Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A political science scholar reviewing The Journal of Politics impact factor (3.2 JIF, 4.7 five-year JIF) alongside Scopus metrics when evaluating target venues for an empirical comparative politics manuscript.
- Is an instance
A tenure committee evaluating a political science dossier and consulting JOP indexing in the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) while following DORA recommendations to assess article content directly rather than relying on journal-level metrics.
Editorial commentary
Quick answer: The Journal of Politics (JOP) is a peer-reviewed general-interest journal established in 1939 and published quarterly by the University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Southern Political Science Association (SPSA). While the official proprietary Journal of Politics impact factor is published behind subscription paywalls in Clarivate’s Journal Citation Reports (JCR) under the Social Sciences Citation Index, open bibliometric tracking via OpenAlex records a 2-year mean citedness of 4.55, an h-index of 245, and more than 312,000 career citations for political science scholarship.
What Is the Journal of Politics?
The Journal of Politics is the oldest regional political science journal in the United States, founded in 1939 as the flagship publication of the Southern Political Science Association. In January 2015, the University of Chicago Press assumed publication of JOP on behalf of the association. Crossref metadata confirms more than 12,400 registered journal articles under ISSN 0022-3816 (electronic ISSN 1468-2508). The journal publishes quarterly across all primary subfields of political inquiry, including comparative politics, international relations, formal political theory, methodology, and public policy. The editorial leadership is headed by Co-Editors-in-Chief Timothy Hellwig and Timothy P. Nokken, whose terms formally began on January 1, 2025.
Journal of Politics Impact Factor and Citation Metrics
The proprietary jop impact factor is calculated by Clarivate using a strict formula: the total citations received in a given calendar year to citable research articles published during the preceding two calendar years, divided by the number of citable items published in that two-year window. Because Clarivate JCR and Elsevier CiteScore are proprietary subscription-gated databases, authors and research administrators must verify specific annual index release numbers through authorized institutional library access.
In open research bibliometrics, the OpenAlex dataset (source ID S95650557) indexes 12,309 research works from The Journal of Politics with 312,244 total citations. OpenAlex measures a 2-year mean citedness of 4.55 and an h-index of 245. Because citation lifecycles in the social sciences mature over longer timelines than laboratory sciences, 5-year evaluation windows and cumulative citation indicators provide a more balanced reflection of sustained scholarly influence than short-term annual journal-level ratios.
Editorial Scope, Peer Review, and Submissions
The Journal of Politics publishes theoretically driven, methodologically rigorous research that appeals to a broad readership across political science. All prospective articles undergo rigorous double-blind peer review. To uphold empirical integrity and scholarly transparency, JOP enforces mandatory data-replication guidelines: authors of accepted quantitative manuscripts must deposit their replication datasets, statistical codebooks, and run scripts in a public repository before final publication, enabling reviewers to verify findings against primary research data.
Responsible Metric Use and DORA Context
In accordance with the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA declaration) and the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA), academic institutions should not use the Journal Impact Factor or any single venue indicator as a proxy for the scientific quality or impact of an individual article. Appointment, tenure, and grant review panels are advised to assess the substantive originality and methodological validity of a scholar’s published work directly rather than evaluating candidates based on journal-level metrics.
Sources
- Southern Political Science Association (SPSA), “Journal of Politics” overview and editorial leadership, https://spsa.net/journal-of-politics/ (verified 2026-11-08).
- Crossref REST API, “The Journal of Politics (ISSN 0022-3816)”, https://api.crossref.org/journals/0022-3816 (verified 2026-11-08).
- OpenAlex API, “The Journal of Politics (Source S95650557)”, https://api.openalex.org/sources/S95650557 (verified 2026-11-08).
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
<role vocab="credit"
vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
vocab-term="Journal of Politics: Overview and Impact Factor"
vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/journal-of-politics" />{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "DefinedTerm",
"@id": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/journal-of-politics",
"name": "Journal of Politics: Overview and Impact Factor",
"identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/journal-of-politics",
"description": "The Journal of Politics (JOP) is a peer-reviewed, general-interest political science journal established in 1939, published quarterly by the University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Southern Political Science Association. It holds a Clarivate Journal Impact Factor of 3.2 (Q1 in Political Science, SSCI) and a 5-year Impact Factor of 4.7.",
"inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/publishing#set",
"url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/journal-of-politics",
"license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
"publisher": {
"@id": "https://casrai.org/#organization"
},
"author": {
"@id": "https://casrai.org/#editorial-team"
},
"datePublished": "2026-11-08T01:03:21",
"dateModified": "2026-11-08T01:13:09",
"inLanguage": "en-GB",
"isAccessibleForFree": true
}
