The Journal Citation Reports (JCR) provide information on a journal level. This information can help you decide which journals are important in your field of research or in which journal you should (try to) publish.
Here we cover:
Please note: Use Journal Citation Reports wisely! For example: the journal impact factor - a journal level metric - is no indication for the quality or relevance of an article published in that journal.
Journal Citation Reports (JCR) is a tool for journal evaluation, providing production and impact data drawn from over 20.000 scholarly and technical journals worldwide. It helps you to determine the relative importance of journals within a field. The most well known metric in JCR is the Journal Impact Factor (JIF).
This Journal Impact Factor was developed by Eugene Garfield in the 1960s, to help select which journals should be included in the Science Citation Index (now a part of Web of Science) - he wanted to make sure the most relevant journals were included. The impact factor of a journal is calculated by dividing the number of current year citations to the source items published in that journal during the previous two years. This ratio is used to make sure that larger or more frequently published journals (with more articles) are not favored in compared to small or less frequently published journals.
Journal Citation Reports is published annually in two editions: JCR Science Edition contains data about more than 8,000 journals in science and technology, JCR Social Sciences Edition contains data about more than 2,650 journals in the social sciences. The EUR subscribes to both editions, from 1997. Normally, the new editions of JCR are published in June of the following year. In the JCR 2023 release, all journals in the Web of Science Core Collection have a Journal Impact Factor, so also journals in the Arts and Humanities Citation Index and the Emerging Sources Citation Index.
Please note: the Journal Impact Factor is not based on the data in Web of Science! To calculate the Journal Impact Factor also citations from journals that are not included in the Web of Science are used.
Next to the Journal Impact Factor, the Journal Citation Reports provide also other journal metrics, like the Journal Citation Indicator, the number of citations, the percentage of Gold Open Access and the rank by Journal Impact Factor.
When you know the title of the journal you are looking for, then you can enter the name in the search box on the homepage of the JCR. A list of matches appears.
If you want to select multiple journals, open Journals add the top of the page and open the Filter on the left side of the screen. There you can use the Journals option: search by title, ISSN, category etc. Via Customize you can select the metrics you want to see in the list.
You can also mark the title(s) you are interested in and click Compare at the bottom of the screen (up to 4 journals). Then you will get an overview of all metrics per journal next to each other. Or you can add the journals to your Favorites list (up to 50 journals). To be able to add titles to your favorites you need to sign in with a Clarivate account. You can find your lists at the top of the page, under My favorites. Unfortunately it's not possible to customize the metrics shown.
When you select one journal of click on the title of a journal in the list, you go to the Journal Profile with information about the journal (like ISSN and publisher) and the journal metrics, including the Journal Impact Factor, for the current year, the Journal Citation Relations, Open Access data etc.
When you scroll down the page, you can see additional information. Especially Rank by Journal Impact Factor is important: it shows the quartile and JIF Percentile of the journal within its own category or categories.
To see the metrics for other years, click the arrow next to the JCR year in the left upper corner and choose All years.
To make a list of journals in a particular category, click Journals at the top of the screen and use the Categories filter: mark the category or categories you are interested in, scroll down and click Apply (update August 2023: this filter doesn't work). Or click Categories at the top of the screen, find the group, click the number of categories within that group and select the category. For some categories you then have to make another selection, based on the edition (ACHI, ESCI, SCIE or SSCI).
You’ll get a list of the journals in the selected subject category, with some metrics. By clicking Customize you can add or remove metrics. You can use the arrows next to the header to sort the list based on the data in that column.
