Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A grant report states "PRX Life, Journal Impact Factor 3.1 (2025, as listed by APS)", naming the metric, the data year and the source.
- Is an instance
Quoting PRX Life CiteScore 15 and Journal Impact Factor 3.1 as if they were the same measure would be an error, because the two use different citation windows and publishers.
Editorial commentary
Quick answer: PRX Life’s Journal Impact Factor is 3.1 and its CiteScore is 15, both labelled 2025 metrics on the journal’s About page at the American Physical Society (APS), checked on 29 October 2026. The two numbers differ by a wide margin because they come from different providers with different citation windows, so neither can stand in for the other.
What is the PRX Life impact factor?
PRX Life is a fully open access journal from APS, a not-for-profit society publisher, covering research at the interface of physics and the life sciences. Its scope includes molecular and subcellular processes, cellular organization and dynamics, organismal and population processes, and neuroscience and artificial intelligence. The Journal Impact Factor is the journal-level figure that Clarivate publishes each year in the Journal Citation Reports. It describes the journal as a whole, not any single article in it.
What is the current PRX Life impact factor?
The APS About page for PRX Life lists these figures, stating that all of its metrics are from 2025:
- Journal Impact Factor: 3.1
- CiteScore: 15
- Published papers: 88
- h5-index and Normalized Eigenfactor: not yet available, which APS attributes to the journal’s recent launch and ongoing indexing in external databases
Clarivate issues a new Journal Impact Factor every year, so always give the data year when you quote 3.1, and check the About page or the Journal Citation Reports for the current figure before using it in a CV, a funder report or a promotion file.
How is the impact factor calculated?
Clarivate describes the Journal Impact Factor as the number of citations in the current year to source items the journal published during the previous two years, divided by the number of those items. A young journal with few published papers has a small denominator, so one year’s figure can move noticeably when a handful of papers are cited more or less than expected.
What is CiteScore and why is it so different from 3.1?
CiteScore is Elsevier’s metric, calculated from Scopus. Elsevier describes its current methodology as having a longer citation window than the earlier CiteScore, and it counts peer-reviewed publications only. A longer window than the two years behind the Journal Impact Factor is one reason PRX Life shows 15 for CiteScore beside 3.1. The two figures are not comparable with each other, and a CiteScore should never be reported as an impact factor.
Cautions when using the number
- Name the metric, the data year and the source every time, for example “Journal Impact Factor 3.1, 2025, as listed by APS”.
- Do not compare journals across fields on impact factor alone; citation habits differ between physics, biology and computer science, and PRX Life sits between them.
- A journal-level average says little about an individual paper. The h-index and article-level evidence answer different questions.
- The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) recommends evaluating research on its own merits rather than using journal-based metrics such as Journal Impact Factors.
Access, charges and indexing
PRX Life publishes every article under a CC-BY 4.0 licence (see open access), with authors keeping copyright. It is funded by article publication charges due once an article is accepted, and APS offers automatic charge waivers to authors from lower-income countries. The journal lists its indexing as Scopus, Inspec, Google Scholar and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), as stated on its About page.
Frequently asked questions
What is the impact factor of PRX Life?
The APS About page lists a Journal Impact Factor of 3.1, with all metrics from 2025.
What is the CiteScore of PRX Life?
The same page lists a CiteScore of 15, also from 2025.
Is CiteScore the same as the impact factor?
No. CiteScore is Elsevier’s Scopus-based metric and the Journal Impact Factor is Clarivate’s, and they use different citation windows. Report each under its own name.
Why are the h5-index and Normalized Eigenfactor missing?
APS states that some metrics are not yet available because of the journal’s recent launch and ongoing indexing in external databases.
Related terms
For a comparable physics-journal entry see the PRX Quantum impact factor.
Sources
- American Physical Society, PRX Life: About (metrics, scope, charges, indexing): https://journals.aps.org/prxlife/about (checked 29 October 2026)
- Clarivate, The Clarivate Analytics Impact Factor: https://clarivate.com/academia-government/essays/impact-factor/ (checked 29 October 2026)
- Elsevier, CiteScore metrics: https://www.elsevier.com/products/scopus/metrics/citescore (checked 29 October 2026)
- San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment: https://sfdora.org/read/ (checked 29 October 2026)
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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