Nature’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF)

Nature’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 — the flagship, multidisciplinary weekly journal first published in 1869 — is a distinct title from Nature Communications, Scientific Reports, and the 60-plus other journals in the Nature Portfolio published by Springer Nature. Each of those titles is indexed and scored separately by Clarivate, so a JIF reported under one Nature Portfolio journal’s name is never Nature’s own figure, even though all share the “Nature” brand and the same publisher.

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 is indexed in Clarivate’s Science Citation Index Expanded under the Multidisciplinary Sciences JCR category, where it consistently ranks among the highest-scoring titles.

Nature is a peer-reviewed research journal, not solely a magazine, though its weekly issues also carry non-peer-reviewed news, comment, and feature journalism alongside primary research papers — a hybrid format that plausibly explains why “Nature magazine” persists as casual search phrasing even though the JIF applies only to the peer-reviewed research content Clarivate tracks.

Current figure — treat as time-stamped, not fixed

Multiple independent JCR-tracking aggregators report Nature’s 2-year Impact Factor at approximately 56.1 for the most recent JCR release (2025 citation data, released June 2026), up from approximately 48.5 in the prior release (2024 citation data). Several aggregators also note a 2022 peak of roughly 69.5, attributed to a temporary surge of heavily cited COVID-19 research that has since aged out of the two-year citation window. Nature’s own journal-information page on nature.com was not directly reachable during verification (redirected behind an author/subscriber login), so treat this specific number 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/nature/journal-information for the authoritative current figure before citing it formally. As with every JCR-indexed title, Clarivate updates this figure every June, so any specific number, including this one, is a property of a given release, not a fixed property of the journal.

Worked example

If Nature published roughly 850 citable items across two preceding years, and those items collectively received about 47,700 citations in the JCR data year, the resulting JIF would be 47,700 / 850 ≈ 56.1 — the same mechanical calculation Clarivate applies to every JCR-indexed journal, from a single-issue society title to a high-volume mega-journal. What differs between titles is the citation and publication volume feeding the ratio, not the arithmetic itself.

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. Nature’s own selectivity and prestige make this caution especially relevant in practice: because so much weight is informally attached to a “Nature paper,” it is tempting to treat the journal’s JIF as if it described the citation performance of any specific article published there, or of the researchers who wrote it. 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’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. Likewise, a specific highly cited Nature 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, which is exactly the conflation DORA’s guidance warns against. A separate, easy mix-up worth flagging explicitly: Nature Communications’ JIF (currently in the mid-teens) and Scientific Reports’ JIF (currently under 5) are each real, separately computed figures for real Nature Portfolio journals — neither is Nature’s own JIF, despite the shared publisher and shared brand name.

Related terms

• Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — the general metric this page illustrates with one journal’s current figure.
• Nature Communications’ Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — a sister Nature Portfolio title’s separately computed JIF.
• Scientific Reports’ Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — a third Nature Portfolio title’s separately computed JIF.
• Nature Author Contributions — Nature’s own authorship-statement policy, a separate editorial requirement from its JIF.
• 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 vs CoARA — comparing the two major research-assessment reform frameworks.