PLOS ONE’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF)

PLOS ONE’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). Like every JCR-indexed title, PLOS ONE receives its own separate JIF, and that figure changes with each annual JCR release — but PLOS ONE’s status as one of the largest multidisciplinary megajournals in existence makes the number unusually broad in what it averages together.

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. PLOS ONE, published by the Public Library of Science (PLOS), has been JCR-indexed since shortly after its 2006 launch and now publishes on the order of thousands of articles annually across essentially every scientific and medical discipline, from biology and medicine to physical sciences, social sciences, and engineering.

Current figure — hedge before citing

Third-party JCR-tracking services report PLOS ONE’s 2024 JCR data-year Impact Factor (2025 release) at approximately 2.6, and a 2025 data-year figure (JCR 2026 release, issued June 2026) of approximately 2.8, placing the journal in JCR Quartile 2 for Multidisciplinary Sciences. CASRAI could not independently confirm either figure directly against PLOS’s own journal page or jcr.clarivate.com at the time this entry was written. Treat both numbers as reported, not CASRAI-verified, and check PLOS ONE’s own journal page or jcr.clarivate.com directly for the current, authoritative figure before citing one in a formal context such as a CV, grant application, or tenure file.

Why PLOS ONE’s megajournal model matters here

PLOS ONE was one of the first journals to popularize the megajournal model: it peer-reviews submissions for scientific and methodological soundness — is the research rigorously conducted and reported, are the conclusions supported by the data — rather than for subjective judgments of novelty, significance, or likely impact. That editorial criterion is deliberately decoupled from citation-based metrics like the JIF. Because PLOS ONE accepts technically sound work across an unusually wide range of fields and topics rather than curating for anticipated impact within a narrow scope, its journal-wide average citation figure blends together very different citation norms from very different disciplines — a dynamic that also applies, to a lesser degree, to other broad multidisciplinary titles, but is especially pronounced for a megajournal operating at PLOS ONE’s scale. This is a distinct point from whether the JIF itself is reliable; it is specifically about why a single journal-level number is an even poorer stand-in for the quality or subject fit of any one PLOS ONE article than it would be for a narrowly scoped journal.

Worked example (illustrative, not the journal’s real figures)

Using round, hypothetical numbers rather than PLOS ONE’s actual annual citation and publication counts: if a journal published 30,000 citable items across the two preceding years, and those items received 78,000 citations in the JCR data year, the resulting JIF would be 78,000 / 30,000 = 2.6. This is the same mechanical calculation Clarivate applies to every JCR-indexed title, including PLOS ONE — what varies between journals is the citation and publication volume feeding it, not the arithmetic.

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. 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. For PLOS ONE specifically, this caution is reinforced by the journal’s own editorial philosophy: because acceptance decisions are explicitly soundness-based rather than impact-based, using the journal’s JIF to infer anything about a particular published article’s significance runs directly against how PLOS ONE says it selects what to publish in the first place.

Counter-example

PLOS ONE’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, PLOS ONE’s soundness-only peer review is not itself evidence for or against the journal’s JIF being high or low — the two are separate systems (editorial acceptance criteria vs. a citation-count ratio) measuring different things, and neither validates the other.

Related terms

• Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — the general metric this page illustrates with one journal’s reported figure.
• Nature Communications’ Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — another journal-specific illustration of the same metric.
• Scientific Reports’ Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — another journal-specific illustration of the same metric, also a megajournal.
• Nature’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — a selectively curated, non-megajournal comparison point.
• Science Advances’ Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — another journal-specific illustration of the same metric.
• Cell Reports’ Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — another journal-specific illustration of the same metric.
• 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.
• Is PLOS ONE a predatory journal? — a related question about PLOS ONE’s editorial legitimacy and model.