How to Check a Journal’s Impact Factor (JCR)

To check a journal’s current Impact Factor, look it up directly in Clarivate’s Journal Citation Reports (JCR) rather than trusting a third-party aggregator, which may show a stale, unsourced number. JCR is updated annually each June and is the only source for the official, current figure.

Searching for a specific journal’s impact factor — “PLOS ONE impact factor,” “eLife impact factor,” “Cureus impact factor,” “Scientific Reports impact factor,” “Nature impact factor” — usually turns up a number on a third-party aggregator site with no clear source or date. This guide covers the two things a per-journal search rarely gives you together: how to check a journal’s current, Clarivate-sourced Impact Factor yourself (not a mirrored number that may already be stale), and what that number can and cannot legitimately support once you have it. For the underlying definition and formula, see the CASRAI Dictionary’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF) entry — this guide is the practical companion to it.

What the Journal Impact Factor actually measures

The Journal Impact Factor is a single number, calculated annually by Clarivate and published in its Journal Citation Reports (JCR). It traces back to Eugene Garfield, who founded the Institute for Scientific Information in 1955 and, with Irving Sher, developed the impact factor as a tool for librarians deciding which journals to subscribe to — not as a measure of individual article or author quality. The formula: citations received in a given year to articles published in the two preceding years, divided by the number of citable items (articles and reviews) published in those same two years. The 2026 JCR release, based on 2025 citation data, covers citations to 2023–2024 content, and Clarivate refreshes the whole dataset every June.

Two details of the formula matter more than they first appear:

• The numerator and denominator don’t count the same things. Citations to any content type — editorials, letters, news pieces — count toward the numerator, but only articles and reviews count toward the denominator. A journal that publishes a lot of highly-cited front matter can inflate its Impact Factor without publishing more citable research.
• It is a journal-level average, not a per-article score. Citation counts within a journal are highly skewed — a small number of papers typically account for most of a journal’s citations — so the average tells you almost nothing about the citation performance of any specific paper in it.

How to check a journal’s current Impact Factor

There is no way to browse the full, official JCR dataset for free — it is a Clarivate subscription product, though Clarivate reports that most research university libraries carry it. In practice:

1. Check your institution’s library first. Search your library’s database list for “Journal Citation Reports” or “JCR” — if your institution subscribes to Web of Science, JCR access is usually bundled with it. A subject or research-support librarian can run the lookup for you if you can’t find it yourself.
2. Confirm indexing status separately, for free, via the Web of Science Master Journal List. This is a genuinely free tool: search a journal by title or ISSN and it tells you which Web of Science indexes (Science Citation Index Expanded, Emerging Sources Citation Index, etc.) currently cover it. This matters because a journal can be indexed in Web of Science without being eligible for an Impact Factor — only journals in the Science Citation Index Expanded and Social Sciences Citation Index receive one; journals in the Emerging Sources Citation Index do not, until and unless they’re promoted. Checking indexing status first tells you whether a JIF should even exist for the journal you’re looking at.
3. Check the journal’s own website. Most Web-of-Science-indexed journals state their current Impact Factor on their “About” or “Metrics” page, usually with the release year attached. This is the fastest free route if you just need the current figure and trust the publisher to have updated it (most do, promptly, since it’s a marketing figure for them too).
4. If you land on a free third-party number, check what metric it actually is. Sites like SCImago Journal Rank report SJR, calculated from Elsevier’s Scopus database using a different (PageRank-style) algorithm over three years, not Clarivate’s two-year citations-over-citable-items formula. CiteScore is a separate Scopus-derived figure again — also calculated by Elsevier itself, not a third-party mirror — using citations in a given year to documents published in the preceding four years, divided by the count of those documents; unlike JCR, it is published free at scopus.com/sources with no subscription required. If the journal you are checking is not indexed in Web of Science at all, CiteScore is often the closest free citation-based figure available, since Scopus and Web of Science cover only partly overlapping sets of journals — but it is built from a different database, formula, and citation window than the JIF, so the two numbers are not interchangeable or directly comparable. Eigenfactor and various aggregator sites report their own derived or mirrored figures. None of these are “the Impact Factor” in the specific, trademarked, Clarivate/JCR sense — treat a number as the actual JIF only if its source is JCR itself, the journal’s own citation of its JCR figure, or your library’s JCR access.

