Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
PRL's 2025 Journal Impact Factor of 9.4 counts citations made in 2025 to PRL items published in 2023 and 2024, as published in the June 2026 JCR release.
- Is an instance
APS reports PRL's CiteScore (14.2) alongside its impact factor (9.4); they are separate indexers' metrics and should be cited separately.
Editorial commentary
Quick answer: The Physical Review Letters (PRL) Journal Impact Factor is 9.4 for the 2025 data year, published in Clarivate’s Journal Citation Reports release of 17 June 2026. The American Physical Society (APS) lists it on the journal’s About page as “Journal Impact Factor 9.4”, with the note that all metrics are from 2025 (checked 29 October 2026), and describes it as PRL’s highest ever.
What is the Physical Review Letters impact factor?
It is the Journal Impact Factor that Clarivate assigns each year to Physical Review Letters, the American Physical Society’s flagship journal. APS says PRL welcomes applied, fundamental and interdisciplinary physics research. The figure describes the journal as a whole, not any single paper in it.
Current value and year
The 9.4 figure is the 2025 impact factor, which appears in the JCR edition released in June 2026. Source: APS, “About Physical Review Letters” (journals.aps.org/prl/about) and the APS news item on journal performance metrics and citation reports (June 2026), both checked on 29 October 2026. Always quote the data year with the number: a value labelled “2026” or “current” on an aggregator site may be the 2025 figure under a different label.
How the impact factor is calculated
Clarivate describes the annual JCR impact factor as a ratio between citations and recent citable items published. The numerator is the citations received in the data year to items the journal published in the previous two years; the denominator is the number of citable items from those two years. For the 2025 value, that means citations made during 2025 to PRL items from 2023 and 2024. Clarivate publishes its own account of the metric in its essay on the impact factor (see Sources).
Other metrics APS reports for PRL
The same APS page lists several indicators beside the impact factor, all from 2025:
| Metric | Value reported by APS |
|---|---|
| Journal Impact Factor | 9.4 |
| CiteScore | 14.2 |
| SJR | 2.79 |
| h5-index | 201 |
| Normalized Eigenfactor | 54.26028 |
| Total citations | 541,055 |
These come from different indexers and use different windows and rules, so they are not interchangeable: a CiteScore of 14.2 and an impact factor of 9.4 do not conflict. See CiteScore and Scimago Journal Rank for the other definitions. APS also reports that PRL’s 541,055 citations are an all-time high and rank it 11th most-cited journal overall.
Cautions when using it
- The impact factor describes a journal as a whole. It says little about the citations a specific paper will receive.
- Citation habits differ by discipline, so compare journals within one subject category rather than across fields.
- Do not compare an impact factor with a CiteScore, SJR or h5-index as if they were the same measure; each indexer uses its own window and rules.
- Name the metric, the data year and the source in any CV, tenure file or funder report.
Related journal-metric entries
For a comparable entry see Scientific Reports’ Journal Impact Factor and Nature Communications’ Journal Impact Factor. For the index behind the number, see Journal Citation Reports.
Frequently asked questions
What is the impact factor of Physical Review Letters?
APS reports a Journal Impact Factor of 9.4 for Physical Review Letters, with the note that all metrics on the page are from 2025.
Which year does the 9.4 figure belong to?
It is the 2025 impact factor, published in the Journal Citation Reports 2026 release that Clarivate issued on 17 June 2026, according to APS.
Is 9.4 the highest impact factor PRL has had?
APS lists Physical Review Letters (9.4) among five APS journals that reached their highest-ever journal impact factor in 2025.
What is PRL’s CiteScore?
APS lists a CiteScore of 14.2 for 2025. CiteScore and the impact factor come from different indexers, so quote them separately.
How many citations does PRL have?
APS reports 541,055 total citations, an all-time high, which it says makes PRL the 11th most-cited journal overall in the Journal Citation Reports.
Sources
- American Physical Society, “About Physical Review Letters”: https://journals.aps.org/prl/about (checked 29 October 2026)
- American Physical Society news, journal performance metrics and citation reports, June 2026: https://www.aps.org/about/news/2026/06/journals-performance-metrics-citation-reports (checked 29 October 2026)
- Clarivate, “The Clarivate Impact Factor”: https://clarivate.com/academia-government/essays/impact-factor/
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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