Nature Cancer’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF)

Nature Cancer’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). Nature Cancer is a primary research journal in the Nature Portfolio, published by Springer Nature, launched in January 2020 to cover cancer biology and translational/clinical cancer research. It is a distinct, separately indexed title from Nature, Nature Medicine, Nature Communications, and the 60-plus other Nature Portfolio journals — and, despite the near-identical name, it is also a separate title from Nature Reviews Cancer, an older review-format journal in the Nature Reviews family. A JIF reported under any of those other names is never Nature Cancer’s own figure.

What the number actually measures

The JIF is a ratio: citations received in a given year to citable items (articles and reviews) the journal published in the two preceding years, divided by the number of those citable items. Nature Cancer is indexed in Clarivate’s Science Citation Index Expanded and scored within JCR’s oncology-related categories, where it ranks in the top quartile (Q1) among cancer-research journals. As an open-access primary-research title, the JIF applies only to the peer-reviewed research content Clarivate tracks, not to any editorial or commentary content the journal may also carry.

Current figure — treat as time-stamped, not fixed

Independent JCR-tracking aggregators report Nature Cancer’s 2-year Impact Factor at approximately 14.3 for the JCR release covering 2024 citation data, up from roughly 12.3 the year before. Several of those same aggregators report a further, notably large jump to approximately 28.0 for the most recent JCR release (covering 2025 data, released June 2026) — a near-doubling year over year that is unusual enough to flag explicitly rather than restate as settled fact. Nature Cancer’s own journal-information page on nature.com was not directly reachable during verification (redirected behind an author/subscriber login), so treat both figures as reported and cross-corroborated by secondary JCR-tracking sources rather than independently confirmed against Clarivate or Nature’s own primary page — check jcr.clarivate.com or nature.com/natcancer/journal-information for the authoritative current figure, and treat the size of that year-over-year jump with particular caution, before citing either number formally. As with every JCR-indexed title, Clarivate updates this figure every June, so any specific number, including these, is a property of a given release, not a fixed property of the journal.

Worked example

If Nature Cancer published roughly 140 citable items across two preceding years, and those items collectively received about 2,000 citations in the JCR data year, the resulting JIF would be 2,000 / 140 ≈ 14.3 — the same mechanical calculation Clarivate applies to every JCR-indexed journal. A comparatively young, lower-volume specialist title like Nature Cancer is more exposed to a small number of highly cited papers shifting its JIF sharply from one release to the next than a long-established, high-volume journal would be — part of why large single-year swings are more plausible here than they would be for a more stable, higher-volume title.

Why this number alone is a poor stand-in for quality

Citation-tracking organizations including DORA, the CoARA coalition, and Clarivate itself caution against over-relying on a single journal-level metric to judge an individual article or researcher. That caution is especially relevant for a journal like Nature Cancer, where the Nature brand alone carries prestige signalling that can get informally transferred to any paper published under it, independent of that specific paper’s own citation record. DORA’s core recommendation is not to eliminate the JIF, but to stop using it as a proxy for the quality of a specific paper or the merit of an individual researcher’s work in hiring, tenure, promotion, or grant-review decisions.

Counter-example

Nature Cancer’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. A specific highly cited Nature Cancer paper does not “have” the journal’s JIF — the metric is computed at the journal level only, never the article level — and neither does an individual author who published there. Two further mix-ups are worth flagging by name: Nature Reviews Cancer is a different, review-format journal with its own separately computed and substantially higher JIF (reported at roughly 60 in recent releases), and Cancer Cell and Cancer Discovery are entirely different journals from different publishers (Cell Press/Elsevier and the American Association for Cancer Research, respectively) — none of those figures is Nature Cancer’s own, despite topical overlap and, in Nature Reviews Cancer’s case, an easily confused name.

Related terms

• Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — the general metric this page illustrates with one journal’s current figure.
• Nature’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — the flagship Nature Portfolio title’s separately computed JIF.
• Nature Medicine’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — a sister Nature Portfolio title’s separately computed JIF.
• Nature Communications’ Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — another sister Nature Portfolio title’s separately computed JIF.
• Cancer Cell’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — a different publisher’s journal in the same field, easily confused by topic overlap.
• Cancer Discovery’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — another different publisher’s journal in the same field.
• 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.