Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A researcher checking the Journal of Neuroscience's current JCR entry against a competing SfN-adjacent title's separately computed JIF before comparing relative citation impact, while treating the comparison as journal-level only, not a ranking of individual articles.
- Is an instance
A grants or communications office noting in an internal metrics reference that the Journal of Neuroscience is Science Citation Index Expanded-indexed and therefore receives an annual JIF from Clarivate, distinct from Scopus's CiteScore for the same journal, which uses a different citation window and denominator.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
Citing a single Journal of Neuroscience impact-factor figure pulled from an aggregator site as if it were the current, authoritative number without noting which JCR release year it reflects -- aggregator figures for this journal have shifted materially year to year and diverge from one another.
- Not an instance
Confusing the Journal of Neuroscience's JIF with Neuron's -- Neuron is a separate Cell Press title from a different publisher (Elsevier/Cell Press, not the Society for Neuroscience) with its own distinct JCR entry and citation history; the two journals cover overlapping subject matter but are not the same publication and do not share an impact factor.
- Not an instance
Using the Journal of Neuroscience's JIF to argue that a specific article it published is more rigorous or important than a comparable article in a lower-JIF journal -- the JIF is a journal-level average, not an article-level or author-level quality measure, per DORA.
Editorial commentary
The Journal of Neuroscience’s 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). The Journal of Neuroscience — often abbreviated JNeurosci or J Neurosci in citation style — is the flagship peer-reviewed research journal of the Society for Neuroscience (SfN), a US-based scholarly society, and has published weekly since 1981.
What the number actually measures
The JIF is a ratio: citations received in a given JCR data year to a journal’s citable items (articles and reviews) published in the two preceding years, divided by the number of those citable items. The Journal of Neuroscience (ISSN 0270-6474 print, 1529-2401 online) 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, independent of the journal’s age, reputation, or publication volume.
The current figure, and why it has moved
Aggregator trackers that mirror JCR data — bioxbio.com and Wikipedia’s infobox, which cites JCR directly — agree on a 2024 JIF of approximately 4.0 for the Journal of Neuroscience. That figure has declined over the past decade: the same trackers report a peak near 6.7-6.9 around 2012-2013, with a fairly steady drift downward since. This kind of multi-year JIF compression is not unique to this journal; it has been observed across a number of established neuroscience and biomedical titles over the same period, alongside a general expansion in the number of journals competing for citations. Because JCR is republished every June, always check jcr.clarivate.com (subscription-gated) or the journal’s own page at jneurosci.org for the current, release-dated number rather than treating any single aggregator figure as fixed — this matters most when the number is going into a CV, grant application, or tenure file.
Not to be confused with Neuron
The Journal of Neuroscience is frequently searched for, and occasionally confused with, Neuron — a separate, similarly-named neuroscience journal published by Cell Press (an imprint of Elsevier), not by the Society for Neuroscience. The two journals cover overlapping subject matter and both publish high-volume neuroscience research, but they are distinct publications with separate ISSNs, separate editorial boards, and separate, independently computed JCR entries. Neuron’s impact factor has historically run substantially higher than the Journal of Neuroscience’s. When comparing citation metrics between the two, confirm which journal a given figure actually refers to before citing it — see the dedicated Neuron Journal Impact Factor entry for that journal’s own figure and sourcing.
Why this matters for research assessment
Per the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) and the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA), journal-level metrics like the JIF should not be used as a substitute for evaluating the quality of an individual article or the researcher who wrote it. A neuroscience researcher’s publication in the Journal of Neuroscience says something about where the paper was placed, not, on its own, about the rigor or impact of that specific paper. See the general Journal Impact Factor entry for the full mechanics of the metric and its documented limitations.
Related terms
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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