npj Digital Medicine Impact Factor (2025: 18.0)

The Journal Impact Factor of npj Digital Medicine is the Clarivate-calculated ratio of citations received in a JCR year to the journal's items from the previous two years, divided by the number of those items; the journal reports 18.0 for 2025 (5-year: 19.7).

ByCASRAI Editorial Board

· Last updated 8 Nov 2026

What is npj Digital Medicine?

npj Digital Medicine is, in its own words, an “open access, international, peer-reviewed journal dedicated to publishing the highest quality research relevant to all aspects of digital medicine and health” (journal About page, read 8 November 2026). It is fully open access and charges an article-processing charge to authors. It belongs to the npj series of Nature Portfolio, published by Springer Nature. See open access for how that publishing model works in general.

What is the npj Digital Medicine impact factor?

The “npj digital med impact factor” most searchers want is the 2-year Journal Impact Factor: 18.0 (2025). The journal lists the 5-year figure alongside it: 19.7 (2025). Both come from Clarivate’s Journal Citation Reports (JCR) and are reproduced by the publisher; the JCR itself is subscription-only.

How the number is calculated

The metrics page quotes Clarivate’s definition: all citations to the journal in the current JCR year to items published in the previous two years, divided by the total number of scholarly items (articles, reviews and proceedings papers) published in the journal in those two years. Clarivate notes it is not a strict mathematical average but a functional approximation of the mean citation rate per citable item. The 5-year version applies the same logic to a five-year window. For the contrast with Scopus-based measures, see CiteScore vs impact factor.

Other metrics the journal reports

All values below are as listed on the journal’s metrics page for 2025 (read 8 November 2026); the definitions of the Clarivate measures are Clarivate’s, quoted there.

Metric	Value (2025)	What it measures
Journal Impact Factor	18.0	Citations in the JCR year to the previous two years’ items, per item
5-year Journal Impact Factor	19.7	Same, over a five-year window
Immediacy Index	2.9	Average citations to articles in the year they are published
Eigenfactor Score	0.04123	Five-year citations weighted by the influence of the citing journals; journal self-citation removed
Article Influence Score	5.375	Average influence of a journal’s articles over their first five years
SNIP	4.495	Source Normalized Impact per Paper
SCImago Journal Rank (SJR)	4.215	SCImago’s citation-based journal ranking metric
Median days, submission to first editorial decision	10	Until the paper is sent for review or rejected
Median days, submission to acceptance	144	Includes peer review and any revision time

The speed rows are publisher-reported medians, not a promise for any one submission. For how SJR differs from the impact factor, see impact factor vs SJR.

Is npj Digital Medicine Scopus indexed?

Yes, according to the journal. Its About page (read 8 November 2026) lists SCOPUS among the abstracting and indexing services it names, alongside Science Citation Index Expanded, PubMed Central and SCImago. The metrics page also reports SNIP and SJR, which are Scopus-derived measures. This is the journal’s own statement; Elsevier’s Scopus Sources list is the authoritative record, so check the title there and note the date if you need to cite coverage.

What is the impact factor of PLOS Digital Health or NPJ Viruses?

npj Viruses: its journal metrics page (nature.com/npjviruses/journal-impact, read 8 November 2026) shows a Journal Impact Factor of 3.5 (2025) and a 5-year Journal Impact Factor of 3.5 (2025), with SNIP 0.799 and SJR 1.131 for 2025. Median time from submission to first editorial decision is 12 days and to acceptance 112 days.

PLOS Digital Health: PLOS does not publish a Journal Impact Factor on the journal’s information page (journals.plos.org/digitalhealth/s/journal-information, read 8 November 2026). It states that its journals have metrics including article-level metrics, SJR, CiteScore and h-index, and that PLOS does not consider the impact factor a reliable measure of individual articles but provides it on request. So the figure is not quoted here; use the JCR or PLOS’s journal metrics page and name the data year. The same page lists Scopus and Web of Science among the services indexing the journal. See also the CASRAI guide PLOS Digital Health.

Using the figure responsibly

Journal-level, not article-level. The number describes the journal’s recent citation rate, not the quality of any one paper.
Outliers matter. Springer Nature, a DORA signatory, states on the metrics page that a small number of highly cited articles can have an outsized influence on the 2-year Journal Impact Factor, and that these measures are not necessarily measures of journal quality.
Use a range of metrics. The publisher says authors and readers should consider a range of metrics, including article-level downloads, citations and online attention.
Cite the year and source. Write “Journal Impact Factor 18.0 (JCR 2025)”, not just “impact factor 18”.

Sources

npj Digital Medicine, Journal metrics, nature.com/npjdigitalmed/journal-impact, read 8 November 2026.
npj Digital Medicine, About the journal, nature.com/npjdigitalmed/about, read 8 November 2026.

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