A Q1 journal is one ranked in the top 25% of its subject category by a citation-based metric such as Journal Impact Factor, Scopus CiteScore, or SCImago Journal Rank (SJR). Quartiles run Q1 (top 25%) through Q4 (bottom 25%) and are assigned per subject category, so the same journal can carry a different quartile in each ranking system.
Looking for the JCR platform itself, to search or log in and check one specific journal? Journal Citation Reports is Clarivate’s own subscription database — accessed through your institution’s library portal or Web of Science login, not through this page. CASRAI is a nonprofit research-administration standards body, not the JCR platform. If you don’t have institutional access, skip to the step-by-step section below: the free Web of Science Master Journal List confirms whether a journal is indexed, and the free Scopus CiteScore and SCImago (SJR) routes covered below are the practical way to get an actual quartile figure without a JCR subscription.
This guide covers how quartiles are calculated, the well-documented limits of using them for individual assessment, and — since most people arrive here already holding one specific journal in mind — the exact steps to look up that journal’s current quartile in JCR, Scopus CiteScore, and SJR, including the one route (SJR) that is completely free and needs no institutional login.
For a full walkthrough of finding a specific journal’s current JIF (including named examples like PLOS ONE, eLife, Heliyon, and Cureus), see CASRAI’s companion guide, How to Look Up a Journal’s Impact Factor. This page assumes that background and goes further into how quartile tiers are built, checked, and used.
What the Journal Impact Factor measures, briefly
The Journal Impact Factor is calculated annually by Clarivate and published in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR). The formula: citations recorded in year Y to a journal’s citable items (articles and reviews) published in years Y-1 and Y-2, divided by the number of those citable items. It is a journal-level average, not a per-article or per-author figure, and it traces back to Eugene Garfield’s work at the Institute for Scientific Information in the 1950s, originally built as a library-collection-development tool rather than a research-quality measure.
Last verified 16 August 2026: the current cycle is the 2025 data-year JCR edition, released by Clarivate in June 2026 — Clarivate republishes JCR every June, so treat any JIF or quartile figure not dated to a specific edition year as unverifiable, and re-check this page’s own examples after the next release.
Through the 2022 JCR release, only journals indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) or Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) received a JIF. Starting with the 2023 JCR release, Clarivate extended JIF eligibility to all Web of Science Core Collection journals meeting its quality criteria, including the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) and Arts & Humanities Citation Index (AHCI) — so ESCI-indexed journals now do receive a JIF too, a change worth knowing if you’re used to the older rule. You can check a journal’s current indexing status for free via the Web of Science Master Journal List; the full JCR figures themselves require an institutional or library subscription.
A related but distinct figure, SCImago Journal Rank (SJR), is derived from Elsevier’s Scopus database using a PageRank-style weighting over three years of citations — not Clarivate’s two-year JIF formula. Many free “impact factor lookup” sites are actually showing SJR, CiteScore, or another mirrored figure rather than the trademarked Clarivate JIF, which is worth checking before citing a number as “the” impact factor.
The well-documented limits of impact factor as a research-assessment tool
The core problem is a mismatch between what JIF measures (a journal-wide citation average) and how it gets used (as a stand-in for the quality of one article, or one researcher’s body of work). Citation counts within a journal are highly skewed — a small number of heavily cited papers pull the average up, so most individual articles in a high-JIF journal are cited far less than the JIF figure implies.
This is precisely the practice targeted by the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), drafted by journal editors and publishers at the American Society for Cell Biology’s December 2012 meeting and published in May 2013. DORA’s core recommendation is not to use journal-based metrics — including JIF — “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.” DORA passed 25,000 signatories in May 2024 and continues to gain them.
The Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA), launched December 2022 around its Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment, takes a related but distinct position: qualitative peer judgement should lead assessment, supported by — not replaced by — responsible use of quantitative indicators. CoARA explicitly names JIF as a metric that has been used prematurely or inappropriately as a substitute for that judgement.
