Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A research team studying a workplace exposure linked to a rare, slow-developing health outcome chooses a case-control design: it identifies people who already have the outcome (cases) and a comparable group who does not (controls), then looks backward at each group's exposure history — chosen specifically because a forward-looking cohort design would need an impractically large sample and years of follow-up to accumulate enough rare events.
- Is an instance
A funded clinical trial randomizes participants to a new intervention or standard-of-care (an experimental RCT design) while also tracking real-world adherence and self-reported side effects over the same follow-up period without intervening in how adherence occurs — the adherence tracking is an observational sub-study nested inside the trial's experimental primary design.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A single-patient or single-institution case study (an in-depth descriptive account of one case, with no comparison group) is sometimes mislabeled a "case-control study" because the names sound alike. A case study has no control group and tests no association; a case-control study compares cases against controls specifically to test one. Similarly, a systematic review or meta-analysis synthesizes findings across already-published primary studies and is not itself a primary observational or experimental study design.
Editorial commentary
Nature Cancer’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). Nature Cancer is a primary research journal in the Nature Portfolio, published by Springer Nature, launched in January 2020 to cover cancer biology and translational/clinical cancer research. It is a distinct, separately indexed title from Nature, Nature Medicine, Nature Communications, and the 60-plus other Nature Portfolio journals — and, despite the near-identical name, it is also a separate title from Nature Reviews Cancer, an older review-format journal in the Nature Reviews family. A JIF reported under any of those other names is never Nature Cancer’s own figure.
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. Nature Cancer is indexed in Clarivate’s Science Citation Index Expanded and scored within JCR’s oncology-related categories, where it ranks in the top quartile (Q1) among cancer-research journals. As an open-access primary-research title, the JIF applies only to the peer-reviewed research content Clarivate tracks, not to any editorial or commentary content the journal may also carry.
Current figure — treat as time-stamped, not fixed
Independent JCR-tracking aggregators report Nature Cancer’s 2-year Impact Factor at approximately 14.3 for the JCR release covering 2024 citation data, up from roughly 12.3 the year before. Several of those same aggregators report a further, notably large jump to approximately 28.0 for the most recent JCR release (covering 2025 data, released June 2026) — a near-doubling year over year that is unusual enough to flag explicitly rather than restate as settled fact. Nature Cancer’s own journal-information page on nature.com was not directly reachable during verification (redirected behind an author/subscriber login), so treat both figures as reported and cross-corroborated by secondary JCR-tracking sources rather than independently confirmed against Clarivate or Nature’s own primary page — check jcr.clarivate.com or nature.com/natcancer/journal-information for the authoritative current figure, and treat the size of that year-over-year jump with particular caution, before citing either number formally. As with every JCR-indexed title, Clarivate updates this figure every June, so any specific number, including these, is a property of a given release, not a fixed property of the journal.
Worked example
If Nature Cancer published roughly 140 citable items across two preceding years, and those items collectively received about 2,000 citations in the JCR data year, the resulting JIF would be 2,000 / 140 ≈ 14.3 — the same mechanical calculation Clarivate applies to every JCR-indexed journal. A comparatively young, lower-volume specialist title like Nature Cancer is more exposed to a small number of highly cited papers shifting its JIF sharply from one release to the next than a long-established, high-volume journal would be — part of why large single-year swings are more plausible here than they would be for a more stable, higher-volume title.
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. That caution is especially relevant for a journal like Nature Cancer, where the Nature brand alone carries prestige signalling that can get informally transferred to any paper published under it, independent of that specific paper’s own citation record. 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 in hiring, tenure, promotion, or grant-review decisions.
Counter-example
Nature Cancer’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. A specific highly cited Nature Cancer paper does not “have” the journal’s JIF — the metric is computed at the journal level only, never the article level — and neither does an individual author who published there. Two further mix-ups are worth flagging by name: Nature Reviews Cancer is a different, review-format journal with its own separately computed and substantially higher JIF (reported at roughly 60 in recent releases), and Cancer Cell and Cancer Discovery are entirely different journals from different publishers (Cell Press/Elsevier and the American Association for Cancer Research, respectively) — none of those figures is Nature Cancer’s own, despite topical overlap and, in Nature Reviews Cancer’s case, an easily confused name.
Related terms
- Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — the general metric this page illustrates with one journal’s current figure.
- Nature’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — the flagship Nature Portfolio title’s separately computed JIF.
- Nature Medicine’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — a sister Nature Portfolio title’s separately computed JIF.
- Nature Communications’ Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — another sister Nature Portfolio title’s separately computed JIF.
- Cancer Cell’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — a different publisher’s journal in the same field, easily confused by topic overlap.
- Cancer Discovery’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — another different publisher’s journal in the same field.
- 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.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Nature Cancer’s current Journal Impact Factor?
Independent JCR-tracking aggregators report Nature Cancer’s Journal Impact Factor at approximately 28.0 for the most recent JCR release, up from roughly 14.3 the release before. Because Clarivate updates JIF figures every June, this number is a property of a specific release rather than a fixed property of the journal — check jcr.clarivate.com or nature.com/natcancer/journal-information directly for the authoritative current figure before citing it formally.
Why did Nature Cancer’s Impact Factor jump so much between releases?
A near-doubling of a journal’s JIF in one release is unusual, but Nature Cancer is a comparatively young, lower-volume specialist title, which makes it more exposed than a large, long-established journal to a small number of highly cited papers shifting its score sharply from one year to the next. That sensitivity is a mechanical consequence of the JIF’s small citable-item denominator, not evidence of a data error on its own — though the size of this particular jump is still worth verifying against a primary source.
Is Nature Cancer’s Impact Factor the same as Nature Reviews Cancer’s?
No. Despite the near-identical name, Nature Reviews Cancer is a different, older, review-format journal in the Nature Reviews family, with its own separately computed JIF reported at roughly 60 in recent releases — more than double Nature Cancer’s own figure. A JIF reported under the “Nature Reviews Cancer” name is never Nature Cancer’s figure, and the two are indexed separately by Clarivate.
Does Nature Cancer’s Impact Factor apply to a specific paper or author?
No. The Journal Impact Factor is computed at the journal level only, so an individual Nature Cancer paper or author does not “have” the journal’s JIF. DORA and other reform initiatives specifically recommend against using a journal-level metric like this one as a proxy for the quality of one paper or the merit of one researcher in hiring, tenure, or grant decisions.
Is Nature Cancer’s CiteScore the same as its Journal Impact Factor?
No. CiteScore is a separate metric produced by Elsevier/Scopus using a four-year citation window and a broader set of tracked documents, while the JIF is Clarivate’s own two-year-window metric. Nature Cancer has a different CiteScore than its Clarivate JIF, and reporting one figure as though it were the other is a common sourcing error.
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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