What a real lookup turns up: PLOS ONE, Nature, eLife, Cureus, and other journals people search for

Named-journal searches for “impact factor” are common, and the honest answer varies more than a single generic explainer usually lets on:

• PLOS ONE is indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded and receives an annual Impact Factor from JCR, listed under the Multidisciplinary Sciences category. Check its current figure via the routes above rather than a cached number here — it changes every June.
• Nature (ISSN 0028-0836), the flagship weekly journal published by Springer Nature since 1869, is indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded and receives an annual Impact Factor from JCR — like PLOS ONE, it is listed under the Multidisciplinary Sciences category, where it is consistently one of the highest-ranked titles by citation count. Two mix-ups are worth flagging for anyone searching “Nature magazine impact factor” specifically: first, Nature is a peer-reviewed scientific journal, not a magazine — the informal “magazine” label likely persists because, alongside peer-reviewed research, it also publishes news, comment, and feature content in a weekly format. Second, and more consequential for a lookup, “Nature” the journal is only one title within the much larger Nature Portfolio published by Springer Nature, which also includes editorially separate journals such as Nature Communications, Nature Methods, Nature Medicine, the Nature Reviews series, and Scientific Reports (see below) — each indexed and scored individually by Clarivate. A figure found for “Nature Communications” or “Nature Reviews Genetics” is not Nature’s own Impact Factor, and vice versa; confirm you are looking up the specific title, the same publisher-versus-journal caution that applies to IEEE and formerly applied to Hindawi below.
• Scientific Reports, published by Springer Nature under the Nature Portfolio, is a fully open-access, multidisciplinary journal covering all areas of the natural and clinical sciences. Since its 2011 launch it has used an explicit soundness-only editorial policy — papers are selected for technical validity rather than perceived novelty or impact, the same review philosophy PLOS ONE pioneered — and it is indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded. Its Impact Factor has moved more than most large journals’: it peaked above 5.5 in the mid-2010s, declined into the high-3s by the 2023–2024 JCR releases as its published volume grew substantially, and JCR-tracking sources report it rising to roughly 4.9 (Q1, Multidisciplinary Sciences category) in the June 2026 release, based on 2025 citation data. As with every journal on this list, confirm the current figure via JCR, your library, or the journal’s own metrics page rather than the number just given here.
• eLife currently does not receive an Impact Factor. Clarivate stopped fully indexing eLife in the Science Citation Index Expanded following the journal’s move to a “publish, review, curate” model in 2023, under which every peer-reviewed submission is published as a “Reviewed Preprint” regardless of the reviewers’ recommendation, rather than being formally accepted or rejected. Clarivate’s stated policy is to index only content validated by a traditional accept/reject peer-review decision; eLife has not changed its model to match, so it is not currently JIF-eligible. This is a real, useful example of why “does this journal have an impact factor” is not a permanently fixed fact about a journal — it depends on an indexing decision that can change.
• Cureus was removed from Clarivate’s Web of Science Master Journal List in October 2025, after being placed “on hold” in September 2024 over article-quality concerns; it no longer receives citation counts in Web of Science or an Impact Factor. This followed a period of substantial retraction activity at the journal. It is one of the clearest current examples of why checking a journal’s live Master Journal List status matters more than trusting a remembered or previously-cited figure.
• NEJM (New England Journal of Medicine) and Wellcome Open Research are both indexed in Web of Science and receive an annual Impact Factor; check their current figures via JCR access or their own metrics pages rather than a number quoted here, since both change annually. (Wellcome Open Research uses an open, post-publication peer-review model similar in spirit to eLife’s former one, but — unlike eLife — it retains full SCIE indexing as of this writing; indexing status is a per-journal Clarivate decision, not something that follows automatically from a given publishing model.)
• “IEEE impact factor” is a common search, but there is no single figure to find: IEEE is a publisher operating well over 200 individual journals and transactions (IEEE Access, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, and so on), each indexed and scored separately by Clarivate. Look up the specific IEEE title you mean, not “IEEE” as a whole.
• “Hindawi impact factor” has the same publisher-versus-journal issue, complicated further by a real delisting event: Clarivate removed roughly 19 Hindawi journals from the Web of Science Master Journal List in March 2023 over concerns about compromised peer review and paper-mill activity, following disclosures by Wiley (which had acquired Hindawi in 2021) about large-scale retractions. Wiley subsequently discontinued the Hindawi brand. Any individual title formerly published under Hindawi should be checked on the Master Journal List directly — its historical Impact Factor, if it had one, may no longer apply.

