Nature Communications’ Journal Impact Factor (JIF)

Nature Communications' Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is the Clarivate-computed, journal-level citation ratio Nature Communications receives each year in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) -- citations in the JCR data year to the journal's citable items from the two preceding years, divided by that item count. As of the 2024 JCR data year (2025 release), Nature Communications' reported 2-year Impact Factor was 15.7 (5-year: 17.2), placing it in JCR Quartile 1; Clarivate updates this figure every June, so treat the number as time-stamped to a specific release, not a fixed property of the journal. Per DORA (San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment) and CoARA guidance, this journal-level figure should not be used as a proxy for the quality of any individual article published in the journal or the merit of its authors.

ByCASRAI Editorial Board

· Last updated 23 Jul 2026

Worked examples

Is an instance

A researcher checking Nature Communications' current 2-year JIF (15.7 per the 2024 JCR data year / 2025 release) before deciding where to submit a manuscript, understanding this figure sits alongside CiteScore and quartile ranking rather than replacing them.

Is an instance

A librarian working through the worked-example calculation (total citations to the journal's prior-two-years' citable items, divided by that item count) to explain to faculty how any journal -- Nature Communications included -- arrives at its published JIF.

Looks similar, but isn't

Not an instance

Citing Nature Communications' CiteScore (a separate Elsevier/Scopus metric, four-year window) as if it were the journal's Clarivate JIF -- they are different metrics from different organizations with different windows and denominators.

Not an instance

Describing a single highly cited Nature Communications article as "having" the journal's JIF -- the metric is computed at the journal level only, not attributable to one article or author, which is exactly the conflation DORA's guidance cautions against.

Nature Communications’ 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). Like every JCR-indexed title, Nature Communications receives its own separate JIF — it is not the same figure as its sister journal Nature, or any other title in the Nature Portfolio — and that figure changes with each annual JCR release.

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 Communications, an open-access, multidisciplinary journal published by Springer Nature since 2010, is indexed in Clarivate’s Science Citation Index Expanded and receives a JIF on that basis.

As reported on Nature Communications’ own journal-information page and corroborated by multiple independent JCR-tracking services, the journal’s 2-year Impact Factor was 15.7 and its 5-year Impact Factor was 17.2, both for the 2024 JCR data year (JCR 2025 release) — placing it in JCR Quartile 1 for its assigned categories. Clarivate releases updated JCR figures every June; treat any specific number, including this one, as time-stamped to that release rather than a fixed property of the journal, and check the journal’s own page or jcr.clarivate.com for the current figure before citing it in a formal context.

Worked example

If Nature Communications published 8,000 citable items across 2022 and 2023, and those items collectively received 125,600 citations during 2024, the resulting 2024 JIF would be 125,600 / 8,000 = 15.7 — the same mechanical calculation Clarivate applies to every journal in JCR, from a single-issue society title to a large multidisciplinary journal like this one. The arithmetic is identical regardless of field or journal size; what differs is the citation and publication volume feeding it.

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. A large multidisciplinary journal’s JIF is heavily shaped by a small number of highly cited papers and by field-level citation norms (life sciences and physics articles accumulate citations faster than mathematics or some social-science subfields), so the same score means different things depending on what is being compared. 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 — a distinction that matters when Nature Communications’ relatively high JIF gets cited in tenure, promotion, or grant-review contexts as if it described any one article published there, rather than the journal’s two-year citation average as a whole.

Counter-example

Nature Communications’ CiteScore (a separate Elsevier/Scopus metric using a four-year citation window and a broader document set) is not the same figure as its JIF, and reporting one as if it were the other is a common sourcing error. Similarly, an individual highly cited article published in Nature Communications does not “have” the journal’s JIF — the metric is computed at the journal level, not the article level, which is precisely the conflation DORA’s guidance warns against.

Related terms

Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — the general metric this page illustrates with one journal’s current figure.
CiteScore — Elsevier/Scopus’s competing journal-level metric, different window and denominator.
h-index — an author-level metric, not a journal-level one.
DORA (San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment) — the reform commitment behind the over-reliance caveat above.
DORA signatory
DORA vs CoARA — comparing the two major research-assessment reform frameworks.

Use in your systems

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