What quartile rankings (Q1–Q4) actually are
A quartile ranking sorts journals within a subject category into four equal-sized tiers, ordered by a journal-level metric, from highest to lowest:
- Q1 — top 25% of journals in the category
- Q2 — next 25% (26th–50th percentile)
- Q3 — next 25% (51st–75th percentile)
- Q4 — bottom 25% (76th–100th percentile)
Three different organizations publish quartile rankings, using three different underlying metrics and three different subject-category schemes. They are not interchangeable, and a single journal can carry a different quartile in each system:
Journal Citation Reports (Clarivate) quartiles
Clarivate ranks each journal by JIF within every Web of Science subject category it is assigned to, then converts that rank into a value the JCR documentation calls Z: a journal’s rank position in the category divided by the total number of journals in that category. Z between 0.0 and 0.25 is Q1, 0.25–0.5 is Q2, 0.5–0.75 is Q3, and above 0.75 is Q4. Because assignment happens per category, a journal listed in two Web of Science categories receives two separate ranks and can land in two different quartiles — for example, Q1 in a narrow specialty category and Q2 or Q3 in a broader adjacent one. Quartiles are recalculated with every annual JCR release (each June).
Scopus CiteScore quartiles
Elsevier’s CiteScore uses a four-year citation window (citations in the current year to documents published in the prior four years, divided by the number of those documents, counting articles, reviews, conference papers, and data papers as citable). Journals are ranked by CiteScore within each Scopus subject category (using Elsevier’s own All Science Journal Classification, ASJC) and divided into quartiles the same top-25%/bottom-25% way. Scopus increasingly surfaces the underlying percentile figure alongside or instead of the quartile letter, but the quartile bucketing is still shown on journal profile pages. See CASRAI’s CiteScore vs. Journal Impact Factor comparison for how the two metrics’ methodologies diverge.
SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) quartiles
SCImago publishes its own quartile rankings, also Scopus-sourced but built on the SJR indicator (a prestige-weighted citation measure, not a raw citation count) rather than CiteScore. SJR quartiles are likewise assigned per Scopus subject category — SCImago’s category scheme runs to more than 300 specific categories under 27 broad subject areas — so, again, a journal can be Q1 in one category and Q3 in a neighboring one. See CASRAI’s CiteScore vs. SJR comparison and Impact Factor vs. SJR comparison for how SJR’s prestige-weighting differs from the other two metrics.
Because these three systems use different citation windows, different underlying metrics, and different category taxonomies, “what’s this journal’s quartile?” is not a fully specified question until you also specify which system and which subject category. A journal quartile figure quoted without either of those is missing information a reader would need to interpret it correctly.
JCR vs. CiteScore vs. SJR quartiles at a glance
| JCR (Clarivate) | Scopus CiteScore | SJR (SCImago) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Underlying metric | Journal Impact Factor | CiteScore | SJR indicator (prestige-weighted) |
| Citation window | 2 years | 4 years | 3 years |
| Source database | Web of Science Core Collection | Scopus | Scopus |
| Category scheme | Web of Science subject categories | ASJC (Scopus) | Scopus/ASJC-derived, 300+ categories |
| Free to check? | No — institutional/library subscription required | Yes — free at scopus.com/sources | Yes — free at scimagojr.com |
| Typically updated | Annually, each June (JCR release) | Monthly, with a full annual refresh | Annually |
| Where the quartile shows | JCR journal profile, “Rank” tab | Scopus source/journal profile page | SCImago Journal & Country Rank journal page |
How to check a journal’s quartile ranking, step by step
Which lookup path applies depends on which system’s quartile you need — and, for most people without a library login, only one of the three is actually reachable for free.
Checking a JCR (Clarivate) quartile
- Access Journal Citation Reports through your institution’s library portal (an individual JCR subscription is not typically sold to individuals).
- Search for the journal by title, ISSN, or abbreviation.
- Open the journal’s profile and select the Rank (or “JIF Rank”) tab.
