Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A researcher checking NEJM's current JCR entry against JAMA's or The Lancet's separately computed JIF before comparing the relative citation impact of the general-medicine journals they are considering for a manuscript, while treating the comparison as journal-level only.
- Is an instance
A grants office noting in an internal metrics reference that NEJM is Science Citation Index Expanded-indexed and therefore receives an annual JIF from Clarivate, distinct from journal ranking tools like Scopus's CiteScore, which uses a different citation window and denominator.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
Citing a single NEJM impact-factor figure pulled from an aggregator site as if it were the authoritative, current number without noting the JCR release year it reflects -- aggregator figures for NEJM diverge from one another and change with each annual JCR update.
- Not an instance
Using NEJM's high JIF to argue that a specific article published in NEJM is more rigorous or more important than a comparable article published in a lower-JIF journal -- the JIF is a journal-level average, not an article-level or author-level quality measure, per DORA.
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
<role vocab="credit"
vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
vocab-term="New England Journal of Medicine’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF)"
vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/new-england-journal-of-medicine-impact-factor" />{
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"@id": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/new-england-journal-of-medicine-impact-factor",
"name": "New England Journal of Medicine’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF)",
"identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/new-england-journal-of-medicine-impact-factor",
"description": "The New England Journal of Medicine's Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is the Clarivate-computed, journal-level citation ratio the Massachusetts Medical Society's flagship clinical-medicine journal 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. NEJM (ISSN 0028-4793 print, 1533-4406 online) has published continuously since 1812, making it one of the oldest continuously published medical journals in the world, and is indexed in Clarivate's Science Citation Index Expanded, which makes it JIF-eligible. Third-party JCR-tracking aggregators report NEJM's 2-year JIF in the high-70s to mid-80s range for recent releases -- figures cited include roughly 78.5 and roughly 84.5 for figures described as the '2025 impact factor,' attributed inconsistently to the 2025 versus 2026 JCR release across different aggregator pages -- with a reported 5-year JIF near 84.9. These aggregator figures do not agree with one another even when describing what appears to be the same release, and NEJM's own journal-information page was not independently reachable to confirm one authoritative figure at the time of writing (returned an access-restricted response during verification). Treat any single number you see cited as time-stamped to a specific JCR release -- Clarivate updates JCR every June -- and check jcr.clarivate.com or nejm.org directly for the current, release-dated figure before citing it in a formal context such as a CV, grant application, or tenure file. 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 NEJM has published, nor of the researchers who authored it.",
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"dateModified": "2026-08-03T23:01:43",
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