Worked examples: what a per-journal lookup actually turns up

The routine above is the same for every title, but what it returns varies enough by journal that a few worked cases are worth walking through. Each journal below is searched for by name often, and each one illustrates a different wrinkle in the lookup:

• A megajournal, where the category does most of the work. The PLOS ONE impact factor is reported in the Multidisciplinary Sciences category, so it is ranked against other broad-scope generalist titles rather than against the specialist journals its individual papers actually compete with.
• A selective sibling under the same publisher. The PLOS Biology impact factor is substantially higher than PLOS ONE’s, despite the shared publisher and the same open-access business model, because PLOS Biology applies a significance filter that PLOS ONE deliberately does not. Publisher is not a proxy for the number.
• Society journals, where two years is the wrong window. The Journal of Clinical Investigation impact factor and the mBio impact factor both belong to long-established society-published titles whose papers keep accruing citations well past the two-year window the headline JIF uses. For journals like these the JIF 5-Year figure on the same JCR profile is the more informative of the two.
• Recent launches, where last year’s number is already stale. The Communications Biology impact factor (Nature Portfolio) and the Cell Reports Medicine impact factor (Cell Press) belong to journals young enough that the figure has moved noticeably between annual releases, so a remembered number is far more likely to be wrong than it would be for an established title.
• Titles indexed in more than one category. The Science Translational Medicine impact factor arrives with more than one Web of Science category rank attached, which means any quartile quoted for it is incomplete unless the category is named alongside it.
• A tightly clustered subject category. The Cancer Research impact factor, the Cancer Discovery impact factor and the Cancer Cell impact factor are all reported within the same Oncology category, which makes them one of the few sets on this page that are genuinely comparable with each other — and still not comparable with anything outside that category.
• High-volume titles, where the denominator moves. The Environmental Science and Pollution Research impact factor and the Advanced Materials impact factor belong to journals publishing at large scale, where a growing count of citable items in the denominator can pull the ratio down in a year when the journal’s total citations actually rose.
• A delisted journal, where there is no current answer at all. The Cureus impact factor is the case described above: any figure still circulating for it predates the October 2025 removal from the Master Journal List, and no new one is being calculated.

What the Impact Factor does and doesn’t tell you

Once you have a verified, current figure, it is legitimate for a narrow set of uses and not for others:

• Reasonable use: comparing journals within the same subject category as one input among several in a library collection-development or subscription review, alongside cost, usage data, and disciplinary coverage.
• Reasonable use: as one signal, transparently disclosed, of a journal’s aggregate citation performance — ideally alongside the journal’s underlying citation distribution, since the skew described above means the average alone can be misleading.
• Not a valid use: as a proxy for the quality of a specific article published in that journal. A paper published in a high-JIF journal is not thereby shown to be more rigorous or more cited than a paper in a lower-JIF journal in the same issue — citation counts within any journal vary enormously.
• Not a valid use: as a measure of an individual researcher’s contribution, for hiring, promotion, tenure, or grant-funding decisions. This is a journal-level metric being applied to a person, which is a category error independent of how well-calculated the metric itself is.
• Not comparable across disciplines. Citation practices differ enormously by field — a JIF of 3 is unremarkable in some biomedical subfields and exceptional in parts of mathematics or the humanities, because publication volume and citation norms differ, not because the underlying research differs in quality.

DORA, CoARA, and the responsible-assessment alternative

These limitations aren’t a fringe critique — they are the explicit basis of two real, widely-adopted research-assessment frameworks, and CASRAI’s position tracks both directly.

The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) was drafted by a group of journal editors and publishers at the American Society for Cell Biology’s annual meeting in December 2012 and published in May 2013. Its core recommendation, unchanged in substance since, is not to use journal-based metrics such as the Journal Impact Factor as a surrogate measure of the quality of individual research articles, to assess an individual scientist’s contributions, or in hiring, promotion, or funding decisions — precisely the “not a valid use” list above. DORA passed 25,000 signatories (individuals and organizations combined) in May 2024 and continues to gain signatories, including research funders and universities, into 2026.

The Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA), launched in December 2022 around its Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment and now counting over 800 member organizations, takes a related but distinct position: rather than rejecting quantitative indicators outright, CoARA calls for research assessment to be led by qualitative, peer-review-based judgement, supported by the responsible use of quantitative indicators — explicitly naming the Journal Impact Factor as an example of a metric that has been used prematurely and inappropriately as a substitute for that judgement.

In practice, both frameworks point the same direction as this guide’s two halves: it is fine, and sometimes useful, to look up a journal’s Impact Factor for what it actually is — a journal-level citation average, one input among several for library and publishing decisions. It stops being defensible the moment it is used to stand in for judgement about a specific paper, a specific researcher, or a specific hiring or funding decision. For broader, article- and researcher-level alternatives, see CASRAI’s dictionary entries on responsible metrics, article-level metrics, Field-Weighted Citation Impact, and altmetrics — each addresses a different piece of the gap that JIF, used alone, leaves.

