When selecting a journal to submit a manuscript that you’ve worked so hard on, one consideration you might have is how it compares to other titles in its field. One metric that’s frequently used for comparing journals is the journal impact factor (JIF). JIFs are often used to measure or describe the importance of a particular journal to its field.
Journal Citation Reports (JCR), produced by Clarivate Analytics, is a resource you can use to find JIFs and much more. JCR is updated annually, and the 2020 edition is now available. You can browse JCR by title or by discipline.
JIFs measure of the frequency with which the “average article” published in a scholarly journal has been cited in a particular year or period. For example, Journal of Infection’s JIF is 6.0772. This means that in 2020, the average article published in Journal of Infection during the previous two years (2018 and 2019) was cited 6.072 times.
There are a few caveats to keep in mind when it comes to JIFs:
A single metric is not sufficient for calculating a journal’s influence.
JIFs should not be used to guage the quality of articles published in a particular journal.
Review articles are cited more frequently and can skew JIF metrics.
JIFs do include self-citations. (Be sure to look at a journal’s impact factor without self-citations.)
Citation rates vary between disciplines. In fields such as genetics and biochemistry where innovation mores quickly, impact factors tend to be higher. For other disciplines, such as psychology, it might take a few years for an article to get noticed and cited.