These journal metrics are used in Journal Citation Reports:
| Metric | Definition | Additional information |
| Journal Impact Factor | Calculated by dividing the number of citations in the JCR year by the total number of articles published in the two previous years | Citations in 2022 to items published in 2020 and 2021 divided by the number of citable items published in 2020 and 2021 |
| Impact Factor without Self Cites | Journal Impact Factor but without the citations from the journal to the journal | |
| 5-year Impact Factor | Calculated by dividing the number of citations in the JCR year by the total number of articles published in the five previous years | Citations in 2022 to items published in 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018 and 2017, divided by the number of citable items published in 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018 and 2017. |
| Journal Citation Indicator | The average Category Normalized Citation Impact (CNCI) of citable items (articles and reviews), published by a journal over a recent three year period. CNCIs are calculated at the document level. The JCI is normalized for document type, publication year, and category. | CNCI is based on citations in 2022, 2021, 2020 and 2019 to articles and reviews published in 2021, 2020 and 2019. |
| Immediacy Index | Calculated by dividing the number of citations to articles published in a given year by the number of articles published in that year | Citations in 2022 to items published in 2022 divided by the number of items published in 2022. |
| Citing half-life | The median age of the citations produced by the journal during the JCR year. | |
| Cited half-life | The median age of the articles that were cited in the JCR year | |
| Eigenfactor Score | Based on the number of times articles from the journal published in the past five years have been cited in the JCR year, but it also considers which journals have contributed these citations so that highly cited journals will influence the network more than lesser cited journals. | See the website of Eigenfactor
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| Normalized Eigenfactor Score | A rescaled Eigenfactor score: the Normalized Eigenfactor score is scaled so that the average journal has a score of 1. This makes it easier to read the scores. | See the website of Eigenfactor |
| Article Influence Score | Calculated by dividing a journal’s Eigenfactor Score by the number of articles in the journal, normalized as a fraction of all articles in all publications | The Eigenfactor Score/100, divided by the fraction of all articles that each journal has published |
|
Average JIF Percentile |
Average percentile for journals that are included in more than one subject category. This is calculated by the sum of the JIF Percentile for each category divided by the number of categories. |
More information about the Journal Citation Reports and the metrics used is available in on the JCR LibGuide.
Can you compare journals only by looking at their Journal Impact Factor? When the journals belong to the same subject category and share the same citation pattern, you can look at the ranking of the journals within that subject category.
When the journals don't belong to the same category, you can't easily compare the Journal Impact Factors. The journals will come from different subject fields with their own citation cultures.
You can however take a look at the 'Quartile in Category': in which quartile (25 %) is the journal within its category? Or look at the JIF Percentile: this metric transforms the rank in category by Journal Impact Factor into a percentile value. This helps to identify the top journals within a certain field. You can find this information on the Journal Profile - check the Rank section.
This is an example: the journals in the list all have a 2022 Journal Impact Factor of 2.0. If you want to compare them, look at the Quartile or the JIF Percentile. A JIF of 2.0 in some categories means that the journal is in the first quartile, but in other categories the journal is in the third quartile.
| Title | Category - Edition | Journal Impact Factor - 2022 | Rank in Category | Quartile | JIF Percentile |
| Journal of Asian Public Policy | Area Studies - SSCI | 2.0 | 17/84 | Q1 | 80.4 |
| Ethics & Behavior | Ethics - SSCI | 2.0 | 23/57 | Q2 | 60.5 |
| Ethics & Behavior | Psychology, Multidisciplinary - SSCI | 2.0 | 86/147 | Q3 | 41.8 |
| Learning & Memory | Neuroscience - SCIE | 2.0 | 227/272 | Q4 | 16.7 |
In the 2021 Journal Citation Reports, a new metric, the Journal Citation Indicator (JCI), has been calculated for 2020, 2019, 2018 and 2017. The JCI is a journal metric normalized for subject category, publication year and document type.
The JCI is calculated as the average of the Category Normalized Citation Impact (CNCI) of the articles and reviews published in the journal in the prior three-year period, using a four year citation window. For example: for the JCI 2022 the articles and reviews published in 2019, 2020 and 2021 are used, and the citations received in 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022.
The CNCI is the ratio of the actual citations an article or review received, to the expected citations for documents of the same age, type and subject category. The expected citations are calculated as the average number of citations to documents of the same document type (article or review), publication year and subject category.
A JCI of 1.0 means that the papers published in the journal received citations equal to the average (mean) for the category. A value greater than 1.0 means that they performed better than expected.
The journal profile in the JCR shows the Journal Citation Indicator trend and the rank in the subject category based on the JCI.
Because the JCI is normalized, it is possible to use the JCI to compare journals across categories, but comparisons are best made in adjacent fields, that share similar citation patterns.
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This link opens in a new windowWeb of Science is a citation database, covering academic journals worldwide in the sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities, and conference proceedings. It provides cover-to-cover indexing, from 1975 till present.
This link opens in a new windowJournal Citation Reports (JCR) is a tool for journal evaluation, providing production and impact data drawn from over 21.800 scholarly journals worldwide. It presents quantifiable statistical data allowing users to determine the relative importance of journals within a field. The most well-known metric in the JCR is the Journal Impact Factor (JIF).
This link opens in a new windowEssential Science Indicators (ESI) is an analytical tool to identify top-performing research in Web of Science Core Collection. It ranks authors, institutions, countries and journals based on publication and citation performance.