PLOS ONE’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF)

PLOS ONE’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is a specific instance of the general Journal Impact Factor metric published annually by Clarivate in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) — but PLOS itself, as a matter of explicit editorial policy, does not promote or display a current JIF figure for its journals, including PLOS ONE. That policy position is more useful and more citable for a research-administration audience than any individual number, and it is the main thing this page corrects from an earlier version that quoted third-party tracker figures as if PLOS endorsed them.

PLOS’s own policy: it does not promote an Impact Factor

PLOS’s journal-information page states directly: “We do not consider Impact Factor to be a reliable or useful metric to assess the performance of individual articles but will provide the metric to individuals when specifically requested.” CASRAI verified this language directly on journals.plos.org’s PLOS ONE journal-information page (last verified 16 August 2026); the same boilerplate policy language appears across PLOS’s journal-information pages. Rather than headlining a JIF, PLOS’s own metrics pages promote article-level metrics (ALMs), Scopus’s CiteScore and SJR, and the author-level h-index. This position is consistent with the stance of DORA (the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment) and the CoARA coalition, both of which discourage using a single journal-level citation ratio as a stand-in for the quality of an individual article or researcher — PLOS is a DORA signatory and its metrics-page language reflects that commitment in practice, not just in principle.

What that means for citing a number

Because PLOS itself declines to headline a JIF, any specific figure in circulation for PLOS ONE is necessarily coming from a third party — most commonly Clarivate’s own Journal Citation Reports (JCR), which does compute and publish a JIF for PLOS ONE as a JCR-indexed title even though PLOS does not foreground that number on its own site. Clarivate’s JCR database itself sits behind institutional-subscription authentication and could not be checked directly by CASRAI. If a specific figure is genuinely needed — for a CV, grant narrative, or tenure file — the reliable path is: (1) check whether your institution has JCR access via a library subscription and look up PLOS ONE directly in jcr.clarivate.com, current cycle the 2025 data year, released June 2026; or (2) per PLOS’s own stated policy above, request the figure directly from PLOS. Do not substitute a number quoted by a third-party JCR-tracking aggregator or Wikipedia’s infobox for either of those — aggregators update on their own schedules and can diverge from Clarivate’s actual current release, which is exactly the kind of stale-vintage drift this page previously risked by repeating an unverified figure as though it were current.

What the JIF measures, mechanically, when it does exist

Where a journal does carry a Clarivate JIF, the figure is a ratio: citations received in a given JCR data 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.

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, which is directly consistent with PLOS’s own stated reluctance to promote the metric: a journal that accepts on soundness rather than anticipated impact has less editorial reason to foreground a citation-based average. 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, where one exists, 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.

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 — 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. For PLOS ONE specifically, this caution is reinforced by both the journal’s own editorial philosophy (soundness-based acceptance, decoupled from impact) and PLOS’s own explicit policy of not promoting the metric — using PLOS ONE’s JIF, sourced from wherever it can be found, to infer anything about a particular published article’s significance runs directly against how PLOS says it selects what to publish and how it wants the journal evaluated 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, and one of the metrics PLOS does actively promote) 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.

Keeping this current

Last verified by CASRAI: 16 August 2026, directly against journals.plos.org/plosone/s/journal-information. This page no longer repeats third-party-tracker or Wikipedia-sourced Impact Factor figures for PLOS ONE, since PLOS’s own stated policy is not to promote one; check jcr.clarivate.com (institutional access required) for a specific number if one is genuinely needed. JCR figures generally refresh each June with Clarivate’s new release, so any figure obtained from JCR directly should be rechecked after that date.

Related terms

• Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — the general metric this page discusses in the specific context of PLOS’s policy toward it.
• Nature Communications’ Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — a comparison point from a publisher that does headline its JIF.
• 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 — the metric PLOS actively promotes in place of the JIF.
• DORA (San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment) — the reform commitment behind PLOS’s stated position.
• Is PLOS ONE a predatory journal? — a related question about PLOS ONE’s editorial legitimacy and model.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is PLOS ONE’s current Journal Impact Factor?

PLOS itself does not promote or display a current JIF for PLOS ONE — its own journal-information page states it does not consider Impact Factor “a reliable or useful metric to assess the performance of individual articles” but will provide it on request. CASRAI verified this policy language directly on journals.plos.org (16 August 2026). Because PLOS ONE is a JCR-indexed title, Clarivate does compute a figure; for the current 2025-data-year number, check jcr.clarivate.com with institutional access, or request it directly from PLOS, rather than relying on a third-party tracker or Wikipedia.

Is PLOS ONE indexed in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR)?

Yes. PLOS ONE has been JCR-indexed since shortly after its 2006 launch and receives its own annual Impact Factor computation from Clarivate like every other JCR-indexed title, even though PLOS does not headline that figure on its own site.

Why doesn’t PLOS publish PLOS ONE’s Impact Factor directly?

PLOS’s stated policy, confirmed directly on its journal-information page, is that it does not consider Impact Factor a reliable or useful measure of an individual article’s performance, though it will provide the figure on request. PLOS instead promotes article-level metrics, CiteScore, SJR, and the h-index — a position consistent with DORA and CoARA guidance against over-relying on a single journal-level citation metric.

How is PLOS ONE’s Journal Impact Factor calculated, where one exists?

The JIF is a ratio: citations recorded in the JCR data year to the journal’s citable items (articles and reviews) from the two preceding years, divided by the number of those citable items. This is the same calculation Clarivate applies to every JCR-indexed journal; only the citation and publication volume feeding it differs between titles.

Is PLOS ONE’s Impact Factor the same as its CiteScore?

No. CiteScore is a separate metric published by Elsevier/Scopus that uses a four-year citation window and a broader document set, while the Journal Impact Factor is Clarivate’s two-year-window metric published in the JCR. PLOS actively promotes CiteScore over the JIF; reporting one figure as though it were the other is a common sourcing error regardless.

Does PLOS ONE’s Impact Factor say anything about the quality of a specific article?

Not reliably, and PLOS’s own stated position agrees: it does not consider the JIF a useful measure of an individual article’s performance. DORA and the CoARA coalition caution against using a journal-level metric like the JIF as a proxy for the quality of an individual paper or the merit of its authors, particularly for a megajournal like PLOS ONE whose soundness-only editorial criteria are explicitly decoupled from citation-based judgments of impact.