Frequently asked questions

What is PLOS ONE’s impact factor?

PLOS ONE is indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded and receives a current Impact Factor from Clarivate’s Journal Citation Reports each June. Look it up via your library’s JCR access or PLOS ONE’s own journal-information page rather than relying on a cached figure — the number changes annually.

What is Scientific Reports’ impact factor?

Scientific Reports is indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded and receives a current Impact Factor from Clarivate’s Journal Citation Reports each June, in the Multidisciplinary Sciences category. The figure has moved more than most large journals’ — it peaked above 5.5 in the mid-2010s, fell into the high-3s by the 2023–2024 JCR releases as the journal’s published volume grew substantially, and JCR-tracking sources report it rising to roughly 4.9 (Q1) in the June 2026 release. Because it has moved this much, verify the current number via your library’s JCR access, the Web of Science Master Journal List, or the journal’s own “About” page rather than a previously-seen figure.

What is Nature’s impact factor?

Nature (ISSN 0028-0836) is indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded and receives a current Impact Factor from Clarivate’s Journal Citation Reports each June, under the Multidisciplinary Sciences category, where it is consistently ranked among the most-cited titles. Look up its current figure via your library’s JCR access, the free Web of Science Master Journal List, or Nature’s own journal-information page rather than a number quoted here, since it changes annually. Be careful to look up “Nature” itself and not a similarly-named Nature Portfolio journal (Nature Communications, Nature Methods, Nature Medicine, Scientific Reports, and dozens of others) — each is a separately indexed publication with its own separate Impact Factor.

Is Nature a magazine or a scientific journal?

Nature is a peer-reviewed scientific journal, first published in 1869 and now part of Springer Nature’s Nature Portfolio. It is sometimes called a “magazine” informally because, alongside its peer-reviewed research articles, it also carries news, comment, and feature content in a weekly magazine-like format. For citation-metrics purposes — Impact Factor, Web of Science indexing, quartile ranking — it is treated as a journal like any other Science Citation Index Expanded title.

Does eLife have an impact factor?

No, not currently. Clarivate stopped fully indexing eLife in the Science Citation Index Expanded after the journal adopted its “publish, review, curate” model in 2023, which publishes every peer-reviewed submission (as a Reviewed Preprint) rather than issuing a traditional accept/reject decision. Without full SCIE indexing, a journal is not JIF-eligible, regardless of how it is otherwise regarded by funders and institutions.

What is Cureus’s impact factor?

Cureus no longer has one. Clarivate removed it from the Web of Science Master Journal List in October 2025, after placing it on hold in September 2024 over article-quality concerns, following a period of substantial retraction activity. Any Cureus Impact Factor figure you find elsewhere predates that delisting.

What is IEEE’s impact factor?

There isn’t one — IEEE is a publisher of well over 200 separate journals and transactions, each with its own individually calculated Impact Factor. Search for the specific IEEE title (for example, “IEEE Access” or a specific Transactions title) rather than “IEEE” as a whole.

What is Hindawi’s impact factor?

Same issue as IEEE — Hindawi published many separate journals, each scored individually — plus a real complication: Clarivate delisted roughly 19 Hindawi journals from the Master Journal List in March 2023 over peer-review integrity concerns, and Wiley (which owned Hindawi) has since discontinued the Hindawi brand. Check the specific journal title’s current Master Journal List status before assuming any previously-cited figure still applies.

Is a higher impact factor always better?

Not straightforwardly, and not across disciplines. It is a defensible signal for comparing journals within the same subject category for library or publishing decisions. It is not evidence that any specific article, or the researcher who wrote it, is stronger than one published in a lower-JIF journal — citation counts within a single journal are too skewed for the average to say that.

Does DORA say never to look at impact factor at all?

No — DORA’s recommendation is specifically against using journal-level metrics like JIF as a surrogate for the quality of an individual article or researcher, including in hiring, promotion, tenure, and funding decisions. It does not object to JIF existing or being used for its original purpose: a journal-level, library-collection signal.

This guide reflects Journal Citation Reports methodology, DORA, and CoARA positions verified as of July 2026. Impact Factor figures and journal indexing status change annually (JCR releases each June) and, as the eLife, Cureus, and Hindawi examples above show, indexing status itself can change outside the annual cycle — always confirm a specific journal’s current status via the Web of Science Master Journal List rather than a previously-seen number.