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.
Editorial commentary
The New England Journal of Medicine’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). NEJM is owned and published by the Massachusetts Medical Society and has appeared continuously since 1812, making its publication history one of the longest of any medical journal still in circulation.
What the number actually measures
The JIF is a ratio: citations received in a given JCR data year to a journal’s citable items (articles and reviews) published in the two preceding years, divided by the number of those citable items. NEJM (ISSN 0028-4793 print, 1533-4406 online) is indexed in Clarivate’s Science Citation Index Expanded and receives its own JIF on that basis, computed the same mechanical way as every other JCR-indexed title, regardless of the journal’s age, prestige, or article volume.
A note on the current figure
Third-party JCR-tracking aggregators report NEJM’s 2-year JIF in the high-70s to mid-80s range for recent releases — figures seen include roughly 78.5 and roughly 84.5, both described by different aggregator pages as the ‘current’ or ‘2025’ impact factor, with the two figures attributed inconsistently to the 2025 versus 2026 JCR release. A reported 5-year JIF near 84.9 also appears across trackers. These aggregator figures do not fully agree with one another, which is typical when different JCR releases or caching lags are being reflected, and NEJM’s own journal-information page returned an access-restricted response during verification, so it was not independently confirmed against a single primary source at the time of writing. 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.
Worked example
If NEJM published 350 citable items across two preceding years, and those items collectively received 28,000 citations in the JCR data year, the resulting JIF would be 28,000 / 350 = 80.0 — the same arithmetic Clarivate applies to every JCR-indexed journal, from a small society title to a long-running general-medicine flagship like this one. What differs is the citation and publication volume feeding the ratio, not the formula itself. NEJM’s comparatively low annual output of citable items relative to its very high citation counts is part of why its JIF sits far above most other journals, including other high-profile general-medicine titles.
Why the figure runs so high, and what it doesn’t tell you
NEJM’s JIF is consistently among the highest of any journal indexed by Clarivate, general-medicine or otherwise. A high JIF reflects that NEJM’s published articles are, on average, cited frequently within the two-year citation window — it does not mean every individual article is highly cited, nor that articles published in NEJM are inherently more rigorous than articles published elsewhere. Per DORA (San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment) and CoARA’s responsible-assessment guidance, journal-level metrics like the JIF should not be used as a substitute for evaluating the actual content of a specific paper, or the contributions of a specific researcher, in hiring, promotion, or funding decisions.
Related terms
- Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — the general metric this page illustrates with one journal’s current figure.
- Nature’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — another single-journal illustrative instance.
- Nature Medicine’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — another general/internal-medicine-adjacent single-journal instance.
- Cell’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — another single-journal illustrative instance, for comparison across fields.
- Journal of Clinical Investigation’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — another clinical-research single-journal instance.
- 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.
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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