indexed journal, from a small society title to a large flagship journal. What differs is the citation and publication volume feeding the ratio, not the formula itself.
Why a large society journal’s JIF can look modest next to a selective flagship title
JBC publishes a high volume of original research across the full breadth of biochemistry and molecular biology rather than curating a small number of high-profile papers, which is a structural reason its JIF sits lower than more selective, narrowly curated journals such as Cell or Nature. A lower JIF in this context reflects editorial scope and acceptance volume as much as it reflects per-article citation performance, which is one reason DORA and CoARA both discourage using JIF alone, or across journals with very different scopes, as a proxy for research quality.
Worked example of the underlying use, and its limit
A hiring committee comparing two candidates who each published in JBC should not treat JBC’s journal-level JIF as a stand-in for either candidate’s individual contribution — the metric describes the journal’s two-year citation average as a whole, not the merit of any one article or author.
Counter-example
JBC’s CiteScore (a separate Elsevier/Scopus metric using a four-year citation window and a broader document set) is not the same figure as its Clarivate JIF, and reporting one as if it were the other is a common sourcing error. Similarly, an individual highly cited article published in JBC does not “have” the journal’s JIF — the metric is computed at the journal level, not the article level.
Related terms
- Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — the general metric this page illustrates with one journal’s current figure.
- Cell’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — another single-journal illustrative instance, a more selective flagship title.
- Nature’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — another single-journal illustrative instance.
- Journal of Clinical Investigation’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — another society-adjacent biomedical journal’s illustrative instance.
- CiteScore — Elsevier/Scopus’s competing journal-level metric, different window and denominator.
- DORA (San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment) — the reform commitment behind the over-reliance caveat above.
- Journal Citation Reports (JCR) — the Clarivate publication that reports JIF annually.
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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