Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A researcher checking Science Advances' current reported 2-year JIF before deciding where to submit an open-access multidisciplinary manuscript, understanding the figure sits alongside CiteScore and JCR quartile rather than replacing them.
- Is an instance
A librarian using the worked-example calculation (total citations to the journal's prior-two-years' citable items, divided by that item count) to explain to faculty how any JCR-indexed journal -- Science Advances included -- arrives at its published JIF.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
Citing Science Advances' CiteScore (a separate Elsevier/Scopus metric, four-year window) as if it were the journal's Clarivate JIF -- they are different metrics from different organizations with different windows and denominators.
- Not an instance
Assuming Science Advances shares a JIF with its sister AAAS publication Science, or that a single highly cited Science Advances article "has" the journal's JIF -- both metric level and per-title JIF are conflations DORA's guidance cautions against.
Editorial commentary
Science Advances’ 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, Science Advances receives its own separate JIF — distinct from its parent journal Science or any other AAAS title — and that figure changes with each annual JCR release.
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. Science Advances is a peer-reviewed, multidisciplinary, fully open-access journal published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) — the same publisher behind Science — and has been indexed in Clarivate’s Science Citation Index Expanded since its 2015 launch, which is what makes it JCR-eligible in the first place.
Current figure — hedge before citing
Third-party JCR-tracking services report Science Advances’ 2024 JCR data-year Impact Factor (2025 release) in the range of roughly 12.1 to 12.5, and at least one tracker reports a 2025 data-year figure (JCR 2026 release, issued June 2026) of approximately 13.9, placing the journal in JCR Quartile 1 for Multidisciplinary Sciences. CASRAI could not independently confirm either figure directly against AAAS’s own journal page or jcr.clarivate.com at the time this entry was written, and the third-party trackers do not fully agree with one another on the exact 2024 value. Treat both numbers as reported, not CASRAI-verified, and check science.org’s Science Advances 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.
Worked example (illustrative, not the journal’s real figures)
Using round, hypothetical numbers rather than Science Advances’ actual annual citation and publication counts (which are not independently confirmed above): if a journal published 3,000 citable items across the two preceding years, and those items received 37,500 citations in the JCR data year, the resulting JIF would be 37,500 / 3,000 = 12.5. This is the same mechanical calculation Clarivate applies to every JCR-indexed title, including Science Advances — 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. As a large multidisciplinary journal, Science Advances’ JIF is shaped by a small number of highly cited papers and by field-level citation norms that differ across the many disciplines it publishes in, so the same score means different things depending on what is being compared. 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 — a distinction that matters when an open-access, high-visibility journal like Science Advances gets its JIF cited in tenure, promotion, or grant-review contexts as if it described any one article, rather than the journal’s two-year citation average as a whole.
Counter-example
Science Advances’ 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, an individual highly cited Science Advances article does not “have” the journal’s JIF — the metric is computed at the journal level, not the article level, which is exactly the conflation DORA’s guidance warns against. Confusing Science Advances’ JIF with that of its sister publication Science is also incorrect: each AAAS title receives its own independently calculated figure.
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.
- CiteScore — Elsevier/Scopus’s competing journal-level metric, different window and denominator.
- h-index — an author-level metric, not a journal-level one.
- DORA (San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment) — the reform commitment behind the over-reliance caveat above.
- DORA signatory
- DORA vs CoARA — comparing the two major research-assessment reform frameworks.
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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