Science Act is a signatory of the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA). We recognize that small numbers of highly cited articles can disproportionately influence citation-based indicators such as the 2-year Journal Impact Factor (JIF). Because of this, Science Act believes that journal-level citation metrics are not, on their own, reliable measures of research quality.

We encourage authors, reviewers, and readers to consider a broad range of indicators when evaluating research and journals. Article-level metrics — including downloads, citations, and online attention — are available on each article page and provide a more nuanced view of the impact and reach of individual papers.

Science Act is committed to Responsible Research Assessment (RRA) and supports evaluating research on its own merits, rather than relying on journal-based metrics or proxy measures of quality.

Key Metrics at a Glance

The following journal-level citation indicators will be reported as soon as they become available.

Metric Definitions

The Journal Impact Factor is defined as all citations to the journal in the current JCR year to items published in the previous two years, divided by the total number of scholarly items (these comprise articles, reviews, and proceedings papers) published in the journal in the previous two years. Though not a strict mathematical average, the Journal Impact Factor provides a functional approximation of the mean citation rate per citable item. A Journal Impact Factor of 1.0 means that, on average, the articles published one or two years ago have been cited one time. A Journal Impact Factor of 2.5 means that, on average, the articles published one or two years ago have been cited two and a half times. The citing works may be articles published in the same journal. However, most citing works are from different journals, proceedings, or books indexed in Web of Science Core Collection. (Source: Clarivate Analytics)