- Each Web of Science subject category the journal is assigned to is listed separately, with its rank, total journals in the category, and quartile (Q1–Q4) for the current JCR year.
If your institution doesn’t subscribe, the free Web of Science Master Journal List confirms whether a journal is indexed at all, but it does not show the JIF or quartile itself — for the actual figure, use the CiteScore or SJR routes below instead.
Checking a Scopus CiteScore quartile
- Go to Scopus’s public source list at scopus.com/sources (no login required to browse it).
- Search for the journal by title or ISSN.
- Open its source-detail page; the CiteScore, its percentile, and its quartile are shown for each Scopus subject category the title is assigned to.
Checking an SJR quartile (the free route)
- Go to the SCImago Journal & Country Rank site (scimagojr.com) — no account or subscription needed.
- Search for the journal by name, or use the site’s category/country filters to browse rankings directly.
- Open the journal’s profile page. Each subject category it’s assigned to is listed with its SJR value, rank, and quartile for the selected year.
- Use the year selector on the journal page to see how its quartile has moved across recent JCR/Scopus cycles.
Because JCR sits behind a paywall for most individual searchers, SCImago’s public SJR rankings are the most commonly used free substitute when someone just needs to confirm roughly where a journal sits — with the caveat, covered above, that SJR quartiles are not the same number as JCR quartiles for the same journal.
Why the same journal can show different quartiles in different categories
The mechanism is easiest to see with a real, broad-scope journal. PLOS ONE publishes across essentially every scientific discipline, so citation databases assign it to a broad “Multidisciplinary Sciences”-type category as well as to the many narrower, discipline-specific categories that match the individual papers it publishes (life sciences, medicine, environmental science, and so on). A quartile is a per-category percentile, not a journal-wide score — so the identical citation record can put a journal like this in a higher quartile in the broad multidisciplinary bucket, where it’s compared against other broad-scope generalist titles, while it sits lower in one or more of its narrower subject categories, where it’s instead compared against specialist journals with much higher subfield-specific citation rates. This is exactly the “specify the category” point made above: a quartile figure for a multidisciplinary or broad-scope journal is close to meaningless unless the category is stated alongside it. Because quartiles are recalculated every year and vary by exactly which categories a title is currently assigned to, check a specific journal’s current per-category standing directly via the lookup steps above rather than relying on a remembered or quoted figure.
Worked examples: how quartiles behave across a publisher family and a subject cluster
Two clusters make the per-category mechanics concrete. Inside Cell Press’s own family, Cell’s impact factor is ranked in a broad cell-biology category, while its stablemates are ranked somewhere else entirely: Neuron’s impact factor against neuroscience titles, Current Biology’s impact factor against general-biology titles, and Cell Reports Medicine’s impact factor against clinical and translational ones. All four can hold a Q1 badge at the same time, and it is a Q1 of four different ranked lists.
The oncology cluster shows the same effect across publishers rather than within one. Cancer Cell’s impact factor (Cell Press), Cancer Discovery’s impact factor and Cancer Research’s impact factor (both AACR) are ranked together in the Oncology category, where a high field-wide citation baseline lifts the raw figures for every title in it, much as it does for broad biomedical journals such as the Journal of Clinical Investigation. Materials science runs the other way: the ACS Nano impact factor and the Advanced Materials impact factor place both journals near the top of their own categories on numbers that would read as mid-table in oncology. Comparing a quartile across those two clusters is exactly the cross-disciplinary comparison the metric cannot support.
The same care applies to a publisher-level contrast inside one field: PLOS Biology’s impact factor and PLOS ONE’s differ by a wide margin under the same publisher and the same open-access model, because the two journals apply different selection criteria to submissions, not because one is a better-run journal than the other.
How researchers and institutions actually use quartile rankings
Quartile tiers get used in a few recurring, concrete ways:
- Journal selection — authors and research offices use quartile standing (alongside scope fit, turnaround time, and open-access terms) as one input when shortlisting where to submit.
- Institutional and national evaluation criteria — some universities and national research-assessment frameworks set explicit publication-count expectations by quartile (for example, a minimum number of Q1 or Q2 publications) as part of tenure, promotion, or performance-review criteria. This practice is widespread enough that it is a frequent, direct target of the DORA/CoARA critique described above, precisely because a quartile is still a journal-level metric being applied to individual researchers.
- Funder and library reporting — some funders and institutional research offices track quartile distribution across a portfolio of grant-funded outputs as a rough, aggregate signal, distinct from evaluating any single output.
- Library collection development — quartile standing, like JIF itself, is still used as one factor (among cost, usage statistics, and faculty request) in subscription and “big deal” negotiation decisions — arguably closer to the JIF’s original library-tool purpose than its use in individual assessment.
The same limitation that applies to raw JIF applies to quartile rank, and for the same underlying reason: a quartile is a bucketed version of a journal-level metric, not a measure of any individual article or author. Sorting journals into four bins doesn’t change what’s being measured — it just coarsens it. DORA’s recommendation against using journal-based metrics as a surrogate for individual quality applies as directly to “is this a Q1 journal” as it does to “what is this journal’s raw impact factor.” A Q1 classification says a journal is in the top quarter of its category by one particular metric in one particular year — it says nothing definitive about the quality of a specific paper published in it, or of the researcher who wrote that paper.
Frequently asked questions
Can a journal be Q1 in one field and Q3 or Q4 in another?
Yes, routinely. Quartiles are assigned per subject category, not to a journal overall. A multidisciplinary or broad-scope journal indexed in several Web of Science or Scopus categories can rank in the top quarter of one category and the bottom half of another in the same year, under the same underlying metric — see the worked example above.
Is a Scopus quartile the same as a JCR (Web of Science) quartile for the same journal?
Not necessarily. They’re built from different metrics (CiteScore vs. JIF), different citation windows, different citable-document definitions, and different subject-category schemes (Scopus/ASJC vs. Web of Science categories). A journal can plausibly land in different quartiles in the two systems for the same publication year.
Where do I actually find a journal’s quartile ranking?
See the step-by-step section above. In short: JCR quartiles require an institutional Journal Citation Reports subscription; Scopus CiteScore quartiles are free at scopus.com/sources; and SJR quartiles are free at scimagojr.com — SJR is the practical option if you don’t have a library JCR login.
Is there a public “JCR Q1 journal list” I can download or browse?
Not a complete one, freely. Clarivate’s Journal Citation Reports data, including the full ranked list of Q1 journals in every category, is licensed content available only through an institutional or library subscription — it isn’t republished as an open list. The closest free, usable equivalent is SCImago’s public SJR-based ranking at scimagojr.com, which can be filtered by subject category and by quartile directly, and functions as a reasonable proxy when a JCR subscription isn’t available — bearing in mind, as covered above, that an SJR quartile and a JCR quartile for the same journal are not guaranteed to match.
Does DORA say never to look at a journal’s quartile or impact factor at all?
No. DORA does not ask institutions to ignore journal-level metrics entirely — its recommendation is specifically against using them as a surrogate for individual article or researcher quality, and against embedding them directly in hiring, promotion, or funding decisions. Using quartile standing as one input into a journal-selection decision, or citing it transparently and in context, is a different use than the one DORA and CoARA object to.
Does a higher quartile mean a “better” journal?
It means the journal ranks higher on that specific metric, within that specific subject category, in that specific year — not that it is a better fit for a given paper, has stronger peer review, or produces more reliable science. Scope match, editorial rigor, audience, and open-access terms are all independent of quartile standing and, for most publication decisions, matter more.
See also CASRAI’s Journal Impact Factor dictionary entry, the h-index entry for an author-level (rather than journal-level) alternative, and the Scholarly Publishing hub for the rest of CASRAI’s publishing-cluster content.
